American atheist distrust stems from anomalous high religiosity

Evidence

At this point, you the reader might be wondering, what about the United States, which is characterized with both high levels of rule of law but also high levels of atheist distrust? Interestingly, the United States is an outlier. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, 39 percent percent of Americans strongly agree or agree that politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office. This high number is lower than other highly religious but much poorer countries such as Pakistan (95 percent), but comparable to its very religious southern neighbor Mexico (39 percent). In America’s northern neighbor and close cultural cousin Canada, this distrust is much less pronounced (21 percent). But Canada’s atheist distrust is higher than comparably developed nations with high human development and strong rule of law, but much less religious, such as the UK (11 percent), Denmark (8 percent), and Sweden (4 percent), where distrust of atheists is virtually nonexistent. Why is it that the United States has levels of atheist distrust that are so out of step with other wealthy advanced democracies? This is a complex issue, but there is at least one answer to this puzzle that has to do with two oddities about the United States: for interesting reasons, America, despite being an economic powerhouse, has anomalously high religiosity levels, and we have seen that religiosity is the single most important determinant of atheist distrust. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 306

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s analytical frame: religiosity as the key determinant of outgroup distrust, which bears on how the omniscient-God mechanism and fumi-e apostasy tests operate in different institutional contexts. — connects to: Atheists are intuitively distrusted as much as convicted rapists; Religious belief strongly predicts distrust of atheists; Atheists are distrusted as norm-wildcards whose beliefs cannot be inferred — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 295 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 306