Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.

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Since the 1960s, a variety of new ways of addressing the challenges of diversity in American society have coalesced around the term ''multiculturalism.'' In this article, we impose some clarity on the theoretical debates that surround divergent visions of difference. Rethinking multiculturalism from a sociological point of view, we propose a model that distinguishes between the social (associational) and cultural (moral) bases for social cohesion in the context of diversity. The framework allows us to identify three distinct types of multiculturalism and situate them in relation to assimilationism, the traditional American response to difference. We discuss the sociological parameters and characteristics of each of these forms, attending to the strength of social boundaries as well as to the source of social ties. We then use our model to clarify a number of conceptual tensions in the existing scholarly literature and offer some observations about the politics of recognition and redistribution, and the recent revival of assimilationist thought.''We are all multiculturalists now,'' Nathan Glazer declared with characteristic bluntness and authority in 1997. Informed by his participation on a panel charged with designing a new history curriculum for high school students in New York State, this well-known Harvard social scientist meant to call attention to the ways in which all Americansregardless of race, religion, political affiliation, lifestyle, or moral orientation-have come to speak the language of tolerance and respect for cultural diversity in the contemporary, post-civil-rights era.Is Glazer correct? Is multiculturalism as pervasive as he says? If so, is it a deeply held commitment or an empty language? What is multiculturalism anyway? What forms of social distinction and collective identification does it apply to? What does it suggest about how solidarity might emerge amid difference? Such questions are no trivial academic matter. Our answers to them have very real implications for politics and public policy. We need look no further than the recent debate and Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action at the University of Michigan where Sandra Day O'Connor-to the surprise of many erstwhile supporters-wrote a majority decision that held diversity to be central to the dream of the nation and the legitimacy of the ruling class. In contrast, Glazer himself suggests that the discourse of multiculturalism *The article was inspired and supported by a grant from the Edelstein Family Foundation and is

This paper examines anti-Muslim sentiment in America. Existing research has documented rising hostility to Muslims in Western countries, but has been much less clear about what drives such sentiments or exactly what sort of “other” Muslims are understood to be. Our interest is in the cultural construction of Muslims as a problematic or incompatible “other.” We explore the extent, content, and correlates of such views. Building from recent work in critical race theory and the study of cultural boundaries in national belonging, we argue that Muslims are distinct in being culturally excluded on religious, racial, and civic grounds at the same time. Using nationally representative survey data with specially designed measures on views of Muslims and other groups, we show that nearly half of Americans embrace some form of anti-Muslim sentiment, and that such views are systematically correlated with social location and with understandings of the nature of American belonging.