To Protect and Serve? Race and Police Use of Force across Religious Contexts

Abstract

Background While prior research has revealed a dynamic relationship between individual religiosity and punitiveness, much less is known about how religious context might affect attitudes toward punitiveness. In addition, even less is known about how religion, individual or contextual, might shape public attitudes toward an important aspect of punitiveness—police use of force, an issue that has evoked large-scale social movements in recent years. Purpose The present research aims to fill in the gap from prior research by examining the relationship between religious context and attitudes toward police use of force. Particularly, this study intends to investigate whether said relationship varies by race. Methods In this study, individual-level data from the General Social Survey (GSS) 2000–2018 were merged with contextual-level data from the U.S. Census 2000 and the Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS) 2000 enabling a multilevel analysis of the religious effects on attitudes toward police use of force. Results Study results suggest that higher county-level Catholic population share was associated with less support for police use of force. In contrast, when county-level evangelical Protestant population share rose, residents, including Blacks, became more supportive of police use of force. However, the evangelical Protestant contextual effect was stronger for Whites than Blacks, and this White-Black difference grew when county-level evangelical Protestant population share increased. Conclusions and Implications The findings suggest that religious effects on attitudes toward punitiveness are multilevel. Religious context exerts independent and divergent influences on one's perceptions of police use of force above and beyond important individual characteristics. Therefore, religious contextual characteristics may need to be considered in the ongoing debate on police brutality and reform.