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
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.
There are significant gaps in the existing scholarship around understanding how oppression accelerates, decelerates, or complicates the process of forming an unbelieving identity among people with minoritized identities; and, within these groups, understanding unbelief among those who do not identify as atheist (e.g., culturally Catholic, secular humanist). To address these issues the objective of this project was to center hegemonic Christianity and intersecting forms of oppression in frameworks for understanding unbelief in the US among communities of colour and LGBTQ+ people. Our key research questions were:
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?
3. how do internal evaluations of stress predict unbelief?
We sought to examine evidence for and against commonly held notions of the causes of atheism across various demographic groups while taking an intersectional approach, positioning unbelief within the complex matrix of power and marginalization in which it exists. We used grounded theory-based qualitative studies to 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. We then developed two large-scale quantitative studies informed by the qualitative analyses — 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 developed and tested 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 also explored the potential for buffers of stress (e.g., social support) to act as moderators of the aforementioned paths.
Publications
Publications from this project are forthcoming, check our Publications page for updates
