theglubbening:

javert:

Why Americans Hate Atheists (repost from Reddit comment thread)

eldritchjoy:

nyquilontherocks:

Question: Why are atheists so hated in the USA? Really, I don’t understand. I live in Rome, we have the vatican over here, and nobody cares if you are…

yeah, any time you start caricaturing rednecks, you’re probably headed for some problematic territory.

point (1) i’m not sure i buy, because as they say that wasn’t the view held by the people who actually founded the damn country.  I’m not saying that that didn’t have some influence on American attitudes towards atheism, but all in all i don’t think it was a major factor.

point (4) i don’t buy either, because while i didn’t have a Christian upbringing myself, most of my Protestant friends growing up switched churches rather liberally, and go to their friend’s church for a week or something.  And of course there are plenty of people who are nominally Protestant but don’t really practice their faith in any real organized way.  I don’t think it’s impossible to be “culturally Protestant” in America so much as that being culturally Protestant is more or less inseparable from American culture as a whole.  It’s the default assumption made until a real religious discussion breaks out, which virtually never happens.

i think there’s a lot of truth to the rest of it though.  There was a definite backlash directed against “godless Communists” during the Cold War (see “under God” in the pledge of allegiance) and William F. Buckley very deliberately tied together Christianity and capitalism when he was defining what we now know today as modern American conservatism.

i did basically no research on this, though and there are others who could explain it much better than i.