Atheists and Evangelicals

Real prejudice and a competition of victimhood

If you tell a group of evangelical Christians that Atheists are the most hated religious group in America, you’ll probably get laughed out of the room. Evangelicals would tell you about the climbing rates of Atheism in America as religion continues to disappear from public life. They might emphasize how if you’re in academia, Hollywood, or the media, you have to keep quiet about your faith as religion bashing is the norm in public discourse. Or maybe they’d highlight the hate that the few Christian public figures like Chris Pratt, Kanye West, and Tim Tebow receive for being open about their faith.

Likewise, if you told a group of atheists that evangelical Christians have it rough in America these days due to prejudice, they’d likely look at you as if you had two heads. They’d tell you about the outsized political and cultural power that evangelicals have in the US. In 2020, 65% of adults in the US identify as Christians, so they might argue the plight of evangelicals can’t be comparable to actual minority religions. Or maybe these atheists would point out echoes of theocracy in America, with many liquor stores closed on Sunday, and even some public schools refusing to teach the basic scientific facts of evolution. Not only are prayers are said at nearly every sporting event, but saying you don’t believe in God makes people think that you are immoral.

For elaborated versions of these competing arguments, see these articles (here, here, here, & here).

In arguments and op-eds, atheists and evangelicals tend to minimize the suffering of the other group. Because atheists and evangelicals are prejudiced against each other, when one group claims that they face bigotry, the other argues that these crocodile tears distract from the REAL intolerance. This creates a competition of victimhood, where each group thinks the other is being overly dramatic (at best) or complete liars (at worst), and that they are the true victims.

It may seem strange that different groups compete to claim that they are the most hated, but victims of hate are entitled to compensation. Some of our own work finds that victims often seem blameless when they harm others (if someone is attacking you, murder is just self-defense), and other work finds that victims are often attributed a more positive moral character. Those who suffer pain and injury are entitled to sympathy and compensation, and so people strive to convince others that their own group is the true recipient of cruelty.

Unfortunately, this “competitive victimhood” can blind evangelicals and atheists to the real prejudices that each group faces. If we look at the data, for example, we can see that both groups have their fair share of critics. Pew findings show that on a feeling thermometer scale (Image below), 27% of respondents viewed atheists in the bottom 33%, and 21% of respondents viewed evangelical Christians in a similarly negative light.

OK. But who has it worse?

Just like a kid who wants to know who the favorite child is, Americans want to know who the least favorite group is. But being the scorekeeper for a competition of victimhood is hard.  Often, declaring one group’s discrimination as “worse” than the other can seem like a dismissal of the competing group’s troubles. We want to be clear throughout this piece that that is not our intention, but—as scientists—we feel that the data deserves to speak. Importantly, any relative comparisons of suffering don’t deny the absolute existence of suffering. Just because children in Africa are starving, does not mean depression in the United States should be ignored.

The data suggests that atheists suffer from a more outright kind of discrimination and distrust. In the following paragraphs, we’ll tease out why we think this might be the case, but we’ll follow up on the real prejudice that many hold towards evangelical Christians. We then explore how to bridge these divides of animosity.

In the political domain, it is actually illegal for an atheist to hold public office in 7 different states. 40% of Americans said they would not vote for an atheist for a president, putting them in last place behind gays/lesbians, evangelicals, & Muslims. Only one member of Congress identifies as “religiously unaffiliated” with none openly identifying as atheists.

Also, atheists are often shy about “coming out” because many people hold a strong distrust for non-believers. One 2011 study from Will Gervais and Azim Shariff illustrates the surprising extent of this distrust. Participants were given the following scenario “Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away. Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.” After reading this description, participants were shown a list of identities and were asked which identity Richard likely held. As you can see in the graph, people believed that immorally-behaving Richard was more likely to be an atheist than he was to be a Christian or a Muslim—and roughly as likely to be a rapist (see image below).

In other words, when it comes to morality, some equate atheists with rapists. Several other studies confirm that people mistrust the morality of atheists, with some research indicating that people are more likely to believe that serial killers are atheists. Many people doubt the morality of atheists, but religious people are especially likely to, seeing the godless as immoral.

Do atheists deserve some suspicion?

Perhaps it’s justified to keep a healthy suspicion of the non-religious. In fact, some evidence suggests that atheists don’t even trust one another as much they trust religious people. John Locke, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, argued in his 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration” that “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.” If atheists have no god, then they aren’t existentially bound to a moral code.

Maybe in 1689, all moral systems were tied to God, but in the 21st century, there are an abundance of non-religious-based moral systems that hold people accountable and reduce selfishness. Modern atheists are humanists, utilitarians, and stoics. There is evidence that atheists are not more immoral. In fact, atheists commit fewer crimes than the average person, and Western European countries with higher levels of atheism do not suffer from higher rates of crime or sexual licentiousness. Despite this reality, atheists are discriminated against because people think the godless lack a reliable moral compass. Next, we turn to a different kind of prejudice.

Why do evangelicals get some hate?

Although atheists seem to be especially distrusted, people are also suspicious of evangelical Christians. Who are evangelicals’ biggest haters? One recent paper in the journal Sociology of Religion suggests that it might be ivory tower academics (like many of our readers) who feel contempt towards evangelicals. Why? Well, academics generally have little first-hand contact with evangelicals and rely on stereotypes that they are intolerant enemies of science.

The authors of this paper divided academics into distinct categories based on their perspectives on evangelicals. One group of academics felt particularly harshly towards evangelicals, viewing them as intolerant oppressors. These academics experienced less contact with evangelicals over the course of their lives and tended to see evangelicals’ desire to convert others as threatening to their progressive social vision. The authors called this group of academics “Conservative Protestant Critics.” However, there was another group of academics, who have experience and familiarity with Protestantism, and they are called “Theological Definers.” These academics “are fairly supportive of evangelicals and project an image of objective assessment toward them.”

The authors speculated that it is likely both evangelicals’ alignment of social characteristics (becoming more white, less educated, & increasing affiliations with the Republican party) and their tendency to evangelize that makes them disliked by some segments of the population like academics. Commensurately, evangelicals increasingly view atheists as “not like them” in terms of ideology, race, and class, and stereotypes become easier to accept as contact between the groups diminishes.

We both have first-hand experience in the worlds of both evangelicals and atheists. We both work now in psychology (the academic discipline with the highest percentage of atheist professors) but Will attended an evangelical Christian school for his undergraduate degree, and in one summer, he worked as both a youth pastor at an evangelical church (before attending a month-long conference in social science.) Kurt spent a number of vacations in rural Nebraska with the big evangelical family of his step-mom. He remembers, as a ten-year-old, sitting in Sunday school in the basement of a church in Central City, NE learning about the importance of baptism for salvation. When the other kids—including his cousins—learned he was unbaptized, they calmly informed him he was going to Hell. But then Kurt’s cousins whispered that they would pray for him every night. That they cared enough about him to pray warmed his heart—their love banished any antipathy he had felt.

Without this time spent in close relationships with evangelicals, it’s possible we might both be “Conservative Protestant Critics.” But since we’ve spent so much time with them, the stereotypes of evangelicals that circulate through some academic circles have become harder to swallow. When people say that evangelicals are intolerant oppressors and enemies of science, they’re talking about our friends, our family members, and our former colleagues. In the same way, evangelicals that know more atheists feel warmer towards them. Friendship acts as a buffer for stereotypes and prejudice. In the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS), researchers found that first-year college students who made just one new friend with a differing worldview (e.g. evangelical, atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.) were almost twice as likely to appreciate that worldview compared to first-year students without that friendship.

A guide to judging & getting judged less

Disagreements between the faithful and the faithless are inevitable because atheists and evangelicals disagree about a central truth. But this disagreement does not inevitably mean discrimination. Hopefully, we have persuaded you to not write someone off as immoral just because they identify as an atheist or an evangelical. But there is more we can do to bridge this religious divide.

First, we need to tackle our misconceptions about the other group. This generally just means seeking out an honest education about what the other group is like. A good thing is that you’re already taking one step towards this goal, just by reading this newsletter! Given that social media dynamics tend to promote moral outrage, it’s probably best to get our information about the other side from the offline world, not from popular YouTube videos with hostile debates between atheists and preachers. (We placed a reading list at the bottom of this article that may be of use.)

Otherwise, the evidence suggests that one of the best ways to reduce our prejudices is to befriend someone with an opposing worldview. Already know of some atheists or evangelicals in your life? Develop those relationships and learn about why and how they try to be a good person, given their worldview.

In these relationships, you can also present yourself in a way that shows the other person that the stereotypes are wrong.

One stereotype of evangelicals is that they are anti-science, but emerging evidence from the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding shows that religion does not prevent trust in science, even though non-religious people think it does. Being upfront about your appreciation for the processes of science with your less religious counterpart could help you sidestep a common misunderstanding.

Philosophy can also help bridge the (non)religious divide. In a recent study titled, “If you don’t believe in God, do you at least believe in Aristotle?” researchers from Florida State University showed that Atheists and Religious people viewed one another as immoral until they learned that that person in the other group adhered to a moral code grounded in philosophy, kindness, and a concern for others (e.g., “Tom believes in practicing the balanced approach to living advocated by Aristotle. This means he strives every day to put the needs of others ahead of himself and to live virtuously.”) If you want to be better understood by your religious (or non-religious) counterparts, it helps to communicate your moral code with references to thinkers that you both respect.

Conclusion

Whether you seek to spread God’s word or deny that God exists, both evangelicals and atheists are caricatured in America—especially by each other. Overcoming this intolerance is not easy, but it is possible, and below we’ve summarized ways to help. The most important lessons for building mutual goodwill are not to fight over victimhood, and to acknowledge that someone cares about both morality and science no matter their stance on religion.

OUR TO-DO LIST FOR ATHEISTS & EVANGELICALS

1.     Educate yourself about the other group

2.     Befriend a member of the other group

3.     For evangelicals, openly present your pro-science beliefs

4.     Talk about your moral beliefs as they relate to philosophy, kindness, and a concern for others

Another place to start is with books! The book “American Grace” by Robert Putnam is a good place to start for a reasonably objective assessment of the characteristics of religious and non-religious folks. For our academic atheist readers, interact with the intellectual roots of the Christian tradition – read Soren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand, Bertrand Russel’s collection of essays entitled “What I Believe” may help evangelical readers develop an appreciation for an atheist perspective on what it means to live a moral life.