Are moral certainty and epistemological certainty similar enough?

Josh Rothman at the Boston Globe writes:

There's a name for that strange mixture of admiration, guilt, and defensive dismissiveness you feel when you encounter someone better than you: it's called "anticipated reproach," and Benoît Monin, a psychologist at Stanford, has studied it in a number of fascinating experiments. His essential finding: The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard. As he explains in a recent paper, coauthored with Julia Minson of Wharton, "overtly moral behavior can elicit annoyance and ridicule rather than admiration and respect" when we feel threatened by someone else's high ethical standards.

Rothman goes on to quote a study that shows that hearing contrary moral leadership in the face of having made a moral decision threatens the listener's social standing: if he admits he was wrong, his position within the community is weakened.

Rothman's article is interesting, but I think it points to something else: contrary epistemic certainty is just as threatening to someone else's social position as moral certainty. Pointing out to a religious person that their religion has no basis in reality-- that there are no talking snakes or ants, that the world is much more than 6,000 years old but not eternal, that there is no record anywhere of someone spontaneously giving voice to a culture with which he has no exposure, threatens their social position because they've based their lives on that falsehood, and so has everyone else in their social circle.

These are the same people, however, that depend upon a materialistic epistemology to support their lives: medicine, agriculture, even geology and physics all depend upon the arbitrary premises of any given theistic commitment being wrong.