Anti-atheist prejudice is socially accepted while racial prejudice is not

Evidence

Perhaps believers, who may avoid expressing negative attitudes toward other ethnic or racial outgroups, have less concern when it comes to atheists. Anti-atheist prejudice, unlike prejudice against racial or religious minorities, could be a socially accepted prejudice in America. But that would push the question further back—why would this prejudice be socially acceptable? Moreover, these polls predict voting behavior with a reasonably high degree of accuracy. Voters in the United States have never elected an openly atheist president. Judging from the rarity of self-declared atheists holding political office in America, the polls might, if anything, underestimate how widespread the rejection of atheists is. Finally, in our own experimental research, we find that believers in the United States and Canada distrust atheists even when we use subtle and indirect measures of distrust and prejudice that sidestep some of the problems of survey research. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 232

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. These observations, taken together, suggest that the origin of anti-atheism cannot be found in familiar explanations such as imagined dissimilarity, xenophobia, or general fear of otherness. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 258

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that anti-atheist sentiment is the socially legitimate prejudice in America—unlike racial or religious bias—which anchors the argument that atheism signals group untrustworthiness.
• XREF: Feeds the reader’s central claim: that the fumi-e ritual and public atheism represent partner-choice disruption—if atheism is the one acceptable prejudice, then belief itself is the trust marker religious groups police through public displays. — connects to: Outgroup prevalence reduces distrust-based prejudice even as it raises fear-based prejudice; Anti-Muslim prejudice is considered more socially acceptable than any other group’s — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 312; Religiosity does not moderate fear of atheists the way it moderates racial views — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 370 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Why would anti-atheist prejudice be socially acceptable in a way anti-Black or antisemitic prejudice are not, and does this map onto the mechanism of partner-choice rather than outgroup animus?
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 232; Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 258