We are led to believe that religion makes people better. That following the moral instructions laid out in this holy book or that one will provide us all with the information necessary to live decent, ethical lives. We are even told – most of the time through blind assertion – that the existence of any kind of human morality requires a deity. That without religious instruction, the world would quickly descend into amoral anarchy full of murder and sex acts so bizarre, Rick Santorum would need 5 or 6 additional surnames just to describe them all.
We also know that racism is fundamentally wrong. Prejudice based on something as arbitrary and biologically meaningless as socially-constructed ethnic groups is part of a dark chapter of the human experience that we are all working feverishly to finish and close forever. Thanks to great strides we have made as a society, we can be confident that anyone can recognize the simple moral truth of the need to treat each other as equals, regardless of their heritage.
As a result, we might have a tough time explaining this:
A meta-analytic review of past research evaluated the link between religiosity and racism in the United States since the Civil Rights Act. Religious racism partly reflects intergroup dynamics. That is, a strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups.
The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.
If both of the above maxims were true, we would expect to see a positive association between religious expression and racial tolerance. After all, we do have some anecdotal evidence to support that conclusion – some of the great champions of the fight against racism, from William Wilberforce to Al Sharpton, have campaigned in explicitly religious terms. Doesn’t it make sense that a shared sense of being created equally under the loving watchful eye of YahwAlladdha would lead us to being more tolerant?
To test whether or not the evidence supports this conclusion, the authors performed a meta-analysis – basically a study of studies – to see what the literature said.
They found 55 studies that met their inclusion criteria and analyzed measures of racism against measures of religious expression. What they found will likely not shock you: religious adherence is positively correlated with racial intolerance and strong out-group derogation. Conversely, agnostic (or “questing”, to use the language of the study) ideology was (weakly) correlated with racial tolerance.
Now if you’re anything like me, you’re incredibly good-looking and a skilled yet sensitive lover. You’re also highly skeptical of such a cut-and-dry finding. After all, religion is associated with so many other factors, you’d have to control for a long list of potential explanatory variables. One of the major drawbacks of meta-analyses, particularly those that use observational data rather than randomized controlled trial data, is that controlling for confounders is quite difficult. Not every author includes the same variables in their analysis, making these kinds of tests difficult to perform.
There are two findings that I found particularly fascinating in this study that I want to share with you.
1. The relationship between racism and religiosity changes over time
One way to “control” for the influence of extraneous factors is to see how the relationship changes over time. The role that racism plays in our society has changed significantly since 1964 (the beginning of the observation period of the study). If religiosity was an explanatory factor for racism – that is, if being religious made you racist – we would see a “dose-response” relationship that remains relatively fixed over time. If it’s just “old time religion” that fuels the correlation seen above, then the effect would diminish over time as other factors that fuel racism change.
What we see is the latter case – as time passes and racism becomes more socially unacceptable generally, the association between religion and prejudice diminishes. Now while they plot a linear trend, there is no reason to conclude that religious people will become more racially tolerant than non-religious people. Extending the line that way goes beyond the descriptive ability of the test. What it does tell us though is that there are other factors that better explain racist ideologies than religious affiliation.
2. Authoritarianism is a better explanatory factor than religion
So we know from our explorations of System Justification Theory that conservatism and racial antipathy are linked, and we know that religion and conservatism are linked, so could it be that the “wrong” kind of religion is what is fueling racism? The authors tried to investigate this phenomenon by controlling their analysis for authoritarianism. What they found may not surprise you, but it definitely surprised me:
The effect not only disappears, but actually reverses. Essentially, this finding suggests that moderate religion actually makes you less racist. Now it is important to remember that this is not based on the full 55 studies – only 8 of the eligible studies included the authoritarianism variable and we are not given any more information than what’s in the table.
The other thing that is important to remember is that this study is predominantly measuring the existence of racism in religious white Americans (simply as a product of participants in the studies under meta-analysis), which introduces a whole host of other variables that cannot be controlled for. It is also regrettable that direct comparison between believers and non-believers was not possible. Overall, I am not exactly blown away by this study, and I feel that the authors went too far in stating their conclusions.
So, as much as I would like to be able to say “religion is bad because it makes people racist”, there does not seem to be sufficient evidence to make that call. What it does seem to suggest is that any association we see between racism and religion is likely caused by third factors. This is a mixed blessing, so to speak. It is unfortunate that our atheist utopia will not necessarily be free of prejudice, but it also means that we do not necessarily have to convert people away from their religious beliefs to increase tolerance.
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