The Politics of Religious Prejudice

• In Event: 059 - Regular Session. Religion

Abstract

Many scholars find growing tolerance for minority religious groups in the United States, and they argue that such a religiously pluralistic society fosters a robust sense of civic inclusion for these groups. However, the persistence of negative attitudes towards certain religious minorities and non-religious groups raises questions about the underlying mechanisms of religious prejudice and whether this work has addressed them completely. While the literature emphasizes personal religious importance and orthodoxy as key predictors of prejudice, we argue that there is a second kind of religious prejudice against politicized minority groups based on normative expectations for applying religious identities to public life. Using data from the nationally-representative 2014 Boundaries in the American Mosaic Survey, we measure respondents’ likelihood of expressing lower levels of acceptance and explicit distrust of four minority groups: atheists, the spiritual but not religious, Buddhists, and conservative Christians. We find a preference for public religious expression systematically predicts attitudes about atheists and conservative Christians, but not about SBNRs or Buddhists. The results demonstrate a second form of religious prejudice that cuts across religious and secular divides and is far more tenacious than current scholarship would predict. We discuss the implications of these two kinds of prejudice for studies of symbolic boundaries and civic inclusion in the U.S.

Authors

• Evan Stewart, University of Minnesota

• Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota

• Jack Delehanty, University of Minnesota