Anti-atheist prejudice cannot be explained by xenophobia or general outgroup distrust.

Evidence

This antipathy cannot just be a reflection of rampant xenophobia, or a general distrust of people seen as the “outgroup.” For one thing, we see in the poll numbers a general decline of prejudice over time, but this decline doesn’t seem to have affected atheists all that much. Moreover, prejudice against atheists is much broader and only weakly related to prejudice toward other groups. And most instructive, people following other religions are as much outsiders, and often more so, than atheists. Yet surveys, and our own experimental research, show that atheists who are culturally similar are trusted less than even members of outgroups who are religiously, linguistically, and ethnically different. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s central analytical claim: atheists are distrusted specifically because they reject supernatural accountability, which is the inverse mechanism to the Big God partner-selection thesis.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the reader’s bridge between Big Gods theory and Silence for the distrust Rodrigues faces as a theist among non-believing Japanese authorities—but actually the mirror image (theists distrusting atheists); relevant as the control case for the analytical argument.