That's an interesting point, and I think it has some merit. Up until now I've always believed that they simply feared Judgement.
I suppose the two are not mutually exclusive after all...
The only thing elitists fear more than their own judgement is irrelvancy.
If I may chime in re: atheism and politics. One thing I rarely see brought out is that the roles of philosophy and religion are essentially the same, and serve the same roles to people. Not to say they are mutually exclusive...but they deal with the same issues...the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge (revelation?), ethics, and a group ethics/political structure built onto those foundations.
The point I want to make is that the Left derives its politics from Kantian/Marxist philosophy. Politics without the substrate of the underlying beliefs is largely meaningless...those politics include the underlying philosophy...including atheistic answers to the foundational answers.
In America we see this as a 'religious divide'. People who derive their philisophical/religious concepts such as right and wrong from a Judeo-Christian foundation is the essence of Conservatism. People whose foundation is philosophical are by and large the secular socialist Left. The mushy middle are often mildly religious or generally agnostic. They are generally influenced by both religious AND Kantian perspectives and haven't sorted through the inherent contradictions.
However, this continuum from Kantian/Marxist on the left through the agnostic/mildly religious in the middle to the Judeo-Christian on the right does not capture everyone, including myself. Just as there are religions other than Judeo-Christian with obviously different ethical and political implications (9/11) there are philosophies that are not Kantian, although Kantian philosophy is very much dominant in 'official' academia.
I am an atheist. I have different foundations from most here. But I am VEHEMENTLY opposed to the secular left. People here are very conscious of the religious influence on our system and the founding fathers who created it. I encourage you all to also become familiar with the enlightenment era philosophy that also was a major (in my mind, even larger) influence on them.