Abstract
International Relations scholarship on religious freedom points to religious persecution as a major driver of political violence around the globe. If correct, the perceived persecution of conservative Christians in the United States (U.S.) may contribute to the radicalization of individuals who self-identify as conservative and Christian. Yet, in focusing on country-level indicators, previous empirical research on the “religious freedom peace” is generally silent on the role of individual-level perceptions in the formation and mobilization of grievances. This article represents a first attempt to fill this gap. As such, it asks if the religious freedom discourse articulated in conservative American media contributes to the radicalization of its domestic consumers through the cultivation of perceptions of persecution that are divorced from the generally high levels of religious freedom otherwise experienced in the U.S. Although the results of an original online survey experiment demonstrate that persecution discourse does indeed shape perceptions of threat to religious liberty, I find no support for the idea that it also leads to increased support for political violence, either directly or indirectly through misperceptions of persecution.
Highlights
Widespread perceptions of threat to religious freedom have taken hold among American Christian conservatives in recent years.1 Conservative politicians, pundits, and activists intentionally cultivate these perceptions by framing issues of major concern as violations of Christians’ religious freedom
Because the religious freedom peace thesis (RFPT) suggests that religious repression leads to violence, and because conservative Christians in the U.S are increasingly likely to perceive their rights to practice their religion freely to be threatened by their government, this study set out to understand if American Christians could be at increased risk of supporting political violence
Research on religious liberty in the U.S suggests that exposure to persecution discourse in the media shapes religious liberty threat perceptions, while the literature on elite cueing and dog-whistle politics shows that leaders can provoke their followers to engage in both violent and nonviolent forms of political activism
Summary
Widespread perceptions of threat to religious freedom have taken hold among American Christian conservatives in recent years. Conservative politicians, pundits, and activists intentionally cultivate these perceptions by framing issues of major concern as violations of Christians’ religious freedom. Widespread perceptions of threat to religious freedom have taken hold among American Christian conservatives in recent years.. Conservative politicians, pundits, and activists intentionally cultivate these perceptions by framing issues of major concern as violations of Christians’ religious freedom. This has been the case since at-least the late-1970s, but this tactic has surged in popularity since the Obama Administration first tried to implement the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) contraception mandate in 2012. Subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court to expand the rights of LGBTQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer—people have further exacerbated this trend to the point that one conservative essayist could ominously title her book on the subject It’s Dangerous to Believe (Eberstadt 2016). Some academics and critical Evangelical commentators uncharitably pathologize (mis)perceptions of threat to religious freedom as part of a Christian or Evangelical “persecution complex” (Castelli 2007a; Noble 2014; Singer 2019; Wiedel 2014; see Wilkinson [2017] 2019), members of religious majorities that perceive themselves as part of a persecuted minority experience adverse psychological effects similar to those reported by members of minority religious traditions who have really experienced discrimination on account of their beliefs (Parent et al 2018; Vang et al 2019; but see Rosik and Smith 2009)
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