Religious Prejudice Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

The gap between the humanitarian ideals of most religions and the often inhumane actions of their practitioners is wide and widely observed. Religious people are clearly not immune to the tendencies toward biased judgments, intolerance, contempt, and even violence that are apparently universal features of human societies.

The specific relationship between religion and prejudice, however, is complex. During the past 4 decades, social science research has focused on the following sets of questions: If religiosity correlates with higher levels of prejudice, as many studies show, is that correlation a matter of individual personality features or intergroup dynamics? Are some religious worldviews more likely than others to foster prejudice; that is, does what they believe affect the kind and degree of prejudice found among religious people? Are different groups—racial or ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, or religious others, for instance—more or less likely to be targets of prejudice among various religious groups?

Historically, most research on religious prejudice focused on the racial and ethnic bias of religious people. Recent work on religion and prejudice suggests that findings in that area cannot be generalized to religious groups’ attitudes toward other forms of difference, and that besides psychological and social factors, researchers must consider theological and philosophical aspects of religious worldviews in order to define, recognize, and understand religious prejudice.

Definitions of prejudice usually include both cognitive and affective aspects—ideas about a person or group in the absence of relevant information as well as feelings for or against that person or group. Religious prejudice can refer to the ideas and judgments that religious people hold toward others or to the prejudices of nonreligious people toward those who are religious. Although most research shows a high correlation between religiousness and prejudice, important definitional challenges emerge when worldview— rather than such traits as race, ethnicity, or even sexuality—defines the targets of negative responses. At issue is whether or not negative assessments about what others believe should be understood as prejudice.

Because it emerged from the field of social psychology, unsurprisingly, research on religion and prejudice most often sought personality-based explanations. Redirecting most of this research was Allport and Ross’s 1967 study that found a high rate of prejudice among those whose religious orientation the authors characterized as “extrinsic”; that is, defined by motivations (social status, a sense of belonging, etc.) unrelated to the authentic teachings of a religion, and decreased levels of prejudice among those with “intrinsic,” or sincere and mature religious faith. Despite challenges to, and the complexity of, the intrinsic-extrinsic model, religious personality trait analysis remains a prominent tool in the study of religious prejudice. Additional scales using categories like authoritarian, orthodox, fundamentalist, and “quest” personalities also show correlations with various levels and types of prejudice.

Most recent studies show little or no correlation between religion and racial or ethnic prejudice regardless of personal religious orientation, a finding that coheres with the egalitarian teachings at the core of most religions. When the target is sexual minorities, however, prejudice runs high among those with both extrinsic and intrinsic religious orientations, as well as among fundamentalists and those with orthodox beliefs. Negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians cut across these various scales and therefore must be understood in terms other than individual personal religious dispositions. Some research shows that whether the teachings of religious groups proscribe or tolerate prejudice toward gays and lesbians has a significant effect on the attitudes of members, although other studies suggest that the controlling factor is right-wing authoritarianism, not the specific ideologies of any religious group. Also, researchers have found that anti-gay prejudice exceeds that mandated by the religious ideologies of many of those who express it, suggesting a persistent personality component to this type of prejudice.

Sociological dimensions of religion come to the fore when offering intergroup rather than interpersonal dynamics as explanatory models for understanding negative attitudes held by religious people toward those who are different. Marketplace models of religion posit that competition for members and for the social resources that accompany religious affiliation fosters high levels of commitment to ingroups and negative judgments toward religious outgroups. In particular, researchers have analyzed the strict boundaries drawn between insiders and outsiders (and negative views of the latter) by fundamentalist groups in terms of their ability to protect ingroup identity and self-esteem in times of social upheaval and crisis. This approach helps explain the negative attitudes those of one religious group hold toward those of others, a type of prejudice found to be pervasive among religious people regardless of individual religious orientation.

The question remains, however, whether or not there is anything properly religious about this religious prejudice. That is, do religious worldviews themselves, independent of personality types and intergroup dynamics, predispose people to judge negatively those who are religiously different? The positions taken by different religious communities and different individuals within those communities on the question of religious others are diverse and complex. Since the 1980s, theologians and philosophers of religion have employed a typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism to classify these positions. Exclusivists believe that their own religion has unique access to religious truth and salvation, whereas inclusivists see other religions as imperfect though valid routes to a truth revealed most perfectly in their own. Pluralists affirm that no single religion has privileged access to truth, and that there is no a priori basis for denying the validity of any religious path. While particular religions may tend explicitly or not to foster one of these attitudes more than another, they exist within nearly all major religions. For instance, Evangelical Christians are most often exclusivist, while several liberal Protestant denominations affirm pluralism, and the position taken by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council was explicitly inclusivist. Similarly, there are exclusivist and pluralist Hindus, inclusivist and exclusivist Muslims. Furthermore, inconsistencies often exist among the positions on religious others taken by religious institutions, texts, leaders, and individual members of religious communities.

Religious worldviews, unlike race and, by most measures, sexual orientation, have a significant volitional element; people adopt sets of religious beliefs and practices because they find them to be meaningful and enriching to their lives. Negative assessments of alternative views may, in that sense, be inevitable. The person who believes firmly in only one god will tend to view negatively those traditions that teach there are many, and he or she may maintain that position in spite of positive feelings for, and relationships with, those who believe differently. Modes of religious knowing, rooted as they often are in spiritual experiences irreducible to rational analysis, may thus involve a priori judgments, but not necessarily interpersonal antipathy. Studies of American inter-religious relations, for instance, show surprisingly high levels of respect and tolerance for religious others among those with strongly exclusivist belief systems. Furthermore, pluralist affirmations of religious difference are not always as conducive to harmonious intergroup relations as might be expected. The pluralist premise that no religion has unique access to truth and that such claims are metaphorical or simply wrong strikes many as its own form of prejudice, if not intellectual imperialism.

These incongruities raise important questions about how best to reduce religious prejudice. Simply defining all negative assessments of other worldviews as prejudice shuts down the conversation with most religious people. As with any form of social bias, exposure to and education about religious others is a necessary but insufficient condition for improving inter-religious relations. The most successful inter-faith dialogues in the United States have occurred when people collaborate on projects of mutual importance, whether building a community homeless shelter, passing a piece of legislation, or, in the growing number of U.S. interfaith households, raising a family. Recent trends in American religion toward less institutionally defined, more individualized spiritualities may diminish the intergroup dynamics that foster religious intolerance. To the extent that individuals find themselves not only exposed to, but incorporating aspects of, different religious traditions into their own eclectic spiritualities, the category of religious “other” itself becomes less significant.

The most helpful research on religious prejudice in the coming years will be that which (a) expands beyond the current and historical focus on North America and on Christian groups to develop truly cross-cultural and multireligious models; (b) explores the significance of new patterns of eclectic spirituality and religious combining; and (c) distinguishes carefully between the truth claims of religious people and their attitudes toward those who do not share them.

Bibliography:

Allport, Gordon W. and J. M. Ross. 1967. “Personal Religious Orientation and Prejudice.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 5:432-43.
Hunsberger, Bruce and Lynne M. Jackson. 2005. “Religion, Meaning, and Prejudice.” Journal of Social Issues 61(4):807-26.
Jackson, Lynne M. and Bruce Hunsberger. 2000. “An Intergroup Perspective on Religion and Prejudice.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38:509-23.
Laythe, Brian, Deborah G. Finkel, Robert G. Bringle, and Lee A. Kirkpatrick. 2002. “Religious Fundamentalism as a Predictor of Prejudice: A Two-Component Model.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41(4):623-35.
Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 2005. America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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