
Anything but an Atheist
Coming out as an atheist in the United States carries real social cost, and this homemade documentary lays out the stigma alongside a stack of statistics meant to counter it. A Federal Bureau of Prisons response to a 2010 freedom of information request puts atheists at just 0.08 percent of the federal prison population, a figure the film sets against surveys showing majorities of Nobel Prize winners and university scientists identify as non-religious. It moves through claims about lower divorce rates, lower teen pregnancy, and lower crime and homicide rates in more secular populations, drawing on sources like Phil Zuckerman's research and United Nations development data comparing income and literacy across secular and religious countries. Portraits of well-known atheist intellectuals, pulled partly from the Celebrity Atheists wiki, run alongside references to an ABC 20/20 segment on the price of coming out as nonreligious. The argument throughout is blunt: the reputation atheists have in America does not match the numbers.