The role of religious beliefs and collective narcissism in interreligious contact on university students

Abstract

The rise of exclusive puritanism movements challenges several communities to live in peaceful coexistence. This research aimed to observe the level of interreligious contact among university students. This was a threefold study. The first part was an initial inquiry to construct an interreligious contact scale. The second sought to see the inferential association between interreligious contact, belief in religious teachings (i.e. religious fundamentalism, kindly religious belief, and meta-religion endorsement), and collective narcissism. The third part was to investigate differences in those variables between students who joined student political organizations with religion-based ideology and those who did not. There were 381 respondents from various religious backgrounds (e.g. Muslim, Christian, and other) participating in this research. The result of the exploratory factor analysis indicated a unidimensionality of the interreligious contact scale. Regression analysis found that religious fundamentalism and collective narcissism made individuals less likely to exhibit interreligious contact. However, kindly religious belief and meta-religion endorsement encouraged interreligious contact. In addition, an independent sample t-test suggested that there was a difference in the inclusivism level between religion-based student organization members and non-members. Members of such organization tended to exhibit a lower level of interreligious contact, while their level of religious fundamentalism and collective narcissism were higher compared to their non-member counterparts.