Question It is a well publicized fact that voters are less likely to vote for atheists than for individuals of practically any other sort of minority. Why is this sort of discrimination generally not regarded as indicative of a really significant injustice? Why isn't the difficulty of atheists to achieve political office viewed as on par with racism, homophobia or other kinds of discrimination?

Accepted:
March 2, 2009

Comments

Let's flip the question around a bit. Suppose I believe that people who hold certain particular religious views are likely to favor policies I don't like and oppose policies I like. That gives me a reason to worry that if I vote for a candidate of that religious persuasion, I'd be voting for someone who wouldn't share my views on things I care about politically. And surely that's an acceptable reason not to vote for someone. It seems pretty different from racism or homophobia.

People who wouldn't vote for an atheist, I'd guess, typically believe that atheists differ with them on questions that they care about. They see a person's atheism as an indicator of how the person would vote if s/he were a legislator. That still doesn't seem like racism or homophobia.

Except... Experience suggests that people who wouldn't vote for an atheist sometmes have at least this in common with racists and homophobes: they haven't actually subjected their beliefs to scrutiny. It's very common to find people who believe atheists would somehow lack a moral compass or wouldn't take moral questions seriously. That, at least, is sheer preudice. There are plenty of atheists who take moral questions very seriously, have considered them carefully, and hold thoughtful, responsible views.

Worse: many people think that morality without religion is somehow impossible. The issue here is trickier than the first one; seeing that morality doesn't require religion calls for some philosophical insight that doesn't come easily to everyone. But it's still a mistake, even if a slightly more subtle one.

So far, we've said that a person could base their attitude toward a candidate on information about the candidate's religious views without lapsing into the nastiness of something akin to racism or homophobia. We've said that in the case of atheism, however, many people have faulty beliefs about what atheists are like and about the relationship between religion and morality.

But we need to add: there's a good deal of the same sort of prejudice about religious candidates. It's not unusual to find people who think that anyone who's seriously religious is a crackpot. That's equally silly. It doesn't stand up to empirical scrutiny, and it doesn't stand up to philosophical scrutiny either. But the overall difference remains: voting against someone because you are suspicious of their views isn't like voting against them just because they're black or white or gay...