Unbelief within marginalized communities
Principal Investigators
Dr. Dena M. Abbott
College of Education and Human Sciences
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Dr. Melanie Brewster
Teachers College
Columbia University
Start and end dates: 1 October 2022 – 30 June 2024
Award: £150,791
Nonreligious people are a fast growing demographic in the United States (U.S.; Pew Research Center, 2015) and also among the most stigmatized and understudied (Brewster, 2014). Christian hegemony underlies several axes of oppression, including racism, sexism, and heterosexism (Brewster & López-Molina, 2021); however, faith communities also offer social, cultural, and financial support in the face of structural inequities (Lewis-Coles & Constantine, 2006). Therefore, adopting an unbelieving worldview is a complex process for people of colour, lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) people, and gender-diverse (i.e., transgender, nonbinary) people, who are underrepresented in scholarship of unbelief. Thus, knowledge gaps exist in studies of unbelief including 1) understanding how oppression accelerates, decelerates, or complicates the process of forming an unbelieving identity among people with minoritized identities and 2) exploring unbelief among those who do not identify as atheist (e.g., culturally Catholic, secular humanist).
The objective of the project is to center hegemonic Christianity and intersecting forms of oppression in frameworks for understanding unbelief in the US. As a step toward that goal, we will identify a framework for the development of unbelief among communities of colour and LGBTQ+ people. Key research questions include 1) how do oppressive external systems relate to adopting an unbelieving worldview and timelines to secularization?, 2) how may ties to religious groups and religious/spiritual practices maintained among minoritized unbelievers?, and 3) how do internal evaluations of stress predict unbelief? This innovative project will combine qualitative and quantitative methods to: 1) examine evidence for and against commonly held notions of the causes of atheism across various demographic groups and 2) take an intersectional approach, positioning unbelief within the complex matrix of power and marginalization in which it exists.
First, a series of five grounded theory-based qualitative studies will elucidate the origins of unbelief among groups previously underrepresented in research: 1) transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people, 2) lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people, 3) Black-identified people, 4) Latino/a/e people, and 5) ex-Muslim people. Then, informed by qualitative analyses, the research team will conduct two large-scale quantitative studies — one focused on unbelieving communities of colour (racist discrimination as a key matrix of domination) and the other with LGBTQ+ populations (heterosexist/transphobic discrimination as key matrices of domination). Using structural equation modelling, we will test a framework of the paths from oppression-related stressors (e.g., racism, Christian dominance) to unbelief via the indirect role of evaluations of stressors (e.g., tolerance of uncertainty). We will also explore the potential for buffers of stress (e.g., social support) to act as moderators of the aforementioned paths.
The primary expected project outputs are (7) peer-reviewed articles in high impact academic journals, (1) book proposal related to the psychology of unbelief, Intersectional Atheism, (2) presentations at national conventions (e.g., American Psychological Association), and a social media campaign to share our findings with broader audiences. Project findings will contribute to Explaining Atheism programme objectives to advance the scientific study of atheism and increase public understanding of the causes of atheism.
