Andy’s post — and the ensuing discussion — about racial prejudice got me to thinking about the broader nature of prejudice, racial and otherwise. And then, coincidentally, Jim Gimpel sends along a link to this study by Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglass Hartmann:
bq. Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans’ acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.
I suppose it’s possible to envision a group less tolerated than atheists, but surely atheists are at the top — or, perhaps, bottom. (See also these earlier posts.)
Could this change? Perhaps James Wood, in reviewing Terry Eagleton’s new book, has his finger on a species of atheism that might render it less anathema:
bq. What is needed is neither the overweening rationalism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.