Atheists Are Oppressed in America

By James Croft

A friend recently posted a question on Facebook which sparked much discussion: are atheists oppressed in the USA? I was not surprised by the troll responses from Christians ranting about how they are the most oppressed group in the States, but I was a little surprised that a number of atheists themselves seemed quite invested in the idea that atheists do not experience oppression in America. The thread suggested a need for the question to be tackled in a systematic way, because there were so many different definitions of “oppression” floating around, and because some of the arguments seemed pretty confused. So here’s an attempt to justify the claim that a structure of oppression exists in the USA which targets and harms atheists.

What is oppression?

Dictionary definitions, as ever, are next to useless in complex discussions which involve terms which have disparate common and academic meanings. They are too thin, capturing only how words are used in everyday parlance and not the full concept as understood by those who have considered it most deeply. Better to look to the academy, where the most useful definitions of oppression are ones which recognize that society is permeated by a matrix of power relationships which privilege some identities and underprivilege others, leading to hierarchies of good and bad, powerful and powerless, based on one’s membership in various categories of class, race, gender, sexuality, religion etc.

Consider this definition from Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, Adams, Bell, and Griffin, eds.:

“Oppression: The systemic and pervasive nature of social inequality woven throughout social institutions as well as embedded within individual consciousness. Oppression fuses institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry, and social prejudice in a complex web of relationships and structures that saturate most aspects of life in our society.

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