How Do U.S. Christians and Atheists Stereotype One Another’s Moral Values?

ABSTRACT

Moral conflict between Christians and atheists is becoming increasingly heated amidst the U.S. “culture wars,” yet research has been mostly silent regarding how these groups stereotype one another’s moral values and beliefs. We used moral foundations theory to better understand the nature of such stereotypes. In Study 1, U.S. Christian and atheist participants completed measures of moral values from their own perspective as well as the perspectives of typical atheists and typical Christians. Whereas atheists believed their ingroup endorsed fairness/justice values more than Christians, Christians believed their ingroup endorsed all moral values more than atheists. Moreover, both groups held (often extremely) inaccurate stereotypes about the outgroup’s values. In Study 2, participants wrote explicitly about outgroup morality. Atheists typically described Christians more negatively than Christians described atheists, regardless of the moral foundation of concern. Also, Christians’ negative impressions drew primarily from the Authority foundation, and both groups drew heavily from the Care foundation in both their positive and negative depictions. Implications for addressing the growing conflict between Christians and atheists in the United States are discussed.

Acknowledgments

We thank Eric Rawn for his assistance with coding in Study 2.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ To facilitate ease of reference for readers, we label our hypotheses with an A to represent atheist participants’ perspectives and a C to represent Christian participants’ perspectives.

² We argue that collapsing self-identifying atheists and agnostics (all nonbelievers) in this way provides a degree of heterogeneity that, on one hand, is similar to that of the “Christian” identification (in which “Christians” might vary in the denomination with which they identify, each with its own idiosyncrasies) and, on the other hand, resembles real-world contexts in which the label “atheist” entails a variety of identities and degrees of commitment to atheistic belief (see Bullivant, 2013). In addition, see the Supplemental Materials for evidence that our final sample of atheists was highly representative of self-identifying atheists in the United States.

³ For all pertinent analyses we removed the Sanctity item “Whether or not someone acted in a way that God would approve of.” Although this did not impact the significance or direction of any effect, we removed it because this item may have contributed to criterion contamination (atheists obviously do not believe in God). Indeed, atheists’ actual responses, as well as atheists’ and Christians’ responses as a typical atheist, were much lower for this item (Ms = 1.16, 1.11, and 1.39, respectively) compared to the other Sanctity items (Ms = 2.24, 2.15, and 2.92, respectively).

⁴ The direction and significance of all effects remained unchanged when controlling for participants’ self-reported political ideology

⁵ Now including the putative Liberty/oppression foundation.