Religious Behavior and Prejudice: Some Dimensions and Specifications of the Relationship

Abstract

which find a positive relationship between religious commitment and prejudice,' but the findings of these studies are far from conclusive. There are fewer studies which find a negative relationship between religious commitment and prejudice.2 Two solutions have been offered for the dilemma presented by these contradictory findings. (The two solutions are compatible by some interpretations.) Gordon Allport offers one solution in his interpretation of religious commitment as being actually two distinct types of behavior.3 The first of these he calls "institutionalized" religious commitment, meaning "belonging to a church because it is a safe, powerful, superior in-group."4 The second is "interiorized" religious commitment, which means "belonging to a church because its basic creed of brotherhood expresses the ideals one sincerely believes in."' Institutionalized religious commitment is related positively to prejudice, while interiorized religious commitment is related negatively to prejudice, thus explaining the contradictory findings. Robin Williams offers an alternative interpretation of these contradictory findings. He contends that the relationship between religious commitment and prejudice is actually curvilinear, with those least and most religious being the least prejudiced.6 His hypothesis to explain this is that the middle level of religious commitment is associated with conformity to community norms, which implicitly reinforce attitudes of prejudice. Both of these interpretations need to be empirically investigated and verified. In this paper, however, the analysis will be limited to Allport's interpretation, for reasons which shall be explained below. These two interpretations start from an assumption of the validity of the findings of these empirical studies. There is reason to question the validity of these findings, or at least to question the degree to which the findings can be generalized to the entire U.S. population. There are three main shortcomings which seem to be shared by most studies of religion and prejudice. First, most of these studies have been done on local populations, with biased and often quite small samples. It is quite conceivable that the inconsistencies and contradictions in the results are due to this factor. Second, most of these studies conceptualize religious commitment as participation in an organized religious body, which seems a perfectly valid and logical approach. However, they then measure religious commitment by only one dimension of participation, usually church attendance.7 Finally, the conceptualization of prejudice or intolerance is usually one dimensional also; i.e., attitudes toward only one group are analyzed. Studies which have analyzed attitudes toward more than one group, notably Bettelheim and Janowitz' Social Change and Prejudices and Robin Williams' Strangers Next Door,9 have indicated that there is good reason to examine attitudes toward different "out-groups" comparatively. The analysis below is an attempt to partially solve these three problems and to point out some broad dimensions of the association between religious commitment and prejudice to guide further research.