Distrust of atheists exceeds distrust of Muslims despite atheists posing no external threat

Evidence

Americans are less accepting of atheists than of any of the other groups we asked about, and by a wide margin. The next-closest category on both measures is Muslims. We expected Muslims to be a lightning-rod group, and they clearly were. This makes the response to atheists all the more striking. For many, Muslims represent a large and mostly external threat, dramatized by the loss of life in the World Trade Center attacks and the war in Iraq. By contrast, atheists are a small and largely silent internal minority. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 237

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the Silences cross-text bridge: the perceived threat from atheists is not physical but moral-epistemic — they destabilize the omniscient-gaze enforcement system from within, which is exactly why Japanese authorities used the fumi-e to expose concealed believers as atheists-in-hiding.