{"id":8597,"date":"2016-10-18T14:14:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T14:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/?p=8597"},"modified":"2016-10-18T14:14:21","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T14:14:21","slug":"atheists-still-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/2016\/10\/18\/atheists-still-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheists Still “Other”?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Penny Edgell, Douglas Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis, <\/span>“Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-Religious in the United States,” Social Forces<\/em>,<\/a><\/span> 2016<\/span><\/div>\n
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo by Fibonacci Blue, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ten years ago, Penny Edgell<\/a>, Joseph Gerteis<\/a>, and Doug Hartmann <\/a><\/span>published a paper with a surprising finding<\/span><\/a>: atheists were the most disliked minority group in the United States. More Americans said atheists didn\u2019t share their vision of Americans society\u2014and more said they wouldn\u2019t like their child marrying one\u2014than Muslims, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and a host of other groups. Today, however, m<\/a><\/span>ore Americans have no religious affiliation<\/span><\/a>, and many non-religious groups picked up on this finding as a reason to improve their public image. So, have things gotten better for atheists? The authors recently published the findings from a ten-year follow up to answer these questions, and found that not much has changed.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>Despite an increased\u00a0awareness of atheists and other non-religious people over the last decade, Americans still distance themselves from the non-religious. A new\u00a0finding from\u00a0the 2014 data is that Muslims are now statistically tied<\/em> with atheists for the most disliked group in the United States. This time around, the authors asked some additional questions to get at\u00a0why<\/em> so many people dislike atheists. They\u00a0<\/span>asked if\u00a0respondents think atheists are immoral, criminal, or elitist, and whether or not the increase in non-religious people is a good or bad thing. They found that one of the strongest predictors of disliking atheists is assuming that they are immoral. People are\u00a0less likely to think\u00a0atheists are\u00a0criminals\u00a0and those who think\u00a0they are\u00a0elitist actually see it as a good thing. However, 40% of Americans also say that the increase of people with “no religion” is a bad thing.\u00a0 A new\u00a0finding from\u00a0the 2014 data is that Muslims are now statistically tied<\/em> with atheists for the most disliked group in the United States.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

These findings highlight the ways that\u00a0many people in the United States still use religion as a sign of morality, of who is a good citizen, a good neighbor, and a good American.\u00a0And the fact that Muslims are just as disliked as atheists shows that it is not only\u00a0the\u00a0non<\/em>-religious that get cast as different and bad. Religion\u00a0can be a basis for both inclusion and exclusion, and the authors conclude that it is\u00a0important to continue interrogating when and why it excludes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penny Edgell, Douglas Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis, “Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-Religious in the United States,” Social Forces, 2016 Ten years ago, Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Doug Hartmann published a paper with a surprising finding: atheists were the most disliked minority group in the United States. More […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1957,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,13],"tags":[42181,14907,470,37332,3107],"class_list":["post-8597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-inequality","tag-atheists","tag-sociology-of-culture","tag-discrimination","tag-inequality","tag-morality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8597"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8604,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8597\/revisions\/8604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}