Poverty As Punishment: Examining the Relationship Between Religious Belief in Hell and Redistribution Attitudes

• In Event: 30812 - Social Policy

Abstract

To what extent do Americans agree that a democratic government should redistribute money from the rich to the poor, and how do attitudes toward redistribution vary across the population? Building off of existing literature on religious beliefs, political ideology, and attitudes toward punishment, we argue that there is a heretofore unmet empirical opportunity to explore how political and religious ideology intersect to shape Americans’ views toward redistributing money from the rich to the poor. Drawing on theories of deservingness and Americans’ understanding of poverty as individualized negative consequence, we examine the relationship between punitive religious ideology and attitudes toward government-led redistribution. Specifically, using data from the World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2020), we examine the relationship between Americans’ belief in hell and their attitudes toward a democratic government’s responsibility to tax the rich and subsidize the poor. Using OLS regression analyses, we find that, net of other factors such as income level, political party, educational level, and gender, belief in hell is significantly negatively related to redistribution attitudes – in other words, controlling for demographic and political ideology factors, those who believe in hell are statistically significantly less likely to support government-led redistribution than are their non-believing counterparts. However, adding religiosity and religious denomination to the OLS models attenuates the negative effect of belief in hell to no longer be statistically significant. These findings reiterate the association between religious beliefs and political attitudes, suggesting that future research pay special attention to punitive religious attitudes as a strong undercurrent shaping policy opinions and attitudes toward inequality more broadly.

Authors

• Anna Holliday Shelton-Ormond, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Ted Mouw, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill