Religion and Racial Inequality Attitudes: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Two: Religious Social-Political Racism and Xenophobia

Abstract

Racial inequality remains a problem for American society. Decades of public opinion research has consistently found that white Americans are less likely to downplay the continued significance of racial ideologies and racial inequality attitudes in maintaining systemic racial inequality. This research has identified associations between individualist explanations of inequality and opposition to policies and initiatives that aim to redress past inequality and attenuate ongoing disparities. Using data from the 2024 American Mosaic Project (N=3,464), a nationally representative survey, we examine how religion shapes racial minority groups' understandings of African American inequality. Bridging scholarship on racial attitudes and racialized religion, we employ four novel scales measuring religious orthodoxy, involvement, centrality, and authority, interacting these with racial identity to illuminate how religion differentially influences endorsement of structural versus individualistic explanations for racial inequality. Our findings reveal that religion operates in contradictory and racially distinct ways, challenge assumptions that religion operates uniformly across racial groups and contribute to ongoing debates about how religious commitments intersect with racial identity to shape inequality attitudes. Our results suggest that the same religious dispositions can produce fundamentally different, and sometimes opposing, understandings of racial disadvantage depending on one's racial group membership. This has important implications for understanding how religion functions as a mechanism that both reproduces inequality and constructs cultural and moral boundaries among racial groups in an era of heightened polarization and contested epistemic authority.

Authors

• Daniel Cueto-Villalobos, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Shania Kuo, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities