Different Forms of Religiousness and Their Complex Relationship with Prejudice

Abstract

A century of theoretical and empirical work in the psychology of religion has attempted to establish the links between different forms of religiousness and various types of prejudice. The present study examined the connection among four types of personal religiousness and four targets of prejudice. Using a sample of college students, we found that religious fundamentalism, religious ethnocentrism or exclusivity, religious commitment, and religious quest had complex patterns of relationships across measures of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-gay, and anti-poor hostility. The results depended on the particular form of personal religiousness, the particular target of prejudice, and type of statistical analysis used. There was one consistent finding: religious ethnocentrism was strongly and positively connected with all prejudices in all analyses. Anti-gay prejudice was the most successfully predicted outcome variable by the religiousness variables (R2 = .45, p < .001), and anti-poor prejudice had the weakest correlation with the religiousness variables (R2 = .07).|Keywords: religious fundamentalism, religious commitment, religious openness, religious ethnocentrism, ethnic-racial prejudice, sexual orientation prejudice, Muslim prejudice, anti-poor prejudice