I’ve written a great deal about Mormon racism—probably too much. But, needless to say, Mormonism has no monopoly on racial prejudice. To wit:
A meta-analysis of 55 independent studies carried out in the United States with more than 20,000 mostly Christian participants has found that members of religious congregations tend to harbor prejudiced views of other races.
In general, the more devout the community, the greater the racism, according to the authors of the analysis, led by Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at USC College and the USC Marshall School of Business. The study appears in the February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review.
“Religious groups distinguish between believers and non-believers and moral people and immoral ones,” Wood said. “So perhaps it’s no surprise that the strongly religious people in our research, who were mostly white Christians, discriminated against others who were different from them — blacks and minorities.”
Most of the studies reviewed by Wood’s team focused on Christians because Christianity is the most common religion in the United States.
Her analysis found significantly less racism among people without strong religious beliefs.
You can read more of the report here. I agree with much of the study’s analysis, but its conclusions would’ve been strengthened had confounding factors like education and geographical region been controlled for.
These headlines – including the blog post headline – are always misleading and I think harmful. I am suspicious that they are purposely so – they make for tidy smears of religion. The result of such headlines is to encourage and enable ridiculous generalizations and smears: “Oh, Fred is a Christian, he’s probably a racist.”
Properly understood, the study identifies a correlation but not causation. But the author has an axe to grind, so goes beyond the correlation claim to a more general causal claim that is, frankly, unjustified. The author speaks of something like an intrinsic marginalizing tendency in religion. “She attributed the association between religion and racism to the combination of ingroup identity and morality, which encourages distinctions between people.” She continues, “religion has a downside, like any group membership”.
My opinion of what is happening here: she is mixing some sociological data with some postmodern ideology about community and marginalization (her play here is straight out of Foucault and Derrida’s playbooks).
That causal claim is not justified by the correlation findings, it is in fact an ideological claim. There are far better explanations for the correlation. The author points out that there are relatively few mixed race congregations. The author wants to attribute this to some religious cause (communities bind together by marginalizing “the other”). But a far better explanation is that our society is, in fact, not racially intermixed (we have white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, etc). It strikes me that racism is more prevalent among the religious because if you are religious there is a higher likelihood that you have less of an education and live in a rural community. Non-religious Americans tend to have more education and are more likely to live in cities.
Point is, this study does not (nor, frankly could it) show that religiousity (being a Christian) is a cause of being a racist. That the author so oversteps the bounds of her study is bothersome. Worth pointing out that many civil rights advocates used religiously informed morality to bring to light how immoral racism is.
First, the author does point out that many civil rights advocates were religious.
Second, the study isn’t claiming the religiosity causes racism so much as it causes out-group derogation. And given that most congregations in the US are pretty racially heterogeneous, that out-group derogation manifests itself as racism.
“she is mixing some sociological data with some postmodern ideology about community and marginalization (her play here is straight out of Foucault and Derrida’s playbooks).”
The author needn’t appeal to postmodern ideology. The theory that communities (religious or not) “otherize” out-groups has been a sociological mainstay, a truism for many decades. Functionalists like Emile Durkheim and conflict theorists like Lewis Coser articulated that view years before postmodern thinkers ran with it. So I don’t think you can weigh the study down by trying to saddle it with postmodern baggage. I mean, do you really doubt that religious communities marginalize others?
“It strikes me that racism is more prevalent among the religious because if you are religious there is a higher likelihood that you have less of an education and live in a rural community.”
I assumed when reading the summary of the report that they controlled for those possible confounding factors. But having read the entire study now, I don’t see any evidence that they did, which is astoundingly irresponsible. But I still expect there to be more racism among religious congregations, because I buy the study’s argument about in-group identity and out-group derogation.
“The researchers found barely any difference between the amount of racism among religious fundamentalists and more moderate Christians.”
This may partly control for the white Southerner confounding factor. It wouldn’t surprise me that religious fundamentalists are more likely to harbor racial prejudices, as they are concentrated in the South, but it’s harder to make sense of more moderate Christians having similarly racist beliefs.
And while I think the study’s findings are salvageable, I softened my post’s headline for good measure anyway.
The article says: “Wood and her co-authors also found little difference in racist attitudes between religious fundamentalists and more moderate Christians. The second group tended to pay lip service to racial equality but harbored the same prejudices. … … Her analysis found significantly less racism among people without strong religious beliefs.”
How are they distinguishing those that pay “lip service” from those that really do embrace racial equality? I wonder how she worked that out. How do we know that the non-religious are not just paying lip service? Does an absence of religiousity somehow guarantee racial tolerance? My wife’s research in “racial resistance” seems to show that having the right beliefs does not guarantee actual racial openness.
The author does have something of a prescription for us. Apparently the best way to guarantee racial tolerance is to be an agnostic. “[A]gnosticism [was the] the one disposition in our review that was consistently related to racial tolerance.” Apparently she was able to discern that this was not just the lip service type. Of course, again we just have correlation and not causation.
Uncalled for pot shot at sociology: this is why I find sociology incredibly uninteresting. It fails to explain the why of anything.
Yes, I do “really doubt that religious communities marginalize others”, if this is meant as some kind of universal and necessary claim. I do not assent to the claim that “religious communities [by necessity] marginalize others.” Or, to put it another way, I don’t think that “in-group prejudice” is a necessary feature of defined communities (religious or otherwise). I am more familiar with the philosophical (primarily postmodern) variations of this them than I am on the sociology stuff, but I think Derrida’s claim that “community is always violent” is just misleading rhetorical flourish.
Of course sometimes defined communities (religious groups or even atheist groups like SHAFT) do marginalize. This might even be a common thing. (In fact, the study seemed like a pretty good example of an “enlightened atheist us” manifesting “out-group derogation” against the “unenlightened religious they”). Common as it may be, I just object to the claim that it is a necessary feature of community membership. I see no necessity in this. In fact, it strikes me that some communities might make great efforts to not marginalize others (the article on the study appeals to Christ warning against just this kind of marginalizing activity).
Here is a question: what was the purpose of the post? Was it to trot out another example of this sociological “out group derogation” theoretical mainstay? If so, that seems pretty boring. And why choose the religious groups as the vehicle for your exploration of that sociological “truism”? Why not explore how non-religious groups (like SHAFT) also invariably (if this is the claim) engage in this out-group derogation? This is where my suspicions arise. Hard not to see this, then, as a “look what awful things THEY do/believe” which is ironically then just another instantiation of this sociological “truism”, only you are the perpetrator.
At the end of the day, isn’t it the case that we all think that my/our self-definitions (atheist, liberal, progressive, open-minded, free thinker, etc) are good and defensible and harmless but the self-definitions of others (religious, conservative, traditionalist, closed-minded) are bad, indefensible and marginalizing?
“Common as it may be, I just object to the claim that it is a necessary feature of community membership.”
No one said it was necessary.
“Here is a question: what was the purpose of the post? Was it to trot out another example of this sociological “out group derogation” theoretical mainstay? … And why choose the religious groups as the vehicle for your exploration of that sociological “truism”?”
The purpose of SHAFT and this blog is, as I see it, to criticize vehicles for intolerance and unreason. Where atheist groups are guilty of this, I call them out on it—as I did with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and my post about the credulity of many “so-called skeptics.” If my posts focus on religion, it’s only because I think religion is the most predominant and most harmful vehicle. And with racism specifically, religion has been a very effective vehicle throughout history.
Again, that is not to say that atheists are blameless. As you note, this post may well serve as evidence of my in-group/out-group biases. But just because “we all think that my/our definitions are good and defensible,” it does not follow that no definitions are good and defensible or that they are equally bad and indefensible.
Perhaps my reading was oversensitive, but it certainly struck me that the author was making sweeping claims about religion. Looking back over it, it is hard to avoid coming away from it without that feeling.
The interesting question is this: is there something about the self-definition of Christians that makes them more likely to be racist? If there is, then that is an important and damning critique. But if there is not, then the study makes a lot of noise without saying much. If the correlation between racist attitudes and being religious is in fact better explained by geography, social class, and education, then her findings are not only weakened by not taking those factors into account, they are destroyed.
I am all for SHAFT calling out “enemies” of reason (though we should define reason and articulate why it is a good). What worries me is the sloppiness, the broad strokes that, frankly, just encourage intolerance of religious people. Jon says “racism specifically, religion has been a very effective vehicle throughout history”. First of all, “religion” is just too broad of a category here to be useful. Some religious traditions may have been vehicles for racism, but just so have some atheist traditions been vehicle for awful things. Do you want to say that ALL religious traditions have been vehicles for racism? Is there some necessity in this? What about the fact that it was leaders with religiously informed moral opinions that were the most active in denouncing racism? The trouble one runs into is that it is easy to get lulled into the fanatical rhetorical flourishes of Hitchens (broad, sweeping, and patently absurd claims like “religion poisons everything”). This sort of thing, encouraging and enabling the belief that religion leads to racism, does not strike me as particularly reasonable.
These sweeping sociological claims (most x are y) are not innocuous. There is increasing intolerance of religious persons in America (and in the west generally), including intolerance from positions of great power. See the Janet Napolitano (Homeland Security Chief) memo that lumped legitimate Christian pro-life groups (along with traditional marriage advocates) in with terrorists. The memo also tries to tie conservative views (“right-wing extremism”) on abortion and gay marriage to racism. This is part of a general trend – paint religious persons and organizations as institutionally bigoted so that the government can treat them like hate groups.
M concern, then, is that studies like this, and those that promote their misleading conclusions, are just encouraging an intolerance of religious viewpoints. Jon knows that many atheists are “emotionally charged”. How are posts like this likely to be received by the atheists who are not willing to parse the data?
Sweeping claims, sure. The authors felt confident in their generalizations, given that they reviewed 55 studies that involved 50,000 Christians. But there’s a vast difference between saying that religious people are, in general, more racist and saying that religious people are necessarily racist.
Moreover, the study doesn’t say that all religions contribute to racism. An important predictor of racism, according to this study, is one’s comportment toward his or her religion. Consider the following:
“Consistent with our hypotheses, greater religious identification, greater extrinsic religiosity, and greater religious fundamentalism were all positively related to racism. Greater intrinsic religiosity and greater quest were negatively related to racism, a relation that reflected racial tolerance.”
So not all religions or religious people are at issue, here. The authors are primarily talking about religions that either have a fundamentalist approach, or place a lot of emphasis on tradition (because tradition-anchored churches are slower to follow progressive societal trends, such as racial tolerance).
“The interesting question is this: is there something about the self-definition of Christians that makes them more likely to be racist?”
I’m not sure I know what you mean by “self-definition of Christians.” The author is not fingering Christianity as the culprit for racism, so much as she’s blaming religious congregations (which tend to be racially heterogeneous) and persons. In fact, the authors found the racism of religious people to be worth writing about, precisely because this racism seems at odds with their religions’ teachings. The title of the article is “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach?” This demonstrates that the authors at least acknowledge that the racism doesn’t stem from religious teachings, but often despite them.
What role, then, does religion play? The reason why the authors maintain that religion is of unique importance regarding racism (and out-group derogation more generally) is because it can afford people a sense of moral superiority over others—a “God is on my side” mentality. Consequently, religious out-group derogation is especially divisive and dangerous.
In short, neither I nor the authors are arguing that all religious traditions are vehicles for racism. My use and the study’s use of the word “religion” is just sloppy shorthand for “most religions.” I would never argue that your religious faith makes you racist, for example. But I submit that your religious understanding and experience is radically different than most Americans’. Religion, as it is practiced by the majority of people, is a dangerous enterprise that is deserving of many of the so-called new atheist critiques.
“Jon knows that many atheists are “emotionally charged”. How are posts like this likely to be received by the atheists who are not willing to parse the data?”
I’m not so sure that this blog’s audience is comprised of “emotionally charged” atheists. Here’s the audience, from what I can tell: you, Ryan Roos, Mike Otteson, Ben Siler, Aaron Johnson, Mike Linford, and James Patton. A very reasonable bunch. So when I write posts like this, it’s not to excite the more emotionally charged readers. I’m writing to convince people like you that your thoughtful understanding of religion is totally alien to most religious people.
Uncle.
Perhaps my religious experience is unique. But I don’t know anyone who has a “God is on my side” mentality. Of course I think God is with the Catholic Church. And I think the grace offered through the Church’s sacraments is not only just justifying but also sanctifying. But churches are spiritual hospitals for sinners. Why would being a member of a church make me morally superior? Going to church is, in part, a recognition that I am a sinner and not a saint. Do those that think their church membership makes them morally superior not pay attention to what Jesus said? – “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2:17).
One last thing I would submit: I understand that my religious understanding is perhaps different from how most American’s think of their faith. But I would also submit that the bloggers on this site also have a very unique religious understanding, having been Utah Mormons. It strikes me that those who know of religion principally through a Utah experience see the extreme of “group think” dynamics, an extreme that is not representative of the country at large (though I don’t deny that such a thing happens to other religious communities elsewhere).
“But I would also submit that the bloggers on this site also have a very unique religious understanding, having been Utah Mormons.”
Fair enough. I can’t deny that.
As Jon’s past posts make clear, Mormon racism primarily stems from Mormon beliefs about pre-life battles, Cain and Able, curses of dark skin, Lamanites, and other mythical craziness. I know people (many of them older–there’s definitely a generational factor here) who I think would not have such strong racist beliefs were it not for their association with Mormonism.
“Of course I think God is with the Catholic Church.”
And all other churches also think this about themselves. And everyone within this whole mess thinks everyone else is wrong. That right there is enough for a very strong in-group/out-group divisions, especially with deities and afterlives and eternal rewards or punishments thrown in. Everyone believes they’re the ones who are right, and the stakes are incalculably high. This is certainly a recipe for group marginalization and perceived moral superiority, and it would actually surprise me if this didn’t frequently manifest as racism.
That this probably sounds ridiculous to you and doesn’t reflect your experience only underscores how different your experience really is.
Of course, I sidestep this entire religious mess and think everyone is wrong, and no doubt that shows up as an occasional self-righteousness for me. But I don’t think I have the creator of the entire universe giving me water bottles in the corner of the ring.
I found your analysis of this research interesting and challenging. Two points worth noting. First about the correlational nature of the findings. The findings are suprising just because most religions preach humanitarian acceptance–the explicit doctrine is racial tolerance–yet religious identifiers reject outgroups. This is the paradox that started us on the study.
Second, you asked about education and regional effects on the religion-racism relation. We did test for region of the country but found no systematic influences. That is, the effects held across the country. But we were not able to test for urban versus rural differences with our data set. As for education, we found the strongest evidence for the relgious identity-racism effect in seminaries as well as among other highly religious populations. We did not have any direct data on education level of the participants, but seminary students are certainly educated and so the effect does not seem to be limited to uneducated people.
Thanks for your interest in this work.
Thanks for taking the time to entertain our criticisms and clarify your findings, Dr. Wood.