Politics, Individualism, and Atheism: An Examination of the Political Attitudes of Atheist Activists in a Canadian City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the growth of atheism in the Western world (including activist organizations), and atheists becoming more political, it is essential to understand the identities and values that motivate atheist activism. One avenue for exploring these identities and values is through an examination of individual political attitudes. Although the scholarship on atheist activists’ political attitudes is limited, some scholars have identified the apparent growth of right-wing sentiments within the US atheist movement (LeDrew 2016). Others have identified a contentious relationship between prominent atheists’ political attitudes and egalitarian views (e.g., anti-sexism and anti-racism) (Amarasingam, Amarnath, and Brewster 2016). Of those scholars who have commented on atheists’ viewpoints, most emphasize the liberalism of the broader population of atheists. The purpose of this article is to examine the political attitudes of atheist activists in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and highlight a core set of political attitudes and values that atheists share despite intra-movement disagreements about the relationship between atheist identity and political ideology. My findings show that some Canadian atheist activists’ share a cluster of liberal and Enlightenment ideals that includes personal liberty, individualism, and an absolutist view of free expression. This article will be of interest to scholars of atheist activism as well as social movement scholars.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".