Religious Context and Generalized Social Trust in the United States

• In Event: 262 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Social Trust and Well-Being

Abstract

This project uses individual-level data from the U.S. General Social Survey and group-level data on U.S. counties and metropolitan areas to test the effects of religious context on generalized social trust. We draw upon classical theories as well as two contemporary and competing theoretical models – the moral communities thesis and the closed communities thesis – which together predict that religious context may produce either desirable or undesirable social outcomes. We find that mainline Protestant population share (i.e. the proportion of residents in U.S. counties and cities who identify as mainline Protestant) and, to a lesser extent, Catholic population share, are positively, significantly associated with individual-level trust in multilevel logistic regression models. Evangelical Protestant population share and Black Protestant population share are negatively associated with trust.

Authors

• Joey Marshall, Purdue University

• Daniel V.A. Olson, Purdue University