The stigma of being an atheist 0
An empirical study on the New Atheist movement and
its consequences
BY TOM ARCARO
I n
1963 the sociologist Erving Goffman published a book that has become
part of the canon in social psychology, Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity, in which he defined stigma as "an
attribute that is deeply discrediting". Those who are stigmatised are
"reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted,
discounted one". Further, "sometimes it [stigma] is also called a
failing, a shortcoming, a handicap" and that in extreme cases, a
stigmatised person is "bad, dangerous or weak".1
Then there is the issue of "coming out": "To display or not display;
to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to
lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when and where."2
That atheists are stigmatised in the United States
was dramatically illustrated by the University of Minnesota
researchers Penny Edgell and Joseph Gerteis in their frequently cited
2006 article ‘Atheists As "Other": Moral Boundaries and Cultural
Membership in American Society’, in which they present data indicating
that atheists are much more stigmatised than other historically
marginalised groups: "Atheists are at the top of the list of groups
that Americans find problematic in both public and private life and
the gap between acceptance of atheists and acceptance of other racial
and religious minorities is large and persistent. It is striking that
the rejection of atheists is so much more common than rejection of
other stigmatised groups." 3
Margaret Downey began collecting discrimination
narratives through the Anti-Discrimination Support Network (ADSN) she
founded in 1993. 4
Downey has collected hundreds of detailed stories of atheists losing
their jobs, facing abusive family situations, being subjected to
organised campaigns and even death threats. More recent work by the
staff at the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers
documents the hostile environment for atheists in the military.
The "New Atheists" are not so new
There has been a "freethinking" movement in the
United States for a very long time, even predating the outspoken 19th
century orator Robert Ingersoll. Indeed atheists have had many
champions over the centuries, from the European thinkers Thomas
Aquinas, David Hume and Immanuel Kant and more recently in the United
States, Madalyn O’Hair, Michael Shermer and Carl Sagan. The so-called
"New Atheists" – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and
Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) – are but the latest in what is now a
more widely publicised movement.
Media attention on atheists in the United States
has been on the increase in the last half decade and includes highly
publicised debates between believers and non-believers, bus
advertisement campaigns, numerous editorials and documentaries. An
impressive rise in Internet-based social networking sites specifically
for atheists has occurred, most notably Atheist Nexus which in just
over the first 14 months attracted well over 15,000 members worldwide
and had 1,00,000 unique visitors every month.
Despite all of this attention, there remains in the
public mind a very monolithic and negative image of atheists and there
seems to be no end in sight to this particular dimension of the
culture wars. Ray Comfort, in the ‘Introduction’ to his special 150th
Anniversary Edition of The Origin of Species, writes: "It’s
rare to find an atheist who doesn’t embrace Darwinism with open arms.
Many believe that with creation adequately explained by evolution,
there is no need for a god and no moral responsibility." 5
This stereotype about non-believers is pervasive and distressingly
common among Christians, especially in the American South. The sad
fact is that Comfort is but one voice among many working to perpetuate
the marginalisation and even demonisation of atheists. That
non-believers are decidedly not a homogeneous set of amoral
individuals may be obvious to those who are close to this topic but
much work remains to more completely address the negative stereotypes.
Recent efforts to describe and more thoroughly
understand the non-religious segment of the population in the United
States have yielded rich and instructive data. In his 2009 article
‘Profiles of the Godless’, Luke Galen provides a useful survey of this
growing body of literature as to the characteristics of atheists: the
surveys consistently report that atheists are predominantly male,
highly educated and overwhelmingly liberal.
My research reported here is intended to expand on this data set so
that we may better understand the stigma in order to attenuate it.
Methodology
The survey "Coming Out as an Atheist" was live on
the Atheist Nexus website (atheistnexus.org) for four months, from
September to December 2008. During the time the survey was up news of
its existence spread throughout the Internet on various
atheist-oriented websites, blogs and listservs (most notably when it
was mentioned by PZ Myers on the Pharyngula site http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula).
Although the vast majority of the questions were in a forced-choice
format, one question was open-ended and over half of the respondents
took the time to describe a situation where they had felt some stigma
associated with being an atheist.
All forms of data collection present unique
challenges and problems, including the use of the Internet.
Nevertheless, the data obtained in this study do provide insight into
the lives of the self-identified atheists who completed the survey.
These are individuals who: a) have access to the Internet, and b) feel
comfortable enough in their atheism to seek out communities online
where they could speak with similar individuals. Although findings
from this study may not be generalised to all atheists, research by
Nadine Koch and Jolly Emrey suggests that Internet research conducted
on marginalised populations may have more generalising power than
previously thought. 7
For example, they found that demographics for gay/lesbian samples
obtained from Internet communities mirrored gay/lesbian population
demographics. Furthermore, demographics of those participating in the
survey were nearly identical to those who chose not to participate.
And the psychologist Sam Gosling and his colleagues, after an
extensive study on Internet-based research programmes, concluded:
"Evidence so far suggests that Internet-based findings are consistent
with findings based on traditional methods."8
Research supports the possibility that there is a strong social
desirability bias – people are more honest when they don’t have to
interact with the real person – in telephone surveys and that more
valid results may indeed be yielded by online surveys.9
Results
The population represented in this survey of 8,200
respondents looked very similar to other survey populations of
atheists 10:
many more males (74 per cent) than females, highly educated (62 per
cent with college or graduate degrees), overwhelmingly white and very
liberal (42 per cent). Though most (71 per cent or 5,398) of the
respondents were from the US, the survey was completed by significant
numbers from around the world (29 per cent or 2,218) and thus allows
some suggestive comparisons.
Respondents were offered nine options: Atheist,
Agnostic, Humanist, Bright, Freethinker, Sceptic, Naturalist,
Non-believer and Other, in answer to the question: "Which word below
do you most often use to identify yourself?". The overwhelming
majority – 71 per cent – responded with "atheist". This result
remained roughly steady when controlling for gender, age and
geographic location. Interestingly, there was no close second place in
terms of the preferred label, with none of the remaining options
attracting much over five per cent of the responses. Of note is that
in answer to the question: "How comfortable do you feel being labelled
an atheist?", people from the United States were far less comfortable
being labelled an atheist (54 per cent) as compared to those in, for
example, western Europe (73 per cent).
The remaining 29 per cent however are spread over
scores of different terms. Many respondents indicated that what they
call themselves depends on the social context. Although many had very
serious and thoughtful alternatives such as: "rationalist", "critical
atheist", "antitheist", "teleologist", "non-theistic Reconstructionist
Jew" or "Gnostic atheist", others had more whimsical responses such as
"Pastafarian" and "Anti-Christer." One that perhaps captures the
essence of this entire semantic struggle answered "midway between
atheist and agnostic, waiting for atheist to lose its social stigma".
Herein lies the crux of the problem. The stigma.
The stigma associated with being an atheist
In response to the question: "Which best describes
your realisation that you are an atheist?", 19 per cent of those from
the US indicated: "I have always known" compared to 33 per cent from
the UK and 39 per cent in western Europe. For most atheists (56 per
cent), this realisation was a gradual process over months or years.
In answer to the question: "How often did you
attend religious services when you were growing up?", the data
indicates that 64 per cent of those from the United States attended a
house of worship at least a few times per month. Religious service
attendance was much lower for those in other nations, with only 33 per
cent of western Europeans indicating they went to services that often.
Results for other nations include Canada 52 per cent, UK 43 per cent
and Australia 45 per cent. While only 15 per cent of those from the US
indicated they never went to religious services, the numbers are
higher for other nations: Canada 21 per cent, UK 29 per cent, western
Europe 27 per cent and Australia 15 per cent.
In response to the question: "Do you feel any
stigma related to your atheism?", the data indicate a dramatic
difference between the US and other western nations. While only 16 per
cent of those from the US indicated they felt no social stigma related
to their atheism, the numbers were much higher in other nations:
Canada 38 per cent, UK 68 per cent, western Europe 68 per cent and
Australia 56 per cent. On the other end of the response scale, the
numbers tell the same story: 18 per cent of those from the US
indicated they felt a strong social stigma related to being an atheist
compared to only 5.8 per cent in Canada, two per cent in the UK, one
per cent in western Europe and three per cent in Australia.
In response to the question: "In general, how
stigmatised do you feel atheists are in your culture?", the contrast
between the responses from those in the US were dramatically different
from those in other nations. The choice "not stigmatised at all"
generated only two per cent of those from the US compared to 14 per
cent from Canada, 46 per cent from the UK, 52 per cent from western
Europe and 33 per cent from Australia. On the other end of the scale,
55 per cent of the US respondents indicated that atheists were "very
stigmatised" compared to only 17 per cent from Canada, four per cent
from the UK, three per cent from western Europe and four per cent from
Australia. One of the most consistent patterns related to stigma was
within the US. On every question, the four regions used for comparison
– Bible belt, Midwest, West and North-east – the percentages for each
response remained in the exact same order through all measures.
Social repercussions of being identified as an
atheist
Three questions in the survey asked the respondent
to predict the repercussions should they be identified as an atheist.
These questions were all phrased as follows: "Do you feel that there
would be any social repercussions if people in your
[workplace/family/local community] found out that you were an
atheist?" The results indicate significant differences between the US
and other nations in all three scenarios.
While 57 per cent of those respondents from the US
felt there would be at least minor repercussions in the workplace,
only 12 per cent of those from western Europe felt that way. The other
nations are as follows: Canada 35 per cent, UK 15 per cent and
Australia 24 per cent.
While 61 per cent of those respondents from the US
felt there would be at least minor repercussions in the family, only
20 per cent of those from western Europe felt that way. The other
nations are as follows: Canada 46 per cent, UK 22 per cent and
Australia 27 per cent.
While 68 per cent of those respondents from the US
felt there would be at least minor repercussions in the local
community, only 18 per cent of those from the UK felt that way. The
other nations are as follows: Canada 48 per cent, western Europe 22
per cent and Australia 31 per cent.
When examining this data set broken down by region
within the US, the pattern mentioned above again manifests itself. In
all three scenarios, it is the Bible belt and the Midwest where the
repercussions proved to be the most severe. It is with the family
where there is the most fear of repercussions, with both the Bible
belt and the Midwest in double digits predicting major repercussions.
That females comprised only 25 per cent of the respondents to this
survey certainly raises some important questions beyond the scope of
the present article. There has been little research on how the stigma
of being an atheist varies by gender. The present data suggest that
being an atheist is more difficult socially for females than for
males. In the present data, females differed somewhat from males: they
were slightly younger on average and significantly more liberal, with
53 per cent reporting themselves as "very liberal" compared to 38 per
cent of the males.
In response to the question: "Do you feel any
social stigma related to your atheism?", 78 per cent of the females
reported at least slight stigma as compared to 69 per cent of the
males, indicating that the stigma is moderately greater for a female.
Restated, while 20 per cent of the females said they felt no social
stigma, 30 per cent of the males put themselves in that category.
While 46 per cent of the females believed there
would be no social repercussions if people at their workplace found
out they were atheists, 55 per cent of the males felt the same,
indicating that more females than males feared at least some workplace
repercussions.
The data with respect to social repercussions if
family found out they were atheist are very similar to those found
regarding the workplace: 41 per cent of the females felt there would
be none while 50 per cent of the males reported the same.
Though the national and regional differences
regarding perceived stigma are interesting, I think there is a greater
need for deeper research into its gendered nature.
"And God Bless America!"
Atheists are marginalised and made to feel
uncomfortable when a major political official ends her/his speech with
"and may God bless America" or when grandmother asks "who is going to
say grace?" before a holiday meal.
In two survey questions: "Which best describes how
you feel in more intimate social situations where religion is invoked
(for example, a pre-meal prayer with family or friends)?" and "Which
best describes how you feel in public gatherings where religion is
invoked (for example, when a speaker refers to god or says a
prayer)?", the results were dramatic. Respondents indicated
overwhelmingly that they felt at least a slight discomfort in both
situations: 79 per cent of all respondents were uncomfortable in
intimate social situations and 82 per cent felt discomfort with regard
to public settings.
The vast majority (86 per cent) of the females
reported feeling at least slight discomfort while a slightly smaller –
but possibly statistically significant – percentage of the males felt
the same way (76 per cent). Fifteen per cent of the females reported
feeling no discomfort while 24 per cent of the males reported feeling
no discomfort.
The stories of stigma
Nearly 4,200 respondents offered written responses
to the prompt: "Please provide an example of a social situation where
you experienced stigmatisation because you are an atheist". These
narratives provide perhaps the richest information yielded from the
data and clear patterns emerge, clarifying and deepening the sketch
provided by the quantitative numbers from the forced-choice questions.
Perhaps the most visceral responses addressed the assumption
perpetuated by Ray Comfort and others, namely that atheists have no
morals. Indeed the stories tell of atheists not just being seen as
amoral but decidedly immoral.
One woman from the Bible belt wrote: "Many times
I’ve been told: ‘What stops you from going out and killing people?’!!"
A middle-aged female noted: "My six-year-old son was cornered in first
grade by three other six-year-olds who screamed at him: ‘You will
believe in Jesus!! You will believe in Jesus!!’ Not so good."
A young male confessed: "My wife told me that I’m
caught in Satan’s grip and confessed that after I de-converted, she
considered leaving me. I believe the only reason she didn’t is because
she’s financially dependent on me." Another described: "I’ve had
people literally, physically back away from me upon hearing I
am atheist. My children were told to run away from our evil home."
Conclusion
Many more examples could be cited from the data but
the tone and pattern are clear. The stigma associated with being an
atheist, especially in the American Bible belt, is real, pervasive and
oppressive. It is affecting the lives and livelihoods of many. But
just how many? A recent survey by Trinity College in Connecticut found
that 15 per cent of Americans claim they adhere to no religion, making
them the fastest growing group of believers – or rather, non-believers
– in the US. The Trinity College American Religious Identification
Survey (ARIS) also found that the number of people who self-identify
as "non-religious" is growing in every state. Data from the Pew Forum
US Religious Landscape Survey appears to support the ARIS data.
According to several estimates, there are many more
non-believers in the US other than historically marginalised groups.
Yet this highly stigmatised group has no protection from
discrimination and there are still laws on the books in six states
prohibiting non-believers from holding public office, including my own
home state, North Carolina.
Is a future where atheists in the US are not
stigmatised possible? Work done to minimise or eliminate stigma by
other historically marginalised groups such as homosexuals,
HIV-positive individuals and others with physical challenges such as
epilepsy has had mixed success. The social movement referred to by
some as the "New Atheism" is focused among other things on the
de-stigmatisation of atheism. It is hoped that research data such as
presented here will contribute to useful dialogue on this problem.
(Dr Tom Arcaro, an active member of the Association
for Humanist Sociology, is a professor of sociology and the director
of Project Pericles at Elon University in North Carolina. This article
was published in Skeptic magazine in January 2010.)
Courtesy: www.readperiodicals.com
References
1 Goffman, Erving, 1959, Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice
Hall, p. 5.
2 Ibid, p. 42.
3 Edgell, Penny and Gerteis, Joseph, 2006,
‘Atheists As "Other": Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in
American Society’, American Sociological Review, 71, p. 230.
4 Downey, Margaret, 2004, ‘Discrimination Against
Atheists: The Facts’, Free Inquiry, June 1, pp. 41-43.
5 Comfort, Ray, 2009, ‘Special Introduction’ to the
150th Anniversary Edition of The Origin of Species, Alachua,
Fl, Bridge-Logos, p. 39.
6 Galen, Luke, 2009, ‘Profiles of the Godless:
Results from a survey of the non-religious’, Free Inquiry,
Aug/Sept 2009, pp. 41-45.
7 Koch, Nadine and Emrey, Jolly, 2001, ‘The
Internet and Opinion Measurement: Surveying Marginalised Populations’,
Social Science Quarterly, 82, pp. 131-138.
8 Gosling, Samuel, et al, 2004, ‘Should We Trust
Web-Based Studies?’, American Psychologist, 59, pp. 93-104.
9 Presser, Stanley and Stinson, Linda, 1998, ‘Data
Collection Mode and Social Desirability Bias in Self-Reported
Religious Attendance’, American Sociological Review, 63, pp.
137-145.
10 Shermer, Michael, 2000, How We Believe: The Search for God in
an Age of Science, New York, Henry Holt; Hunsberger, Bruce and
Altemeyer, Bob, 2006, Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America’s
Nonbelievers, Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books.
|
No room for disbelief
BY AUSTIN CLINE
Every single study that has ever looked at the issue
has revealed massive amounts of bigotry and prejudice against atheists
in America. Recent data shows that atheists are more distrusted and
despised than any other minority and that an atheist is the least
likely person that Americans would vote for in a presidential
election. It’s not just that atheists are hated though, but also that
atheists seem to represent everything about modernity which Americans
dislike or fear.
The 2006 study conducted by the University of
Minnesota found that atheists ranked lower than Muslims, recent
immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing
their vision of American society". Atheists are also the minority
group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to
marry. The results from two of the most important questions were:
This group does not at all agree with my vision of
American society...
Atheist: 39.6 per cent; Muslim: 26.3 per cent;
Homosexual: 22.6 per cent; Conservative Christian: 13.5 per cent;
Recent Immigrant: 12.5 per cent; Hispanic: 7.6 per cent; Jew: 7.4 per
cent; Asian American: 7.0 per cent; African American: 4.6 per cent;
White American: 2.2 per cent
I would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a
member of this group...
Atheist: 47.6 per cent; Muslim: 33.5 per cent; African
American: 27.2 per cent; Asian American: 18.5 per cent; Hispanic: 18.5
per cent; Jew: 11.8 per cent; Conservative Christian: 6.9 per cent;
White: 2.3 per cent
Lead researcher Penny Edgell said that she was
surprised by this: "We thought that in the wake of 9/11, people would
target Muslims. Frankly, we expected atheists to be a throwaway
group." Nevertheless, the numbers are so extreme that she was led to
conclude that they are "a glaring exception to the rule of increasing
tolerance over the last 30 years". It’s not that bigotry and
discrimination against Muslims is appropriate but at least it’s not
hard to understand where such attitudes would come from.
Every group except atheists is being shown much
greater tolerance and acceptance than 30 years ago. "Our analysis
shows that attitudes about atheists have not followed the same
historical pattern as that for previously marginalised religious
groups. It is possible that the increasing tolerance for religious
diversity may have heightened awareness of religion itself as the
basis for solidarity in American life and sharpened the boundary
between believers and non-believers in our collective imagination."
Some respondents associated atheism with illegal
behaviour like drug use and prostitution: "that is, with immoral
people who threaten respectable community from the lower end of the
social hierarchy". Others saw atheists as "rampant materialists and
cultural elitists" who "threaten common values from above – the
ostentatiously wealthy who make a lifestyle out of consumption or the
cultural elites who think they know better than everyone else".
Given the relatively low number of atheists in
America, and the even lower number who are public about their atheism,
Americans can’t have come to their beliefs about atheists through
personal experience and hard evidence about what atheists are really
like. Furthermore, dislike of atheists doesn’t correlate very highly
with dislike of gays, immigrants or Muslims. This means that dislike
of atheists isn’t simply part of a larger dislike of people who are
"different".
Why are atheists being singled out for special hatred
and distrust? "What matters for public acceptance of atheists – and
figures strongly into private acceptance as well – are beliefs about
the appropriate relationship between church and state and about
religion’s role in underpinning society’s moral order, as measured by…
whether society’s standards of right and wrong should be based on
god’s laws." It is curious that atheists should be singled out for
special hatred on the basis of church/state separation which religious
theists, including Christians, are usually in the forefront of
fighting to preserve. It is rare to find a case filed by or supported
by atheists which is not also supported by theists and Christians. In
fact, I can’t think of any offhand.
Although people may say that they consider atheists
inferior because atheists don’t believe that civil law should be
defined according to some group’s conception of what their god wants,
I don’t think that’s the whole story. There are too many religious
theists who also want civil law to be secular rather than religious.
Instead, I think that a much better case can be made for the idea that
atheists are being scapegoated the same way that Catholics and Jews
once were: they are treated as social outsiders who create "moral and
social disorder".
Atheists can’t both be lower-class drug users or
prostitutes and upper-class elitists and materialists. Instead,
atheists are being saddled with the "sins" of American society
generally. They are "a symbolic figure" that represents religious
theists’ "fears about... trends in American life". Some of those fears
involve "lower-class" crimes like drug use; other fears involve
"upper-class" crimes like greed and elitism. Atheists are thus a
"symbolic representation of one who rejects the basis for moral
solidarity and cultural membership in American society altogether".
That’s obviously not going to change, because as long
as atheists remain atheists, they won’t be theists and they won’t be
Christians. This means that they won’t agree that any gods, much less
the Christian god, can serve as the basis for moral solidarity or
cultural membership in American society. Of course, neither can
adherents of many other religions who either don’t believe in gods or
who don’t believe in the Christian god. As America becomes more
religiously pluralist, America is going to have to change and find
something else to serve as the basis for moral solidarity and cultural
membership. Atheists should work to ensure that this is as secular as
possible.
(Austin Cline, a former regional director of the
Council for Secular Humanism, has been actively involved in educating
people about atheism, agnosticism and secular humanism on the Internet
for over 15 years. This article was posted on the website About.com.)
Courtesy: About.com; http://atheism.about.com
|
|