Atheists and gays share exclusion but provoke psychologically distinct prejudice

Evidence

We were particularly curious about how anti-atheist prejudice compares to prejudice based on sexual orientation. Anti-gay prejudice is an instructive comparison because both atheists and gays are often described as threatening to majority religious values and morality. After all, atheists and gays routinely score at the bottom on large-scale cultural acceptance polls in America and other religious societies, and have for decades. Like atheists, gays are frequently targeted and excluded by strong religious believers and many religious organizations. This is typified by the Boy Scouts of America, who as of current writing, continue to explicitly deny membership to both atheists and gay males. (Interestingly, public pressure on the Boy Scouts of America has focused far more on lifting the anti-gay ban than on lifting the anti-atheist ban.) Nevertheless, despite surface similarities, our theory predicts that these two different prejudices are rooted in different psychological sentiments. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 266

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The Boy Scouts simultaneously banning atheists and gays while public pressure targets only the gay ban is a concrete instance of asymmetric moral visibility that could feed the reader’s analysis of which exclusions communities notice.
• CANDY: Interesting irony that public pressure on the Boy Scouts targets anti-gay but not anti-atheist bans.

Related

• Anti-atheist and anti-gay prejudice are rooted in different psychological sentiments. (similarity 0.90)
• Anti-atheist prejudice stems from distrust while anti-gay prejudice stems from disgust. (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-atheist and anti-gay prejudices have distinct distrust versus disgust profiles (similarity 0.79)
• Anti-atheist hostility is not simply generalized prejudice (similarity 0.79)