2X As Many Americans Wouldn't Vote For An Atheist As Those Who Wouldn't Vote For A Gay

Monday, May 13, 2019 NYTimes.com/David-Leonhardt » Name This Group Of Americans

Op-Ed Columnist, David Leonhardt, New York Times See if you can name this group of Americans: It is “one of the largest and fastest-growing demographic groups in the United States,” according to a recent Washington Post column. It suffers from substantial discrimination. About 40 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t vote for someone from this group to be president. By comparison, 7 percent say the same about an African-American candidate, 8 percent about a female candidate, 18 percent about a Mormon candidate and 24 percent about a gay candidate. Not one 2020 presidential candidate comes from this group. The group I’m describing? Atheists. I’d encourage you to read Max Boot’s recent column in The Post — the one I quote above — about the discrimination they face. You sometimes hear arguments that religious people in the United States suffer from discrimination, and that’s true in some sense. Specific religions do suffer discrimination. And in parts of secular, liberal America, there is a skepticism about religion that can veer into disrespect. But this skepticism is of a completely different order of magnitude from the hostility toward the lack of religion. Politics is the clearest example: To run for any office, asserting one’s religious faith is a virtual requirement. “Eight state constitutions even prohibit nonbelievers from holding public office,” Boot writes. “Surveys have shown that Americans don’t want atheists marrying their children or teaching them.” There is one prominent example of a politician who “had no belief in God,” Boot writes, and he was pretty successful: Winston Churchill. The United States was founded in part on the notion of religious freedom. That should mean the freedom to practice any religion without discrimination — or the freedom to practice none. We’re falling far short of that ideal. For more: A paper by Will Gervais and Maxine Najle of the University of Kentucky argues that about one quarter of Americans are atheists. The Pew Research Center finds that more than one in five Americans don’t identify with a religion. Some of these “nones” believe in God, although some people who identify with a religion do not.