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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Atheism in America

Joseph Gerteis, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota has a fantastic piece up at The Secular Web discussing a recent article he published in the American Sociological Review called “Atheists As ‘Other': Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society” (American Sociological Review. Albany: Apr 2006. Vol. 71, Iss. 2; p. 211). The insights discussed by Gerteis in the Secular Web piece are, as he mentions, not surprising to me and other nonbelievers:

When we were putting together the survey, we thought that it would be Muslims that topped the list in these post-9/11 times. We asked about atheists mostly as an afterthought, as a kind of counterbalance to our questions about conservative Christians. But it was indeed atheists at the top of the list of the folks Americans rejected--and the finding was robust; we asked the question in two ways just to be sure. Our "private" measure was to ask whether or not people would object if their son or daughter married a person of a given type, with the idea that this would tell us whether Americans would welcome different kinds of people into their own homes and families. Our "public" measure was to ask whether or not such groups agreed with the respondents' vision of America. Here the idea was that we may not want to associate with some people, but we might still accept them as part of the fabric of the country.

The study seems to suggest the difficulty in gauging any sort of public perception in America. Clearly, it is logical to assume that Muslims would top a list of most rejected group of people. Even homosexuals seem a natural heir to the tile of “most threatening to the American way of life” (Gerteis discusses this as well). Is the term “atheist”, as Gerteis suggests, a catch-all term for anyone who holds different political views or worldviews? Perhaps, but I think it is mostly a misunderstanding of what it means to subscribe to an atheistic worldview and the stigma that has dogged the term since the 18th and 19th centuries. People know what “atheism” is, even if it is a general and vague notion. My experience has been that individuals who have made the decision to reject religion and spirituality have not done so on a whim. They have thought about the existence of God and the supernatural at length. For some, myself included, this was not an easy process and involved many restless nights and countless hours of contemplating the implications and meaning of nonbelief (sometimes for credit hours).

Another problem that clouds public perception of atheism and nonbelief in America has to do with social construction. It is easy to forget (and some would argue not true) that one is not born into this world with a belief in God or the supernatural. Like language, religion and spirituality has to be learned; etched onto a blank slate that has the potential to go any number of directions. If one holds that a human is imbued with a spirit at birth, then the “blank slate” mindset is pushed aside in favor of a God-bestowed reason to breathe. In the haze, it is forgotten that even deep-seeded religious beliefs are socially constructed, subject to the same mechanisms that govern biological evolution (see Daniel Dennett). This, I feel, is one of the main impediments to atheism in America and why so many Americans (according to Gerteis et al.) place atheists at the top of their list of most threatening group. More from Gerteis:

So where does this leave us? The findings are the findings. As a scientist, what I can say for sure is that there is a widespread rejection of atheists, that it is manifest in assumptions about who atheists are as both public citizens and as private individuals. As someone who cares about this issue, what I can say is that I am convinced that it turns on issues of morality and how we understand it. And I think that it is not as black-and-white as it might seem.

Posted by Will at July 18, 2006 10:25 AM in Philosophy and Religion

Comments

Posted by: docathelake at August 13, 2006 07:09 AM