{"id":64096,"date":"2012-02-24T07:43:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T15:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=15846"},"modified":"2012-02-24T07:43:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T15:43:17","slug":"how-common-are-godless-liberals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/02\/24\/how-common-are-godless-liberals\/","title":{"rendered":"How common are godless liberals?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to be speaking at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centerforinquiry.net\/events\/moving_secularism_forward\/\">Moving Secularism Forward<\/a> conference in Orlando next week. They invited me because I&#8217;m a conservative atheist public intellectual, and the three other\u00a0conservative atheist public intellectuals in the United States were presumably busy. In any case, going over what I&#8217;m going to talk about I was double-checking political breakdowns by atheist &amp; agnostic proportions and ideology in the <a href=\"http:\/\/sda.berkeley.edu\/cgi-bin\/hsda?harcsda+gss10\">General Social Survey<\/a> for after the year 2000.<\/p>\n<p>I used the &#8220;GOD&#8221; variable, which asks people about their belief in God. Those who did not believe, or said there was no way to find out, I classed as &#8220;atheists &amp; agnostics.&#8221; This means that the total percentages in the population are higher than self-reports; that&#8217;s because the word atheism in particular has a negative connotation (I recall that Julia Sweeney&#8217;s parents were tolerant of the fact that she did not believe in God, but were aghast that she was an atheist!). &#8220;POLVIEWS&#8221; what the variable which I crossed &#8220;GOD&#8221; with. It has seven responses, from very liberal to very conservative, and I just put all liberals and conservatives into one category.<\/p>\n<p>The first table displays what proportion in the whole society atheist &amp; agnostic liberals (or conservatives) are. Since the total proportion of atheists &amp; agnostics is small, naturally these percentages are small. The two subsequent tables just display what percentage of atheists &amp; agnostics are liberal, or what percentage of liberals are atheist &amp; agnostic.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-15846\"><\/span><\/p>\n<table border=\"0\" frame=\"VOID\" rules=\"NONE\" cellspacing=\"0\">\n<colgroup>\n<col width=\"98\" \/>\n<col width=\"146\" \/>\n<col width=\"160\" \/><\/colgroup>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\" align=\"LEFT\" width=\"403\" height=\"17\">All cells combined = 100%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><\/td>\n<td align=\"LEFT\"><strong>Atheist and agnostic<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"LEFT\"><strong>Not atheist or agnostic<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Liberal<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">3.7%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">22.8%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Moderate<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">2.3%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">36.0%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Conservative<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">1.5%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">33.5%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<hr \/>\n<table border=\"0\" frame=\"VOID\" rules=\"NONE\" cellspacing=\"0\">\n<colgroup>\n<col width=\"160\" \/>\n<col width=\"59\" \/>\n<col width=\"75\" \/>\n<col width=\"98\" \/><\/colgroup>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"4\" align=\"LEFT\" width=\"391\" height=\"17\">Rows = 100%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\"><strong>Liberal<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\"><strong>Moderate<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\"><strong>Conservative<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Atheist and agnostic<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">49.7%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">30.6%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">19.7%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Not atheist or agnostic<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">24.7%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">39.0%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">36.3%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<hr \/>\n<table border=\"0\" frame=\"VOID\" rules=\"NONE\" cellspacing=\"0\">\n<colgroup>\n<col width=\"97\" \/>\n<col width=\"146\" \/>\n<col width=\"160\" \/><\/colgroup>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td colspan=\"3\" align=\"LEFT\" width=\"402\" height=\"17\">Rows = 100%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\"><strong>Atheist and agnostic<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\"><strong>Not atheist or agnostic<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Liberal<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">14.2%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">85.8%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Moderate<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">6.1%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">93.9%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"LEFT\" height=\"17\"><strong>Conservatve<\/strong><\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">4.3%<\/td>\n<td align=\"RIGHT\">95.7%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span style=\"line-height: normal;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>When I see these results I&#8217;m always surprised by the proportions of atheists &amp; agnostics who define themselves as conservative. It seems way too high. I think this is due to libertarians who check the conservative option.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/rNt4R-LyaM8\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#160; I&#8217;m going to be speaking at the Moving Secularism Forward conference in Orlando next week. They invited me because I&#8217;m a conservative atheist public intellectual, and the three other\u00a0conservative atheist public intellectuals in the United States were presumably busy. In any case, going over what I&#8217;m going to talk about I was double-checking political [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[155,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64096"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64677,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64096\/revisions\/64677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}