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ho is like me and who is not? What kindof relationship do I have to those whoare different? These are questions about bound-aries, the symbolic distinctions that we makealong multiple dimensions between ourselvesand others. Such distinctions have social impli-cations when they are widely recognized andaccepted as legitimate dimensions of differ-ence, and when they organize access toresources and opportunities (Lamont andMolnár 2002). Symbolic boundaries bothinclude and exclude—by separating out thosewho do not belong, they draw together thosewho do (Alexander 1992; Taylor 2002).Symbolic distinctions drawn along lines of race, gender, sexuality, or social class are oftenstudied because they lead to social exclusion for those in marginalized groups, and these dis-tinctions form the basis for social inequality(Epstein 1988; Lamont and Fournier 1992). Bycontrast, religious boundaries are often seen bysociologists as a basis for inclusion, formingmeaningful subcultures and motivating politi-cal mobilization of the marginalized (Warner 1993). Moreover, increasing religious plural-ism in postwar America has coincided with anecumenical movement and a decline in thesalience of the boundaries between particular religious groups (Hout and Fischer 2001).Yet what about the boundary between thereligious and the nonreligious? Do Americansmake invidious distinctions (c.f. Epstein 1988) between believers and nonbelievers? If so, whatare the bases for these symbolic distinctions?More broadly, what can that tell us about thesources of solidarity in American society and thelimits of religious acceptance?In this article, we situate Americans’atti-tudes toward atheists within the literature onreligion in America. The reaction to atheistshas long been used as an index of political andsocial tolerance. While important, this literaturedoes not tell us why there is so strong a reactionto such a small, hard to identify, and disorgan-
Atheists
A
s
“
Other”:
M
oral
B
oundaries
a
ndCultural
M
embership
i
n
A
merican
S
ociety
Penny EdgellJoseph Gerteis
University of MinnesotaUniversity of Minnesota
Douglas Hartmann
University of Minnesota Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundarybetween believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines thelimits of Americans’acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it showsatheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven byreligious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present atheoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.
A
MERICAN
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OCIOLOGICAL
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EVIEW
,
 
2
006,
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OL
.
7
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(
April:211–234)
Direct correspondence to Penny Edgell,Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota,909 Social Sciences, 267 19th Avenue South,Minneapolis, MN 55455 (edgell@umn.edu).Research supported by the Edelstein FamilyFoundation as part of the American Mosaic Projectat the University of Minnesota. The authors thank Eric Tranby for his help with statistical analysisand other research support.
Delivered by Ingenta to :University of Minnesota - MinneapolisMon, 29 Jan 2007 18:06:57
 
ized category of persons. The broader litera-ture on the historical connection between reli-gion and civic life in America sheds more lighton the cultural bases for this symbolic exclusion, particularly on assumptions about whatAmericans think they have (or should have) incommon. Americans’views of atheists tell us lit-tle about atheists themselves—who they are,where they live, or what they are like. We believe, however, that these views reveal a greatdeal about dominant conceptions of nationalunity as well as fears of moral decline.Using data from a new national survey (2003, N = 2081), we show that Americans draw sym- bolic boundaries that clearly and sharply excludeatheists in both private and public life. From alist of groups that also includes Muslims, recentimmigrants, and homosexuals, Americans nameatheists as those least likely to share their visionof American society. They are also more likelyto disapprove of their children marrying athe-ists. Using logistic regression models, we showthat these attitudes are driven by religious affil-iation and involvement as well as by social con-text and broader moral outlook.We show not only that atheists are less accept-ed than other marginalized groups but also thatattitudes toward them have not exhibited themarked increase in acceptance that has charac-terized views of other racial and religiousminorities over the past forty years. Rather thantreating atheists as akin to other out-groups, wereveal the unique social and cultural basesunderlying attitudes toward this group, leadingus to rethink some core assumptions aboutAmericans’increasing acceptance of religiousdiversity and to consider how the weakening of internal boundaries between religious groupsmay heighten awareness of the external bound-ary between the religious and the nonreligious.We argue that attitudes toward atheists clarifywhy and how religion forms a basis for solidarityand collective identity in American life throughits historical association with morality and cit-izenship.
RELIGIOUS
B
OUNDARIES
A
NDBELIEFS
I
N
A
MERICA
In the context of the modern United States,social scientists have generally concentrated onthe inclusive aspect of religious boundaries, placing at the forefront what Parsons (1951)would have called the functional or integrativeaspects of religious belief and practice. In pri-vate life, scholars concentrate on how religion provides values and a sense of meaning, fosterssupportive and caring relationships (Sherkatand Ellison 1999), and gives “a framework for seeing oneself as a good person and one’s lifeas basically good, independent of the successthat one has in acquiring money, fame, or  power” (Hart 1986:52). In public life, religiousinstitutions have been studied for their role in preserving ethnic and subcultural identities (Eck 2001; Smith 1998), providing the materialresources and social connections that foster social capital and civic participation (Herberg1960; Putnam 2000; Verba, Schlozman, andBrady 1995; Wuthnow 1998) and supportingorganized demands for political change or social justice (Gusfield 1986; Lincoln and Mamiya1990; Morris 1984; Warner 1993). In this con-text, religion is framed as both pluralistic andempowering (Warner 1993:1059), and aspectsof religion that may be contested or foster inequality receive relatively less attention.One can, of course, find references to theexclusionary consequences of religious bound-aries in scholarship on American religion—for example, work on the history of anti-Semitism,on the anti-Catholic movements of the nine-teenth century (Dolan 1985; Gleason 1980;Higham 2002; Lipset and Raab 1978), and onanti-Muslim violence post 9/11 (Wellman andTokuno 2004; Wuthnow 2004). However, in asociety in which religion is voluntary, pluralis-tic, and separate from the state, scholars havetended to understand religion as “a fundamen-tal category of identity and association” that is“capable of grounding both solidarities andidentities” (Warner 1993:1059), a boundarythat fosters belonging.The meta-narrative of scholarship on reli-gion in American life is woven together fromthree strands. First, America has historically been a religious nation. Since the mid-nine-teenth century there have been consistently highlevels of religious belief, affiliation, and involve-ment (c.f. Warner 1993), and over our historyobservers have noted a close connection between religion and democracy. Alexis deTocqueville was moved by the Christian pietyof Jacksonian America. “It is religion that gave birth to the Anglo-American societies.|.|.|. Christianity .|.|. reigns not only as a philosophy
212—–AMERICAN
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OCIOLOGICAL
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EVIEW
Delivered by Ingenta to :University of Minnesota - MinneapolisMon, 29 Jan 2007 18:06:57
 
that is adopted after examination, but as a reli-gion that is believed without discussion,” hewrote.“In the United States, Christian sectsvary infinitely . . . but Christianity itself is anestablished and irresistible fact” (Tocqueville[1992] 2000:405–6). Tocqueville thought thatChristianity (or at least the dominantProtestantism of the era) provided the “habits of the heart” necessary for good citizenship, draw-ing people out of the private realm of family lifeinto vital civic association (Tocqueville [1992]2000:275ff.; see Weber 1946 for a differentinterpretation).Others have concluded that a more ecu-menical version of Tocqueville’s thesis stillholds true in post–World War II America.According to Herberg’s classic
 Protestant,Catholic, Jew
(1960), each of these historicfaiths has provided a way of being, and becom-ing, a good American. Similarly, in
 Habits of the Heart 
(1985) and
The Good Society
(1991),Bellah and his coauthors observed that theBiblical (Judeo-Christian) religions have pro-vided a cultural repertoire of citizenship and sol-idarity. This scholarly tradition argues thatreligion gives a sense of personal identity andmeaning, leading to public engagement andeffective citizenship (see also Glock and Stark 1965; W. L. Warner 1961; R. S. Warner 1993).The second strand of the meta-narrative is theclaim that a religious convergence has occurredduring the twentieth century, which may be the basis for the trust that Americans have in thosewho are religious. When Caplow and his coau-thors revisited Muncie, Indiana, in the 1970s toreplicate the Lynds’earlier Middletown study,they found a set of religious ideas and actionsshared across religious groups that they called“the common creed” (Caplow, Bahr, andChadwick 1983). More recent quantitative work suggests that Muncie is, in this regard, unex-ceptional. Using General Social Survey (GSS)data, Hout and Fischer (2001) found faith in Godand the regular practice of prayer to be widelyshared across religious groups in America, alongwith the belief that there is a strong connection between religious faith and personal morality.This convergence suggests that religion ingeneral—if no longer Christianity in particu-lar—is one basis for private and public trust inAmerican society. In the 1998 GSS, only 15 per-cent of respondents agreed that the United States“would be a better country if religion had lessinfluence.” A recent report by Public Agendasummed up its own survey findings this way: “If more Americans were more religious, people believe that crime would go down, familieswould do a better job raising their children, and people would be more likely to help each other.Indeed, most Americans fear that the countrywould decline if people lost their religious faith”(Farkas et al. 2001:10). In the Public Agenda poll, 74 percent agreed that “[i]t is a bad ideafor families to raise children without any reli-gion.” When asked to identify the most impor-tant meaning of being religious, 53 percent of respondents said “making sure that one’s behav-ior and day-to-day actions match one’s faith.”The authors conclude that for many Americans“[t]o be religious .|.|. means to be a moral human  being” (Farkas et al. 2001:10–11).The third strand of the meta-narrative is theargument that increasing religious pluralismhas coincided with increasing tolerance of reli-gious difference, declines in religiously based prejudice, and processes of assimilation to erodemany of the long-standing divisions amongProtestants, Catholics, and Jews (Alwin 1986;Glock and Stark 1965; Herberg 1960). Declinesin anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic sentimentmirror the scholarly claim that piety and plu-rality increasingly go hand in hand in Americanlife (Gleason 1980; Smith 1993). Indeed, theidea of a unified “Judeo-Christian” tradition— once considered a radical myth—is now wide-ly accepted by conservatives and liberals alikeas a core aspect of American culture (Hartmann,Zhang, and Windschadt, 2005). Taken togeth-er, these three strands of the scholarly literatureweave a story of religion’s declining signifi-cance as an exclusionary boundary in Americanlife. New divisions became salient at the sametime that traditional forms of religious prejudicewere waning, including a division between lib-erals and conservatives. Most sociologists, how-ever, argue that America as a whole is not wellcharacterized by the image of a monolithicChristian conservative camp or an ongoing“war” between liberals and conservatives (seeDiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson 1996). The reli-gious pluralism stemming from immigrationand globalization is another source of new boundaries. Hout and Fischer (2001), however,argue that this diversity poses no threat of seri-ous social conflict, inequality, or intolerance
ATHEISTS
A
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O
THER—–213
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