The Least-Liked Minority Group? Atheists.

As I reported a couple of years back, research
shows that believers
trust atheists about as much they do rapists. A new study
published in The Journal of Applied Social Psychology
reports that atheists
are the most disliked minority group. From the
abstract: 

Prejudice against atheists is pervasive in the United States.
Atheists lag behind virtually all other minority groups on measures
of social acceptance. The sociofunctional approach suggests that
distrust is at the core of anti-atheist prejudice, thus making it
qualitatively different than prejudice against other disadvantaged
groups. Accordingly, this research examined political bias against
atheists, gays, and Blacks and the affective content accompanying
such biases. Results indicated that atheists suffered the largest
deficit in voting intentions from Christian participants, and this
deficit was accompanied by distrust, disgust, and fear, thereby
suggesting that the affective content of anti-atheist prejudice is
both broader and more extreme than prejudice against other
historically disadvantaged groups.

Distrust, disgust, and fear? Surely, that’s a bit of an
overreaction to intellectual smugness. As an out-atheist since my
teens, I have, to my knowledge, never experienced any prejudice on
account of my non-belief. (Well, there was this one dinner party at
our house during which the wife of one of my wife’s colleagues
expressed considerable shock upon learning that I am an atheist.
Apparently, I was the first atheist she’d ever met. On subsequent
social occasions, she has never been in the same room with me
again. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence.)

Will anti-atheist bigotry abate in the future? As I have
previously noted:

Time magazine in 2012 listed “The Rise of the Nones” as
one of the biggest trends in the United States. It turns out that
the fastest-growing religious group in the U.S. is Americans who
list their religious affiliation as “none.” A 2007 survey by the
Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 16 percent of
Americans are unaffiliated with any religious group; about half of
them could be described as secular unaffiliated. Twenty-five
percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 are unaffiliated with any
particular religion. If this trend toward nonbelief continues, it’s
going to be harder and harder for believers to continue to practice
bigotry against atheists. Nonbelievers are their children, their
relatives, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

I suspect that “othering” atheists will fall out of fashion as
growing familiarity with non-believers eventually breeds
acceptance.

See also Reason TV’s report on the biggest atheist gathering in
history in March, 2012 below: