Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the level and correlates of Americans’ distrust of atheists. Using new, nationally-representative survey data measuring public and private trust, we show that atheists are more widely rejected than any other group measured. Despite declining boundaries between religious groups, the boundary between believers and non-believers in America remains very strong. Using logistic regression models, we find that public and private rejection of atheists is driven by religious predictors, but also by social location and political orientation. Finally, we show that distrust of atheists is correlated with other forms of prejudice in a stable way.

Publication Type: Scholar to Scholar
Abstract: A generic investigation establishing a post 9/11 atheist apologetic genre by analyzing Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, and Christopher Hitchens’s god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Situational Requirements are given, stylistic and substantive elements are observed, and an organizing principle is attributed. A polemic and snarky tone; use of the parenthetical, paraphrase, we/them language; and authorial constituency are found throughout each artifact. Implications for the rhetorical study of humor, science, expertise and atheist apologetics are given.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The purpose of this research project is to conduct a qualitative interview study of atheists in the United States, a minority population that has been relatively ignored by scholars of all disciplines, including sociologists. One of the major interests of this study is the idea that being an atheist in the U.S. necessarily entails taking on a nonnormative identity, and hence having to confront all the issues inherent in being a nonconformist. Thus, atheists in the U.S. can be described as deviants who reject the dominant religious culture and the normative belief in the existence of God. Thus, the purpose of this study is to obtain information on this neglected category of nonconformists by conducting in-depth interviews with atheists regarding two main areas of interest: 1) the development of their atheism; and 2) the management of this stigmatized identity. This presentation will focus on the first primary objective - the construction of this nonnormative identity. This part of the study is interested in recording the process of becoming an atheist, the influences which affected their belief systems, their history with religion, and their explanations for rejecting religion. Thus, I will be reporting on the discovery of a three-stage progression to atheism, which includes two distinct career paths that affect the length of the process. I will also describe in detail an interpretive framework that has been developed which helps to explain how and why certain individuals adopt this marginal identity. This framework includes two broad explanatory approaches involving both social environmental influences, as well as individual and cognitive factors.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines ritualistic communication in the context of atheist and agnostic communities, both physical and virtual. A number of rituals, some that parallel those in religious groups, are summarized, including the rituals of conversion, negation, invocation of science and reason, community, non-structure, celebrating humanism and freedom, and morality. In this paper, we problematize the discursively created binary between religious and irreligious, in an effort to articulate potential common ground between these groups.