As many people have noted, atheists get a bad rap in today's society.  People don't trust them.  In fact, even atheists mistrust atheists.  (This is kind of the opposite of Cary Grant's famous, if Dadaist, line, "everyone wants to be Cary Grant.  Even I want to be Cary Grant.")  But why?  There are vanishingly few atheists--most people who are not affiliated are "Nones," not so much atheists as either apatheists (who don't really care) or people who just haven't really found a spiritual home, and maybe aren't looking too hard either.  But somehow, atheism is still a bugaboo in our world.  It's a puzzle why that is.

Along comes this interesting study, that hypothesizes that people mistrust atheists not because of the metaphysical content of their beliefs, but because--at least to some degree (to 19.7%, if you believe the researchers), atheists seem to many people to be emotionally and relationally untrustworthy--unlikely to be truly committed to other people with whom they have established romantic bonds.  The researchers try--rather reductively, in my view--to frame this as "sexual behavior," but I think it has a larger resonance than just sexual activity.  

That said, the piece seems to get at something interesting, at least for our society: namely, that people who appear to refuse to commit in one sphere of life--namely, who are seen to refuse to obey any God--are deemed more likely to be incapable of committing in other spheres of life, particularly in romantic relationships.

Is that true?  I don't think there's any strong link.  Is there no link at all?  I don't know.  The report above actually dances around the question of atheist marriage rates.  I guess until I read this, I wouldn't have assumed they were any different from anyone else's.  But are they?  They seem to marry at lower rates than many other Americans.  But is that a cause of the suspicion of them, or an effect of it?  I honestly don't know.