Religious Orientations and the Targets of Discrimination

Abstract

In this study, fundamentalism, extrinsic, intrinsic, and quest religious orientations were used to predict discriminatory attitudes toward blacks, women, homosexual persons, and communists. The four discriminations yielded a strong tendency to discriminate factor, while residuals for each scale reflected unique discriminatory attitudes toward each group. As predicted, fundamentalism correlated positively with all discriminatory attitudes and with the general tendency but was negatively correlated with residual anti-black attitudes. Quest (especially with a revised scale) correlated negatively with all discriminatory attitudes, even with fundamentalism controlled, but predicted a general Don't discriminate! attitude rather than positive attitudes toward particular groups. Several sex differences emerged for extrinsic and intrinsic religion: Analyses with three extrinsic religion subscales found that social-extrinsic and personal-extrinsic religion predicted males' discrimination, while religious seriousness predicted females' discrimination. Also, intrinsic religion was positively related to discriminatory attitudes for females but not males, though these relationships vanished when fundamentalism was controlled.