University of Minnesota study cited as index of Obama’s outreach to atheists

WDCPIX.COM/Lauren Victoria Burke

President Obama “regularly puts nonbelievers on the same footing as religious Americans,” the Wall Street Journal notes today, recalling especially his inaugural-address shout-out: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.” The article, like others before it, cites a 2006 University of Minnesota study of American attitudes toward atheists as outcasts to show how far out Obama’s doubter-outreach is.

“The reaction to atheists has long been used as an index of political and social tolerance,” wrote U. of M. sociology professors Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis and Douglas Hartmann in a paper titled “Atheists As ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society” (pdf):

We show not only that atheists are less accepted than other marginalized groups but also that attitudes toward them have not exhibited the marked increase in acceptance that has characterized views of other racial and religious minorities over the past forty years. …

Our focus is … on attitudes that mark them as outsiders in public and private life, that may even designate them as unworthy of full civic inclusion.

As religious as he is now — exceeding even his predecessor in some respects, says the WSJ — Obama has personal experience within the nonbelieving minority. A National Journal cover story this month called “Rise of the Godless” (subscription only, pdf by permission) quotes from Obama’s book ”The Audacity of Hope”:

“I was not raised in a religious household. … Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, [my mother] worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work.” … Obama has also said, as he did on February 5 at the National Prayer Breakfast, that his Muslim-born father “became an atheist.”

But Obama’s appeal to nonbelievers also has new electoral math in its favor. From “Rise of the Godless”:

… [T]he religiously unaffiliated bloc grew from about 5 percent of the electorate in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008. The share of Americans who report no religious preference hovered around the 5-to-6 percent level from the early 1970s through the 1980s, jumped to 9 percent in 1993, rose to 14 percent in 1998, and is now about 16 percent, according to Roger Finke, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who is director of the Association of Religion Data Archives. By that count, the no-preference bloc is nearly equal to the share of mainline Protestant churches, from which it is probably poaching members.

Terminology makes a difference. However similar the “no preference” bloc might be to the “unaffiliated” or “nonbelievers,” it is not the same as the relatively tiny “atheist” or “agnostic” blocs, the WSJ points out:

A 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., found that 15% of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, up from 8.2% in 1990. In 2008, only 0.7% identified themselves as atheists and 0.9% said they are agnostic.