The Right Coast:
This [PDF] is an interesting study by Gary A. Tobin and Aryeh K. Weinberg. It surveys the faculty members at elite and nonelite colleges and universities across the country. Some of the findings are hardly news: Faculty members are less religious than the population at large....
The big surprise to me is how closely correlated religious belief is to seemingly unrelated foreign policy issues. Respondants were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: "Supporting institutions like the International Court of Justice is the right policy." The group that most agreed with the statement was ... (drumroll please) ... Atheists/No Religion (80% agreed/8% disagreed). Next came Jews (73% agreed/9% disagreed), Non-Evangelical Christians (67% agreed/18% disagreed), and Catholics (59% agreed/22% disagreed. The outlier was the Evangelical Christian category (bless them)(39% agreed/42% DISAGREED).
There were lots of questions like that. When asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement "America has made a contribution to the world by expanding freedom to more and more people," only 54% of Atheists/No Religion faculty members agreed and as many as 34% disagreed. Among Evangelical Christian faculty members, 87% agreed and 12% disagreed.
Fully 42% of those in the Atheist/No Religion category agreed with the statement "The United States is one of the two countries posing the greatest threat to international stability." Only 10% of those in the (underrepresented) Evangelical Christian category agreed.
It's not obvious to me why atheists should be as strongly critical of American foreign policy as they apparently are (although I can think of some possible explanations). I'll leave the speculation to someone else for now.
It's nice to see someone surprised at this correlation.
A partial answer, I think, is that people have a deep-seated need for various things which are often fulfilled through theistic religion. The "God-shaped hole", if you will. So, for example, people desire transcendant justice. Theists believe it will be handed out at a "judgement day", atheists think the "world court" will give them such a thing, perhaps. Typically, if we don't believe in God, we want government to fill the void. And thus some of the animus towards the US comes from the fact that the US is often effectively an opponent of global-government-building projects, getting in the way of the Next Big Utopia.
My favorite comment:
As an atheist, I call partial BS. I suspect it has a lot more to do with the academic atheists (most often communists or post-modernists) than anything inherent in atheism. Any rational atheist would view the US with glee compared to the options of western Europe with its state-funded religions, or the Islamic world.
I love his statement that "any rational atheist" would love the US. I'd agree: any rational person (atheist or otherwise) should view the US, with all its flaws, as a better alternative than living under Sharia or decaying Euro-Socialism. Or as a net positive contributor to human freedom.
Yet if the majority of atheists overall were found to take the other stance, he would be forced to conclude that most atheists were "irrational" -- typically more irrational than their religious counterparts. Which would put him in a most interesting position, no?
And I think the evidence shows exactly that: look at Europe. Europe is much more secular than the US. And larger numbers of European citizens -- not just those in academia -- tend to agree with the "irrational" statements this man attributes to academia rather than atheism.
It's true there's nothing "inherant" in atheism. One can say God doesn't exist for quite a number of reasons, including hatred towards those who do, or mere failure to find evidence for such. As an atheist, one can be friendly or hostile to religion, believe it or not. But I believe there are some reasons and motivations which come into play more often than others -- dispassionate intellectual analysis being one of the rarest and least common.