Report Report Report 2: Atheists

My eyebrows went up when I saw this report from the Minnesota Daily:

Atheists are America’s least trusted group, according to a national survey conducted by University sociology researchers.
Based on a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households and in-depth interviews with more than 140 people, researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as “sharing their vision of American society.” Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.
“It tells us about how Americans view religion,” said Penny Edgell, an associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher. “Many Americans seem to believe some kind of religious faith is central to being a good American and a good person.”

On the one hand: really? I've been an "out" atheist in America for the past nine years; I've even married the daughter of Americans, and I've never encountered anything like this. On the other hand, the article quotes the author of the study, and she doesn't seem to have any doubts about its conclusions.

Of course, I'm not going to extrapolate from anecdote. And besides, I live in liberal-secular NYC. So I emailed Penny Edgell and asked her for the study, which she immediately supplied. (It will be published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.) And does the study say what the Minnesota Daily says it says? In a word, yes: The Minnesota Daily gets an A– for its article. Here's the paper's conclusion:

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.

The author of the article, Jeannine Aquino, has done a very good job both of reporting what the study says and of going out and seeing whether and how those attitudes are reflected in the Minnesota population. The reason she doesn't get the highest A and A+ grades is purely because she displays no skepticism regardig the study, and doesn't stop to ask whether there might be some flaws in it.

As in any survey, everything hinges on the exact way in which the questions are worded. In this survey, the key question was the following:

Now I want to read you a list of different groups of people who live in this country. For each one, please tell me how much you think people in this group agree with YOUR vision of American society—almost completely, mostly, somewhat, or not at all?

The results showed that 39.6% of respondents said "not at all" with regard to atheists. Second was Muslims, at 26.3%, third came homosexuals, at 22.6%, and fourth was conservative Christians, with 13.5% of people saying that they did not agree at all with their vision of American society. Fifth was recent immigrants, at 12.5%. Hispanics, Jews, Asian Americans and African Americans followed; white Americans came at the bottom of the list with 2.2%.

There was a second question:

People can feel differently about their children marrying people from various backgrounds. Suppose your son or daughter wanted to marry [a person in given category]. Would you approve of this choice, disapprove of it, or wouldn’t it make any difference at all one way or the other?

One might think that the vast majority of people would choose the latter choice for every category: how can you know if you'd approve or disapprove of a future son- or daughter-in-law without even meeting them? But in fact the results were startling: 47.6% of respondents said that they would disapprove if their child wanted to marry an atheist. Again, Muslims were a distant second, on 33.5%; homosexuals, of course, weren't included in this question.

But there are problems with the way the questions were worded.

The first question is based on the assumption that I have a known vision of American society, and that the groups in question can share that vision on a scale essentially from 0% to 100%. If a group shared between 75% and 100% of my vision, I'd choose "almost completely"; if it shared between 50% and 75% I'd chosse "mostly"; if it shared between 25% and 50% I'd choose "somewhat"; and if it shared between 0% and 25% I'd choose "not at all". (Obviously no one was asked to quantify these things, but that seems to be the general idea behind the way the question was structured.)

My problem is with the word "agree" in the question. When you ask one person whether they agree with another person or group, they immediately think in terms of whether they agree or whether they disagree. In other words, they don't think on a scale of 0 to 100, they think on a scale of –1 to +1, where –1 is completely disagree and +1 is completely agree.

If someone disagrees mildly with a different group, what are they going to say? They might be torn between the "somewhat agree" answer and the "not at all" answer. But I think many if not most such people will end up choosing "not at all", because they don't want to give the impression that they agree, even if only "somewhat", with a group of people that they actually disagree with. Someone who feels very strongly that homosexuality is evil and disordered and who thinks that atheists are sadly missing out on an important part of life will therefore end up giving the same response to both categories. And in general a negative opinion which is weakly held by a large minority will be overstressed by the answers to this question, while a negative opinion which is strongly held by a smaller minority will be understressed.

Similarly, a religious person, when asked, is going to feel uncomfortable saying that "it wouldn't make any difference at all one way or the other" if their child married an atheist. So they'll plump for the "disapprove" option, even if they're not a judgmental kind of person at all.

There's also some conflict in the report's conclusions. On the one hand, we're told that

while rejection of Muslims may have spiked in post-9/11 America, rejection of atheists was higher... In our survey, concerns about atheists were stronger than concerns about homosexuals.

On the other hand, we find this:

We believe that in answering our questions about atheists, our survey respondents were not, on the whole, referring to actual atheists they had encountered, but were responding to “the atheist” as a boundary-marking cultural category.

The survey is very unclear about whether Americans are rejecting actual atheists, or whether they're simply rejecting "atheists" qua "cultural category". Homosexuals, we all know, are explicitly and vehemently rejected on a regular basis around the country, even (especially) by their own families. Concerns about homosexuals in general manifest themselves in intolerant behaviour towards individual gay men and women on a daily basis.

If the study is true that concerns about atheists in general are even stronger than concerns about homosexuals, wouldn't we expect individual atheists to be shunned by their co-workers, their communities, even their families? Wouldn't we expect "atheist", "heathen" and the like to be common terms of abuse? But that's not something one hears. Maybe it happens but isn't reported; my feeling, however, is that it's genuinely rare.

There's evidence in the survey to support the theory that when people think about atheists, they're not thinking of real people. Atheists, remember, are surely the least self-loathing of all minorities. Being an atheist, unlike being gay or being a Jew, is entirely a matter of choice. And yet

about 17 percent of the nonreligious say that atheists do not at all share their vision of America, while about one in ten indicate that they would not approve of their child marrying an atheist.

The only way to explain this is to understand "atheist" as a somewhat inchoate marker of alterity rather than as a well-defined grouping of individuals. Indeed, the study makes this quite explicit:

We assess the degree to which atheists represent a symbolic “other” against which some Americans define themselves as good people and worthy citizens.

In other words, many Americans understand by "atheist" something akin to "a person who doesn't share my vision of American society". Maybe the word "communist" has similar connotations. Which essentially turns the survey question into:

Please tell me how much you think people who don't share your vision of American society agree with your vision of American society

And it becomes easier to see how even the nonreligious might react in such a seemingly bizarre manner.

A look at some of the interviews in the study tends to reinforce this belief. Look at KW, a Republican in her 60s, who told her interviewer:

It’s that same arrogance again. I’m an American, I can do anything I want, and to heck with the rest of the world. These people aren’t very religious, you’ll notice that. There’s a real, “I’m an atheist” attitude among people with major money. If you’re going all through life, “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in anything except the almighty dollar,” this is definitely a destructive attitude and the rest of the world sees it.

Of course, if "the wealthy" had been added as a category to the survey, I'm sure they would have come out quite well. But this woman doesn't like the wealthy, and so she decides that being wealthy and being an atheist are more or less interchangeable, since it's socially acceptable for a Republican to dislike atheists even as it's much less socially acceptable for a Republican to start talking in a nasty fashion about "people with major money".

Another interviewee said that

the prisons aren’t filled with conservative Republican Christians. The prisons are probably filled with people who don’t have any kind of a spiritual or religious core.

It's not worth arguing the substance here: the point is that this person simply took a group of people he didn't like – prisoners – and threw them, willy-nilly, into the "atheist" bucket.

I think, then, that it's wrong to conclude from the survey that Americans are particularly harsh on atheists. Everybody defines himself at least in part in opposition to someone or something else, and "atheist" seems to have become a catch-all term for whatever that something else might be. Actual individual atheists, I think, still have little to fear from coming out.

Posted by Felix at 0:58 EST

Comments

Richard Dawkins goes to Church (video). Hilarious.

Posted by: Stefan at 7:38 EST, March 25, 2006

"Atheists, remember, are surely the least self-loathing of all minorities. Being an atheist, unlike being gay or being a Jew, is entirely a matter of choice."

I think you rush over that. Being gay or Jewish is indeed decided at birth, and is not a choice (and compatible with atheism or religious belief).

When it comes to atheism, Christianity and Islam, however, the idea of choice is a matter of debate. Evangelica Christians need to believe they are Christian by choice, as they need to accept Christ personally. But all the facts belie this. Instead, cultural factors have a much higher correlation with your beliefs. Live in Ireland, you'll be Catholic. Iran? Shia. The great majority do not make a choice. (And if you're in Afghanistan and do choose Christ, good luck.)

So I'd say that religious belief is very much culturally determined, even though its practicants need to deny it. But what about atheism? Is that culturally determined?

I happen to think atheism is "rationally determined". If you are subjected to modern science and have a rational mind, then the atheist position, if not inevitable, must at least present itself as a viable position to hold - a default view until evidence points to the existence of something more.

And thus it is not a coincidence that atheism has the highest preponderance among scientists and PhDs. And those people didn't "choose" to be smart.

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 7:52 EST, March 25, 2006

And thus it is not a coincidence that atheism has the highest preponderance among scientists and PhDs. And those people didn't "choose" to be smart.

And oftentimes they're not particularly. You're observing a group of people predisposed to engage in materialist thinking as validation of materialist thinking.

Besides, the truly rational person would go to church. It's the smart bet.

Posted by: Sterling at 19:52 EST, April 02, 2006