Why don't they trust us?

An actual exchange from this morning.

Thad: We're America's most mistrusted minority.
Me: Canadians?
Thad: No, atheists.

According to a new University of Minnesota study, atheists are America's least-trusted minority.
 

Comments

[herbert browne]

hmmm... is it, perhaps, because of a misperception that people who depend almost entirely on Facts couldn't possibly have a Moral Compass?
^..^

[SoulLight]

Because to most pwoplw, Religious faith is about feeling better than other people. Atheists are the people they feel they are the highest above. Would you trust someone you treated or thought of as shit.

[Eli]

I wrote something brief about this yesterday. I think the negative qualities associated with atheists are somewhat telling.

[Bob Koepp]

It appears that for this study minority status reflects only "race, religion and cultural diversity." So... personal injury attorneys don't constitute a minority; career politicians don't constitute a minority; hell, even pathological liars don't constitute a minority. Oh... I'm being redundant.

[Candice]

Religious Americans feel doubly superior to Canadian atheists, I'm sure. Doubly ridiculous to me.

[MT]

If everybody distrusts members outside their group, the smallest minority will always have the most people who distrust it.

[Aeolus]

Given that the news release refers to "those who don't believe in a god", it's not clear whether agnostics are being lumped in with those who believe there is no god. As a highly virtuous agnostic, I would hate to be mistaken for one of those evil-doing disbelievers. If eventually we do all get rounded up and stuck in camps, I hope that at least we agnostics will be given extra rations, and perhaps whips with which to keep you lesser types in line.

[John]

Some of you already know this, but for those who don't then here's a quick and dirty explanation for this phenomenon:

Believers think atheists have no moral compass because they have no rigid belief system, and that includes not having a fear of going to Hell for being bad because they don't believe it exists.

Personally, I trust atheists the most. I think they're more likely to keep their word than some Christians who think they're automatically going to Heaven solely because they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. I think atheists, in general, are more conscientious about their actions because they don't want to face negative consequences in the here-and-now.

Having said that, I still think you're all going to Hell.

[Eli]

Believers think atheists have no moral compass because they have no rigid belief system, and that includes not having a fear of going to Hell for being bad because they don't believe it exists.

Then why don't they extend the antipathy to members of religions that don't believe in hell?

My guess, as I said in the post I linked to above, is that this kind of hostility to atheists is part of a larger hotility to the broadly-conceived-of culture of intellectual and cultural elitism. Historically, religion has often been a tool against that kind of entrenched cultural authority (though it has bolstered the authority just as often).

In shorter form: If you want to understand distrust of atheists, it's best to look at distrust of "coastal elitism" in general.

[michael Schmidt]

"Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism."

Oh the irony.

[Wade]

I'd be very interested to see what the atheists in the survey thought of atheists generally. I doubt that I'm alone in tending to distrust my fellow(?) unbelievers.

[Iron Lungfish]

I'd be very interested to see what the atheists in the survey thought of atheists generally. I doubt that I'm alone in tending to distrust my fellow(?) unbelievers.

Seriously? I trust my fellow atheists more than I trust Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus. Statistically speaking they're less likely to beat me to death for dating another man.

[Eli]

I can't imagine any situation where you'd need to rely on if someone was an atheist or not when choosing whether or not to trust them. There are just so many more reliable indicators.

[Wade]

The article doesn't say much about the questions they were asking, or what sort of trust (if any) this is supposed to measure. The part about “sharing their vision of American society” doesn't really mention trust. The researchers may even be making an unwarranted inferrence--you could imagine, for example, a community of narrow ethical egoists with a common "vision of society" that assumes general distrust.

[yank in london]

This doesn't surprise me at all. In fact, the primary reason I cite for remaining in the UK rather than returning to the states 10 years ago, is the level of tolerance for my atheism. In the states I was often afraid to discuss it, even amongst friends, for fear of getting the "you don't really mean it" argument. Here it's no big deal.

Oh yeah my second reason for staying was pubs and beer!

[Mark]

Come and join us in secular Europe, guys! "Give me your doubters, your sceptics, your huddled atheists longing to think free."

More seriously, it must be a major issue for academics. I am told that we are starting to see a brain drain of scientists going the other way across the Atlantic after more than 50 years of opposing traffic.

[Eli]

More seriously, it must be a major issue for academics. I am told that we are starting to see a brain drain of scientists going the other way across the Atlantic after more than 50 years of opposing traffic.

This seems unlikely to me. I'd imagine that funding/employment, not antipathy toward atheism, determines where scientists go.

[Mark]

Funding (and especially salaries) are certainly much better on the western side of the pond. But anecdotally, the question of stem cell research (long delays and only partial acceptance in the USA, clear ethical rules in the UK and most of Europe) seems to have been something of a watershed. Those in controversial and emerging areas of research, capable of religious interference masquerading as ethical concerns - of which there must be many - are being deliberately targeted. I recall UK Government statements that added up to saying, "This is our chance to get ahead." Whether this will be a sustained reversal remains to be seen, and there;s a long way to go yet.

[Eli]

Those are separate concerns, aren't they? There's nothing atheistic about stem cell research, and there's nothing inherently anti-atheist about opposing it.

[cfrost]

Yeah, well, seeing as how howl-at-the-moon bible thumpers have put the GOP in charge of everything, the feeling is mutual.
I used to wonder what it must have been like to be an apostate or infidel in medieval Europe. I figured the only way you could really know was to spend some time in a rural village in a place like Afghanistan. No more. Now God-besotted fanatics are showing us right here at home.

[Dabodius]

"...to most ... Religious faith is about feeling better than other people."
Isn't feeling superior to believers often part of the motivation of atheism? Isn't one of its perquisites often a reliable means of provoking some discomfort or small outrage in believers, thereby salving whatever feelings of insignificance or nothinghood the atheist may suffer from? I am too clear-eyed for popular prejudices, I matter, I am someone and they must recognize me -- most exercises of skepticism about received opinion confer a thrill of strength on the exerciser that interestingly resembles, if it is not the selfsame, thrill conferred by professing something too improbable for others to believe (think of "young earth creationists.")
I do not say that these emotional benefits of atheism are its rational motivation. That is closer to Herbert Browne's misperception that atheists are "people who depend almost entirely on Facts," or on their misperception that that is what they do, while believers do not. Much depends on what counts as a fact, but let us stipulate a common set of facts we agree on: the evolution of species, the 13+ billion years of the cosmos, etc.. Then the controversy between believers and atheists is not in the first place about facts, but interpretations. You may insist that it is a duck and not a rabbit, I that it is a goblet and not two faces in profile. We may even both insist that we are "depending entirely on facts," which we are -- so entirely that we have left interpretation out of account.
(I can't find the text online, but this^ point was made better in John Wisdom's "Gods," originally in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1944-45, reprinted in his Philosophy and Psychoanalysis(London: Blackwell 1953) and in many anthologies on philosophy of religion thereafter.)
As for the post's complaint, of course Thad and LB are being wronged if they are mistrusted on anything other than their veracity and fidelity. Some of the best people I have known are atheists, as are some of the worst -- but most are indifferent in-betweens, morally insistinguishable from their variously believing neighbors, as I was in my atheist salad-days, so long ago. Now people mistrust me on my merits.

[Mark]

Well, only partly - and in this specific example, you surely can't deny that the motives behind govt-led restrictions on stem cell research had a substantially religious basis?

I've now seen your post at eliswiney.blogspot.com that argues that there is a class nature to this question, which is as interesting an exposition of the "opiate of the people" theory as I have seen in some time. But is there a clear basis to the connection you are making? Surely there is no shortage of materialist elistists who make a public virtue of their religiosity?

(Sorry if this is straying off-topic...)

[Eli]

There certainly are some very openly religious materialistic elitists. My point is that anti-atheist sentiments occur within a broader popular rhetoric with cultural and regional implications. Whether people are mistaken about this or not, many, many Americans believe that their viewpoints and lives are routinely mocked or ignored by a handful of elites in powerful, largely urban institutions - particularly higher ed, the national newsmedia, the film industry, and so forth. They feel subjected to an overbearing cultural hierarchy imposed from without.

Religion, though, can offer a countervailing cultural hierarchy that anyone can invoke, regardless of a lack of education, wealth, or power. It's no surprise, then, that we so often see Christian conservatism invoked in historically poorer parts of the country without educational infrastructure comparable to what you'd see in, say, New England or New York. The same principle has fueled progressive Christianity in poor urban communities.

My thesis, then, is this: the more stratified culture is, and the more people view themselves as subordinated within elitist hierarchies, the more attractive it will become to invoke an alternative religious hierarchy that turns the tables by placing the invoker above either nonbelievers, sinners, or both. So anti-atheism (and, in fact, also, to a certain extent, homophobia) should be understood as exacerbated by perceived cultural elitism.

Does that make sense? I've done a bit of research on this, in relation to a relatively minor legal question (why are communities so much more worried about pornography appearing available than pornography being available?). But I'm not the best at articulating my ideas.

[perianwyr]

"...to most ... Religious faith is about feeling better than other people."
Isn't feeling superior to believers often part of the motivation of atheism? Isn't one of its perquisites often a reliable means of provoking some discomfort or small outrage in believers, thereby salving whatever feelings of insignificance or nothinghood the atheist may suffer from?

All this says is that you don't need religion to be a pompous ass.

I'd say that a good deal of atheism is just a matter of looking at the world, and lining up what people say about God and the necessity of such, and finding God to be a meaningless, overbroad, and inapplicable concept to the matter of life, living, and the future.

[Mark]

Yes, to a degree. The idea has clear analogues in other cultures. For example, it's important to realise that the rise of political Islam is in part down to the fact that it is locally perceived as a culture of resistance in the way that Arab nationalism was in the past, and is not simply the product of an ignorant or medieval culture - and so there are obvious parallels for Christianity in the USA and elsewhere. (It doesn't make it any less repellent, but it's important in understanding it.) But then the question is, "resistance to whom?" If the political and business elites of the USA were packed with atheists to the exclusion of the religious, then establishing the class basis of this conflict would be just a matter of joining the dots. But surely the reality is very different?