Six Reasons Why Atheophobia is Still Prevalent and Accepted

Atheists are one of the fastest-growing confessional minorities in the US. So why do so many of us still have to stay in the closet?

Atheophobia is one of the least discussed forms of prejudice in America, likely because it’s still one of the most accepted. Indeed, considering the fact that the so-called Nones — or people with no religious affiliation — are the fastest-growing ideological cohort in the United States, one would think that atheophobia would not be a significant problem, at least in this country.

In some areas, it’s not. In the urban, liberal bubbles of the US, the idea that atheophobia exists at all might even be laughable. After all, in places like Seattle, Portland, Burlington, and Boston, it can seem like everyone is an atheist. Yet, in the majority of the country, you’ll still find a good deal of prejudice reserved specifically for those who doubt or deny the existence of any deity.

There seems to be more respect for, or at least a patronizing tolerance of, the “spiritual, but not religious” subcategory of the Nones. Yet the same people who think the spiritual crowd is nothing but a bunch of harmless “woo woos” will snarl in hatred of anyone who admits to harboring the belief that there is no god.

Atheophobia: American as apple pie

Here in the South, things are particularly bad. Personally, I’ve kept my mouth shut at all of my onsite jobs, lest my Christian bosses find some reason to fire me. While my colleagues and supervisors go on about this church and that Sunday school and this denomination and that preacher, I smile and nod — with good reason, I might add.

I have known more than one atheist who “coincidentally” lost a job after being outed as an unbeliever. In fact, almost all of my atheist friends and family stay mum unless they’re in a known safe space, like an atheist club, for precisely this reason.

None of my neighbors know my husband and I are atheists, either. We simply politely decline their invitations to church with laments that we don’t like to get up early because, if the past is any indication, our kind and friendly religious neighbors will become frigid and even hostile if they find out the real reason we don’t go to church with them. That, or they might decide to make us their new conversion project. That’s happened, too.

Hell, I even write under a pen name so that a quick Google search of my real name won’t reveal me as an atheist, though this is as much to protect myself and my spouse when we travel to the Middle East as it is to guard against the retaliation of run-of-the-mill American Christians.

Of course, my personal experiences on the wrong side of Christian privilege are pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things. They’re just anecdotes, after all, but the stats back them up. There are almost no openly atheist major politicians in the US, and there has never been an openly atheist president. In fact, admitting one’s atheism is generally considered political suicide.

Atheists are also represented horrifically in the media, assuming we’re represented at all. And that’s to say nothing of the recent instances of atheophobic violence, like the arson at the Satanic Temple.

In terms of the most-hated ideological groups, according to the polls, atheists race Muslims to the bottom. Last decade, Muslims sometimes earned the title of “most-hated confessional minority,” while other times, atheists were the ones with that distinction. Regardless of who came out the “winner” in the most-despised category, that group usually won by a razor-thin margin.

Of course, there are well-known efforts to stamp out Islamophobia in the US (as there should be) to protect this vulnerable confessional minority from the scorn of the privileged Christian majority. However, there is no real equivalent for atheists.

In fact, your average American might not even know the meaning of the word “atheophobia,” even though this type of bigotry is so entrenched that atheists fear for our jobs, our financial stability, our friendships, our familial relationships, and occasionally even our physical safety in most of the country. Not to mention we are all but legally barred from high office.

So the question is — what gives? Why are we so despised? And, perhaps more importantly, why does no one besides us seem to care? Here are a few of my best guesses.

We are usually apostates

Though we’re all born atheists and are then indoctrinated into religion, most adult atheists were not raised to be dirty infidels. Most atheists in most parts of the world, the US included, are ex-somethings. I’m an ex-Christian. My husband is an ex-Muslim. I used to date an ex-Hindu. I have a lot of recovering Catholic and Exvangelical and formerly Orthodox friends.

The only people raised without religion I know are the children that my currently atheist friends are raising now. The reality is if you’re an atheist adult in America, you were likely raised in a faith that you abandoned.

Atheists are notoriously reluctant to procreate, so the fact that our numbers are rapidly swelling despite our general refusal to have more than one or two kids — assuming we have kids at all — can only mean one thing: the children that Christian, Muslim, etc. parents raised with the assumption these kids were going to continue their religious traditions are coming over to the dark side in large numbers.

I’m sure this is absolutely infuriating to most religious parents, especially since many of them subscribe to the idea that their children are their property or extensions of themselves.

Even worse, there’s this pervasive idea among the religious that atheists are “coming for” their kids. I know as a child, I was told never to befriend an atheist because they would try to “brainwash” and “confuse” me away from the truth of the gospel (when, of course, the reality was that my first atheist friends did nothing but lay out a bunch of logical arguments I couldn’t refute, despite my many years of Christian apologetics training.)

Of course, there are evangelical atheists who try to recruit people away from religion because they are sick of all the violence and hatred it inflicts on the world. But most atheists, especially those of us who have been atheists for a long time, just want to live our lives in peace. We don’t try to deconvert kids because we know we don’t have to. Most ex-religious people deconvert themselves with little, if any, outside help.

This reality is not widely understood or accepted by the religious crowd, so they continue to hate atheists based on the misguided belief that every time a kid leaves the silly and obviously false religion they were raised in, it must be because some evil infidel lured the poor child away from the one, true faith.

We frighten people of all religions

There’s no better way to unite people of traditionally warring religious groups than presenting them with an atheist. Put a Sunni and a Shia or a Catholic and a Protestant in a room with an atheist, and they’ll forget whatever problems they had with one another until the unbeliever is dealt with satisfactorily.

For instance, Catholic and Protestant Christians have been burning and beheading each other over arguably insignificant theological differences for more than 500 years. But they sure had no problem uniting when they saw the tide turn toward secularism in the United States. Now, conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants are best political buds. And all it took was a few of their kids turning atheist.

Atheism is a threat to all religions not only because, when not persecuted into the shadows, it tends to attract many of the best and the brightest away from their faiths, but also because it presents an alternative way of life that exists outside the confines of religion. So it tends to eventually draw in people who are dissatisfied with the religion in which they were raised.

For this reason, it’s less likely that someone will convert from one religion to another. Those who seriously question the beliefs endemic to their geographic location of birth are probably going to abandon religious thought altogether.

While some people do convert away from their geographic location’s traditional faith to that of another geographic location, the more common scenario is believers leaving the faith of their youth for nothing at all. The None category is, according to Pew Research, the “single biggest destination of movement across religious boundaries.”

Thus, deconversion is often looked upon as the fault of atheism or secularism rather than the fault of any alternative organized religion or of the deficiencies of the abandoned religion. This is why, “There is no god” is usually considered a more threatening and dangerous statement than, “My god is better than your god.” And it’s why atheists are often at the top of every religion’s hit list, theological differences with other religions be damned. People tend to hate the biggest threat the most.

Many people don’t know an atheist (or don’t know they know one)

Despite the fact that secular humanism is on the rise, the percentage of people who cop to being atheists is still in the single digits. We keep our mouths shut because we worry how people will react, and while this form of self-preservation is perfectly called-for in many circumstances, it has the unfortunate side effect of creating a climate of pluralistic ignorance. Theists get to go on thinking everyone around them agrees with them, and they also never get a chance to meet the friendly atheists next door — or to know they already met us.

This means most people get their understanding of what atheists are like from crappy media portrayals. We’re almost never portrayed as nuanced and multifaceted human beings in movies, books, shows, or anything else, really.

Common atheist tropes include:

• The worn out “angry atheist” caricature that’s almost ubiquitous in religious media.
• The arrogant, weird, often autistically coded deconvert (a la Sheldon Cooper.)
• The emotionless forever-atheist who never struggled with religion — these are often aliens rather than humans.
• The narcissistic, amoral, Machiavellian type who will do anything to get their way.
• The cynical, miserable, lonely loser nursing an addiction and waiting to die with no hope of an afterlife.
• The persecutory communist/authoritarian dictator (this trope often erases persecutions against atheists carried out by religious groups.)

Atheists are almost never portrayed as kind, optimistic, happy, fulfilled, nuanced, morally upright, or in any way fun to be around. In light of that, is it any wonder atheophobia doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in most parts of the country?

New Atheist celebrities didn’t do us any favors

When you ask the average person to name a famous atheist, odds are they’re going to name one who doesn’t exactly paint us in the best light. Many atheist celebrities are the kind of arrogant older white male stereotype we’re trying to get away from. A few of the most famous atheists have also said truly hateful and reprehensible things about women, minorities, and faithful people in general.

Even if religion is factually incorrect, even if it is demonstrably harmful to society, even if it is stalling scientific progress, it doesn’t help when some of the most famous atheist figures say virtually all religious people are idiots and terrorists. Yet some of the biggest names in atheism have done just that — and the rest of us are the ones who pay the price.

The left typically sees us as wealthy (and educated and white and male)

The fact that the average atheist in the US has historically been thought of as an upper-middle-class white man is likely why many in liberal circles don’t see atheophobia as a problem. The general assumption is if the worst thing you have to deal with is passing as a religious person, then you have no real problems.

Putting aside the fact that an atheist should be no more expected to “pass” as religious than an autistic should be expected to pass as allistic or a gay person should be expected to pass as straight — as this expectation stymies the individual’s ability to live authentically — the fact that rich white men are still seen as the stereotypical atheist is part of the problem with atheophobia.

Passing is a privilege in one sense, as it allows invisible minorities to avoid becoming targets for persecution, but it’s also a curse in the sense that it prevents the individual from living and speaking as they see fit, and it allows members of the dominant group to go on believing their ranks are populated solely with people who think like themselves.

Unfortunately, women, racial minorities, the poor, and other visible minorities often have no choice but to pass as religious. We don’t have the privilege of coming out of the atheist closet precisely because we’re facing misogyny, racism, classism, etc. We can’t afford to pile atheophobia on top of all the other phobias we’re dealing with, so we have no option but to slap a religious smile on our faces. To me, this issue means that atheophobia should be higher on the left’s priority list because the intersection of atheophobia with other prejudices prevents atheists who aren’t, in fact, rich white men from living openly.

Indeed, the requirement to hide one’s beliefs and practices might be a concern for the left if we were talking about another confessional minority, but because we’re talking about a minority that’s still wrongly viewed as white and male, most of the country’s most ardent social justice activists aren’t concerned enough about this type of discrimination to push back against it. Thus, we’re on our own.

We’re overrepresented in other classes hated by the right

Despite the fact that most open atheists have traditionally been white men, as their white male privilege afforded them the opportunity to come out of the closet, there are certain groups that have a higher concentration of atheists — groups that mainstream society, and especially the right wing of it, doesn’t look too kindly upon.

There’s burgeoning evidence to suggest the neurodivergent are heavily represented in atheist circles. Atheist subculture is also home to a high number of queerfolk, probably because of the childhood abuse they suffered at the hands of their respective faith groups.

So if the left doesn’t care about atheists because it thinks of us as all high-income white guys, the right despises us not just because we aren’t members of their faith groups but also because when right-wingers think of an atheist, they often think of a blue-haired, androgynous, “libtard,” “spaz” walking around with a stim toy and trying to turn their kids into queers.

Speaking as one of those genderfluid, autistic weirdos, I know well and good how the right reacts to people who can’t or won’t conform. Their hatred of atheists would exist even if our ranks were not filled with queerfolk and the neurodivergent, but the fact that they are fuels an even more virulent acrimony than that directed at old-school atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. The right despises Dawkins-types, to be sure, but they absolutely loathe the new generation of gender non-conforming, gay/lesbian, and neurologically atypical atheists.

Bottom Line

Despite the issues we face here, I’m aware that atheists in the US have it pretty good compared to atheists in many other areas of the world. We might have to worry about losing our jobs and our relationships because of religious people’s bigotry, but we generally don’t have to worry about being lynched by mobs of the faithful or incarcerated and executed by the state. Of course, all that may change if Christian Nationalists get their way.

That being said, atheophobia is one of the most callously disregarded forms of bigotry in the country. Other confessional groups do not typically see their complaints of discrimination so routinely dismissed by both sides of the political aisle. Yet it’s hard to get anyone of any political persuasion to care that this growing confessional minority is intimidated, discriminated against, and silenced on a daily basis in our supposedly free democracy.

I’m not of the persuasion that I should have to keep quiet about the fact that I neither believe in a god nor subscribe to a religion, but I do anyway. Being out of the atheist closet is a good way to get a target put on your back in a huge chunk of America. So I’m only out with people I trust.

I thought the First Amendment applied to everyone, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it only applies to people who have some sort of theistic ideological framework. After all, anyone of any religion can get onboard with, “In God We Trust.” If you’re not a member of any religion? According to our new national motto, you don’t belong in the United States.

Regardless of whether you agree with the opinion that there is no god, the fact that atheists in most states and virtually all of rural America feel we’re not able to express it freely and safely should concern a lot more people than it does.