Why are We so Unpopular?

by Gary Berg-Cross

For good or ill, for better understanding or to thwart understanding, conversations are filled with ideas about trust or really the trust – lack of trust continuum. It's an excess worthy of Thanksgiving feasts.

The failure of the super committee is blamed in part on a lack of trust between Democrats and Republicans. This lack of trust is said to fuel already deep divides between the side. Democrats came to believe that the Republicans really wanted to use the super committee to cut taxes, rather than the deficit. And Republicans members don’t trust Government period, even though they are part of it.

A lack of trust in the financial system (or government regulation) is part of the widespread, political polarization, but is also said to underlie Greek debt problems, US- Israeli relations, employee- employer relations (28% of employees don't trust the senior leaders in their organization, but maybe it’s higher now in the NBA!)

One reason I was thinking of trust, besides being bombarded by the above, was an article on the trust factor with atheists. This new work explains some of the unpopularity of atheists as I blogged on earlier comparing atheist and t-party unfavorability. Such data go back to 2006 and sociological studies by Edgell, Gerteis & Hartmann. Their survey of Americans, found that atheists “are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious and other minority groups.” Writing in the American Sociological Review, they noted that “while rejection of Muslims may have spiked in post-9/11 America, rejection of atheists was higher.” Rejection is measured in several ways and one is whether a person would vote for a presidential
candidate of this type. Atheist are the lowest group, just under homosexuals.

This all comes despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups. So why does the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong? This authors ague that it is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. So atheists are seen as “others” and immorally so.

There has been some follow-up work to understand the dynamics a bit better and it turns out that trust is a key element. “Distrust Feeds Anti-Atheist Prejudice” shouts the article headline by Tom Jacobs reporting on new sociofunctional research by British Columbia psychologist Will Gervis finds that atheists are unpopular because they are widely perceived as untrustworthy. Distrust seems to be a major factor in why we are disliked more than other minorities, although this distrust of atheists generalized to like minded groups from more liberal, secular populations. They are like atheists, but who else is? Well, criminally untrustworthy individual such as rapists are. How does research get at this? They use something called the Conjunction test. You give a person a sentence like:

Amber, “an outspoken and politically active single woman.” Knowing that — and nothing else — about her, is it more likely that Amber is (a) a banker or (b) a banker and a feminist?

What if a person is some clearly immoral type (like a person who steals)? Who are they more like??? You guessed it. Rapists are not seen as people of faith (e.g. Christians, Muslims, Jews) through.

The researchers report that taken as a whole the results were consistent with a moral hypothesis that:

“the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them.”

You can see a video called If Atheist Ruled American that expresses many of the implications that arise from beliefs such as "America is based on faith in God and that's why we have free speech and equal rights." Or that freedom of thinking will be taken away from people since we are just animals and atheists will wage a secret war against rights.

Of course such abstract, unfounded beliefs in what atheists are like can be changed by personal interactions and discussions (such as interfaith discussions that include atheists -discussed in a previous blog). Many people of faith don’t really know atheists and kindred folk well enough to understand their moral behavior. This is generally true of positive contact with out-groups. People can change their option if the exposure is positive. It’s happened and is happening to the GLBT community and it might even happen to the less popular atheist community. So be your moral, right-thinking self and let people see your humanity. It plays well when shown in a favorable light.

Politics, Prayer, and Prejudice

By Mathew Goldstein

In a August 2, 2011 editorial titled Politics and Prayer, the New York Times editorial staff applauds a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decision outlawing the Forsyth County prayer policy because the prayers often featured sectarian references. The NY Times argues that the constitution forbids government from favoring "one religion", citing the court's observation that the invocations must not "repeatedly suggest that government has put its weight behind a particular faith." The NY Times then quoted the court criticizing the county's policy because it favored "the majoritarian faith in the community at the expense of religious minorities." This argument is seriously flawed because it ignores that "the majoritarian faith" encompasses more than "one religion" or "a particular faith" and that the Establishment Clause forbids "an establishment of religion", not "establishment of a religion" or "establishment of one religion" arbitrarily selected.

Forsyth County is majority Protestant, it is majority trinitarian, it is majority Christian, it is majority monotheist. There is no one majority religion or faith. Different religious belief based divisions of the same set of people results in multiple different religious belief majorities. The gratuitous addition of the qualifiers "a", "the", and "one" by the NY Times and the court to mis-characterize as singular the pluralism inherent in majoritarian religion is disingenuous and mischievous. Counting religions is capricious. Delineating a single religion for large groups of citizens is inherently subjective and arbitrary because there can be as many religions as there are people. One judge could count a single religion where another judge could count hundreds of religions.

There is no basis in law for judges to pick and choose for which religions the Establishment Clause applies and for which religions it does not apply. The concocted misconception that the constitution requires judges to identity "the" majority faith or "a" majority religion when evaluating the applicability of the Establishment Clause is in conflict with the underlying principles of impartiality and equity which gives the first amendment and, more generally, all laws, their warrant to claim to be just. It should be obvious that the Establishment Clause principle equally prohibits establishments of minority religion, regardless of how unlikely that result is in a democracy, multiple establishments of religion, however many such distinct establishments there are, and a single simultaneous establishment of multiple religions, regardless of how many different religions or faiths, however delineated, are simultaneously established in a given instance. The Establishment Clause applies equally to minority and majority religions, to any and all religions, to one and many religions.

Accordingly, if, as asserted by the court here, Forsyth County violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by starting its meetings with prayers “endorsing Christianity to the exclusion of other faiths” then it also violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by starting its meetings with prayers endorsing monotheism to the exclusion of polytheism and atheism. There is no non-prejudiced basis for declaring government favoritism for Christianity to be unconstitutional while declaring government favoritism for monotheism to be constitutional. That is a completely arbitrary distinction. Jesus as deity is Christian religion, singular God as deity is Abrahamic religion, one majority is larger than the other majority, but otherwise its the same violation of the same principle against government establishment of religion. Yet it is exactly this irrelevant distinction that many judges, courts, and the NY Times, repeatedly and inconsistently endorse as a foundation of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.

There is no such thing as inclusive or nonsectarian theistic prayer. Theism is exclusive to, and sectarian for, those who believe one or more gods should be worshiped, or be appealed to, with a prayer prior to starting work. If, as the NY Times asserts, "a government that favors one faith flouts the inclusive nature of American government, harming church and state" then a government that favors monotheism, or even theism more generally, is identically harming church and state by flouting the inclusive nature of American government. Excluding non-Christians and excluding non-theists is an identical harm to the identical principle. The NY Times, and the judges, by refusing to acknowledge this, are hypocritically declaring themselves to endorse a principle of inclusiveness while they simultaneously advocate against the identical inclusiveness principle. The only real difference is that one exclusion targets a different minority than the other exclusion. Prejudice or bigotry are the nouns that apply when one minority is not deemed equal before the law merely because that minority disagrees more completely or directly with the majority on a matter of opinion than the other dissenting minorities.