Nonreligious Bay Staters Report Lowest Levels of Discrimination and Stigma in the Nation, Survey Finds
Boston, MA—May 5, 2020—Today, the civil rights organization American Atheists released Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America, a comprehensive report drawn from the groundbreaking U.S. Secular Survey. Organized by a team of researchers and counting nearly 34,000 nonreligious participants, including 580 Massachusetts residents, the U.S. Secular Survey is the largest ever data collection project on secular Americans and their experiences.
“At 75 million people, religiously unaffiliated Americans are as large a demographic as either Evangelical Christians or Catholics, and explicitly nonreligious people comprise a growing share of the population, yet before the U.S. Secular Survey there had been a lack of focused research on our community,” said Alison Gill, Vice President for Legal and Policy at American Atheists, who helped lead the project. “What we found shocked us. Discrimination and stigma against nonreligious Americans is widespread and extremely harmful, and it was the most intense in very religious communities.”
In Mississippi and Utah, where roughly 8 in 10 participants called their community very religious, nonreligious people faced the most stigma. In Massachusetts, however, less than 1 in 20 participants (4.85%) considered their community very religious, making the state the 4th least religious state in the country. Similarly, Massachusetts ranks as the state with the lowest stigma against nonreligious people. Nonetheless, nonreligious Bay Staters do experience discrimination.
“Massachusetts still has a long way to go before nonreligious people can enjoy the same social status as those who profess belief in a higher power,” said Zachary Bos, Massachusetts State Director of American Atheists. “Members of our community organizations consistently report workplace hostility and social inequality. I myself get voicemails several times a month from believers I don’t know telling me I deserve to burn.”
"My non-religion is not represented in 99% of elections. It's a kiss-of-death to run for office and be an atheist, even in Massachusetts," said Christopher Collette, a member of the group Boston Atheists, an American Atheists affiliate.
“The fact that blasphemy is still listed as a jailable offense in the Commonwealth is evidence that legislators don't regard nontheists as a constituency worth engaging with,” added Bos. “That has got to change.”
The Reality Check report found that involvement with organized secular community groups is an important protective factor that correlated with reduced likelihood of loneliness and depression. Members of national secular organizations, including American Atheists, were 34.8% less likely than non-members to be at risk for depression, while members of local secular groups like Boston Atheists were 29.3% less likely.
"Growing up secular at a Christian school without any non-theistic friends, I rarely felt safe openly expressing my humanist values outside the home. Other than my father, I never knew any ‘out’ nonbelievers before college,” said undergraduate Austin Cozzone, who organizes Humanists of Boston University. “It's been amazing to find others who think like me. In choosing to help lead a secular group, I am trying to create a place where others with shared convictions can join the secular community.”
“I hear first-hand from community members that their lives improve when they find these community spaces that share their views and values,” said Bos, a former president of Boston Atheists. “We have a dozen active groups in Massachusetts, but the expressed desire for more community involvement tells me that we could grow ten-fold in the next decade and still not meet the demand.”
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If you have questions about Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America or the U.S. Secular Survey, our team is happy to connect you to our experts, researchers, and nonreligious people across the country who have compelling, unique stories to tell.
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About Us
The U.S. Secular Survey and Reality Check: Being Nonreligious in America are projects of American Atheists, a national civil rights group that represents the interests of atheists and nonreligious people in the United States. The survey and report were produced in collaboration with Strength in Numbers Consulting Group, a progressive research, evaluation, and strategy firm.