There is one group of American citizens that is more widely maligned, mistrusted, and even hated than any other identifiable group. In response to survey questions such as "[This group] does not at all agree with my vision of American society" and "I would disapprove if my child wanted to marry [a member of this group]," one group leads both categories by a wide margin. (Read the study here.) According to other surveys (including this Gallup poll from February 2007), Americans say that they would vote for a woman, black, Jew, Mormon, or even a homosexual for president more willingly than they would vote for a member of this group.
Who are these widely-disliked people? In a country where putting homophobic "marriage protection" amendments on the ballot has replaced race-baiting (the infamous "Southern Strategy") as the preferred getting-our-voters-to-the-polls technique of the political right, what group rates below gays in the eyes of the electorate? Are they murderers? Lepers?
As it turns out, the people Americans on the whole have such consistently negative attitudes about are... atheists. Many different lines of evidence show that people who lack belief in any god or gods are subject to more knee-jerk prejudice than every other group anyone has thought to compare them with. As an atheist myself, I have the dubious honor of belonging to a despised minority, possibly the most despised minority in the country. I suspect that a large proportion of the readers of The New Humanist.com share this dubious honor with me – and if so, I encourage you to be more open about it. Talk openly and often about your lack of belief in any god or gods: Come out of the godless closet and let people know who you really are.
Why would you want to do such a thing? The upside of prejudice against atheists is that atheism isn't an identity worn on the outside for all to see, like race or gender. Atheists can be invisible as such, if they so choose. But I'm not so sure that really constitutes an upside: Invisibility has its benefits, perhaps, but the costs are far greater.
Consider the strides in acceptance that gay men and women have made in the past few decades. It would be a mistake to look at current debates over gay marriage just as evidence of homophobia, because they are also a sign of how far we have come as a nation in accepting gays as fellow humans and fellow citizens, deserving equal rights and fair treatment. How so? There were no debates over gay marriage fifteen or twenty years ago because no one considered legally sanctioned marriages between two men or two women to be even the remotest of possibilities. Now, the general attitudes toward homosexuality have improved to such a degree that gay marriage is not only a possibility, it is an inevitability whose opposition grows increasingly shrill and frantic. Even an appallingly conservative Supreme Court finally felt compelled to strike down sodomy laws in 2003, where a slightly more liberal court had sustained such laws only seventeen years earlier.
How has this progress in ordinary, basic human respect for gay men and women been made? A significant portion of the progress is due to openness: The "silence = death" campaign against HIV, and countless personal choices by many individual gay men and women to be open about their own identities have created a culture where gay men and women are no longer invisible. Increasing numbers of openly gay citizens and celebrities throughout American society make anti-gay bigotry more and more difficult to sustain. Why? How? It's fairly easy for humans to hate an alien "other" exemplified only by stereotypes and assumptions. It becomes much more difficult to hate the "other" when your parent, child, sibling, aunt, neighbor, friend, co-worker, doctor, or teacher – or one of your favorite singers or actors – openly and proudly belongs to that "other" group. When you find that you not only know a gay person, but that you've liked that person for years before learning that he or she was gay, your perceptions of gay people almost inevitably change: The imagined devil horns come off, the perception of alien-ness and its accompanying fear is undermined, and the gay person takes another step in your eyes towards becoming simply a person – one who happens to be gay.
Of course, gay men and women still have a long way to go, and transgendered and bisexual people have even further to go. But more and more Americans every day learn to look at gay men and women and simply see people – fellow humans, fellow citizens, just folks. In the Gallup poll I mentioned in the first paragraph, 55% of those surveyed said that they would be willing to vote for an otherwise qualified Presidential candidate who was homosexual. Obviously, it would be better if that number were closer to 100%, if no American would even take such an irrelevant consideration into account when voting (or at least thinking about voting) for an elected official of any kind. But just as obviously, 55% is better than 26% – the proportion who said they'd vote for a homosexual president in 1978, the first year the people at Gallup even thought to ask the question.
In contrast, only 45% said they would vote for an atheist president in this year's poll, which is actually lower than the best ever 49% response to the same question in 1999. If gays still have a long way to go, those of us who don't believe in the existence of any god or gods seem to have even further to go – and we seem to be going in the wrong direction. Of course, I speak purely in terms of public perception, and in no way imply that the struggles of gays and atheists are otherwise equivalent: Atheists have the full protection of the Constitution (the "no religious tests for public office" clause of Article VI, the "establishment" and "free exercise" clauses of the 1st Amendment) and have not been widely denied basic rights and human dignity outside the realm of rhetoric – so far, anyway.
Still, the analogy has power. As was previously the case with gays, overwhelmingly the people who wouldn't vote for an atheist president don't even know any atheists. Or rather, they don't think they know any atheists. They almost certainly do know atheists – but being aware of the prejudice and bigotry against them, those atheists quietly keep their non-belief to themselves, they remain invisible. Similarly, as a matter of simple demographics it is certain that many of those parents who wouldn't want their child to marry an atheist actually have an atheist child and simply don't know it: They fear and perhaps even hate atheists, but surely they love their children. If they are never confronted with that contradiction, they will never have the impetus to overcome their irrational fears. Again, the similarity between gay and atheist "coming out" is clear.
As ignorance breeds fear, knowledge breeds acceptance. The only way to undermine the knee-jerk fear of atheists so many people have is to let the fearful know that they have nothing to be afraid of, that "those people" they fear are already everywhere and aren't really scary at all: We are teachers and doctors, sons and daughters, taxi drivers and checkout clerks, mothers and fathers, fellow citizens one and all.
We are also elected representatives. In what may prove to be one of the more important strokes against the invisibility of atheists in America, Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif.) on March 12, 2007 became the only openly declared non-theist in Congress. Resulting from an unusual contest sponsored by the Secular Coalition of America (which you can read about in their press release), Representative Stark's announcement is literally unprecedented: His public statement makes him the only openly declared unbeliever ever to occupy a seat in the House or Senate. The Constitution may forbid religious tests for public office, but clearly the electorate applies its own test – and so candidates who may or may not believe in private work very diligently to out-pray each other in public, to the vast detriment of our political climate. (Nothing is sacred in American politics, but much is repellently sanctimonious.)
I say let us follow the brave example of Representative Stark, and the analogous example of many millions of openly gay men and women, and come out of the closet as unbelievers. Only if we throw off the stifling cloak of invisibility and come out in the open for all to see do we have any chance of altering those prejudiced perceptions of atheists, of overcoming people's ungrounded fears about who atheists are, fears that our values and concerns are somehow alien or threatening even though they haven't the slightest idea what those values and concerns might be. Of course, the most central values and concerns of atheists are substantially same as every other human's – life and love, children and work, death and taxes, all that jazz.
Besides, you know you often find the closet dark and stifling, however comfortable its protection may be on occasion.
Perhaps some day, more and more Americans will look at openly atheist men and women and simply see people – fellow humans, fellow citizens, just folks. Until that day, I would rather be seen as an atheist than not seen at all. And if more people make the same choice I do, the chances are vastly improved that one day I won't be seen as an atheist at all. I'll be seen simply as a person – one who just happens to be an atheist.
George M. Felis is an upright primate with an overdeveloped neocortex. Amongst the things he does not take seriously are himself and other people's religious beliefs. He is also a Ph.D. student in philosophy at The University of Georgia, and he's trying to take that a bit more seriously so he can finish his dissertation and get on with life already.
Copyright 2007 The New Humanist.com
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