Careful Thought

Mollie at GetReligion has a great piece on the sad status of atheists today. Seems that nobody loves them.

Some people say this country is one White House Bible study away from a Christian theocracy, but President-elect Dwight Eisenhower may have summed up the religious sentiment of the nation best when he said, in 1952, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”A new University of Minnesota study, which has received precisely no coverage yet, found that people rank atheists below gays, lesbians, recent immigrants and Muslims in “sharing their vision of American society.” A press release from the University of Minnesota expounds:

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

[Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje of the San Antonio Express-News wrote a] piece, which came out a few days before the University of Minnesota study was released, [that] describes the difference between atheism and agnosticism and talks about the difficulties of being irreligious in a religious society:

The overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens profess some religious faith, although far fewer attend worship services on a regular basis. The public square has become increasingly dominated by religious (specifically, Christian) rhetoric, from the “values voters” of the 2004 presidential election to hot-button cultural issues that carry a religious edge – abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, intelligent design, the right to die.

The Minnesota study lead Penny Edgel also argues that

“Today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past – they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy, and in America, that core has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings. “Americans believe they share more than rules and procedures with their fellow citizens, they share an understanding of right and wrong,” she said. “Our findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good.”

I can’t argue with that — though there are certainly whackos and hypocrites within the community of believers. Why hasn’t Brokeback Mountain been more of a financial success? It’s simple – people don’t want their values mocked. Why was there a war over Christmas, and now Easter? For the same reasons. For the past forty years or so religion has been pushed from the schools, from our places of employment, from our government buildings.

Atheists just don’t get it and now people are beginning to fight back in the battle against faith and values.

It was interesting to note the differences in responses during the recent posts on “unschooling” (here, here, and here) between believers (who make up a substantial portion of the homeschooling crowd) and non-believers. Believers certainly made their points, sometimes quite strongly, but the non-believers/atheists tended be so bitterly hate-filled that we ended up moderating comments to keep the language at a PG-13 level.

It seems that believers treat atheists better than atheists treat believers.

Tags: atheism, faith