Social Consequences of Diversity: Religious diversity undermines conventional morality: Evidence from 90 nations, 300,000+ individuals

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 4. Culture in Cross-National Comparison

Abstract

In religiously diverse societies, social conservatives (religiously devout, or socially traditional) feel their beliefs threatened, even where others in their society (religiously secular, or socially liberal, or politically to the left) have no desire to threaten them, or to discriminate against them, or even to proselytize. Examples include devout English pilgrims in liberal 16th century Holland and devout Muslims in liberal 21st century Western Europe. We suggest that this is because diversity itself poses a threat to a conservative way of life. The consequences of societal diversity in religion and morality are, to date, a neglected domain of research. In this paper, we show that societal diversity in religiosity (the centrality of religion to one's life) undermines conventional morality (re abortion, divorce, euthanasia, suicide, prostitution), reduces prejudice (re race, immigrants, other religions), elicits broadminded views about homosexuals, reduces support for religious politicians, reduces charitable volunteer work, and increases tolerance of some crimes. These changes are net of a person's own religiosity, net of the average level of religiosity in the society, net of socioeconomic development, and net of numerous individual level controls. Data are from the pooled World Values Surveys/ European Values Surveys, 1981-2008, with 90 countries, 200+ surveys, and 300,000+ individual respondents. Analysis is by multilevel methods (variance components models with random intercepts, estimated by GLS).

Authors

• Jonathan Kelley, University of Nevada-Reno

• M.D.R. Evans, University of Nevada-Reno