ABSTRACT
PICTURE THE INQUISITION, when authori-ties tortured and killed people for holding beliefs that were considered anathema to the Church. Consider the Renaissance era, when the establishment in numerous Protestant regimes drowned or burned witches at the stake on charges involving all manner of heresy, real or invented. In the past, holding unconventional beliefs was a serious form of deviance indeed. Today, in Western countries, we no longer imprison or execute cog - nitive deviants, but, as recently as the 1950s, the
American criminal justice system deported, jailed, or otherwise punished communists as a threat to our very existence. Deviance textbooks tend to focus on behavioral violations of norms, but holding and expressing deviant beliefs can get the individual in trouble as readily as engaging in widely disliked, unacceptable, or wrongful acts. Hence, what’s referred to as “cognitive deviance” or “un - conventional beliefs” is as important as behavioral deviance (Perrin, 2015). Not all expressions of belief lead to specific reactions, but even the mere
expression of those beliefs may result in negative reactions from audiences. Is atheism deviant? Indeed it is! In the United States, year after year, polls indicate that roughly 80 percent of the population believes in God, and a substantial proportion of theists feel that someone who doesn’t believe in God is not a moral person and “might not be fully trustworthy”; hence, these audiences-the votersmight not vote for a self-admitted atheistic political candidate, for instance, for president. The news polls deliver to our non-believing presidential aspirant is not encouraging. In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2014, 53 percent of the respondents said that they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate if he or she is an atheist. Among all the categories the poll asked about, respondents were least supportive of the atheist; the “gay or lesbian” candidate drew only a 27 percent “less likely” vote; someone who once used marijuana, a 22 percent less likely; and a candidate who had had an extramarital affair, 35 percent. White evangelicals said they were 82 percent less likely to support a candidate if he or she does not believe in God; among the religiously unaffiliated, only 24 percent said this-and, for the latter, 64 percent said it “wouldn’t matter.” As we’ve seen, beliefs and notions of right and wrong vary by social category and historical time period. And political ideas make up a major sector of our belief system. The long and short of it is that, in the United States, among mainstream voters, a professed atheist has very little chance of winning a presidential election, and, other things being equal, atheism has very little moral traction with believers.
