Dehumanizing Christians by George Yancey

Author:George Yancey [Yancey, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christianity, General, Political Science, Political Freedom, Psychology, Social Psychology
ISBN: 9781412852678
Google: YH1rAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2014-01-15T03:41:34+00:00

Who Dehumanizes Christians?

I admit that I am doing this backward. Generally a researcher introduces demographic and social data first before going into other analysis. Of course, I could not show this data with the first study because I did not have it. I chose to go more into the similarities and differences between RWA and CDS so that we may have a better understanding of the philosophical dynamics that animate the individuals in these two groups. But now we are ready to look not only at how members of these groups respond to their targeted out-groups but also who scores high in right-wing authoritarianism and Christian dehumanization.

To keep this simple I compared the top 25 percent of each scale to the rest of the sample to find out the variables that help to predict authoritarianism and dehumanization.9 We must remember that I do not have a probability sample, and that may skew the results. However, we should get a general gauge on the important factors with each group. In the future I hope to use a probability sample to gain a more accurate reading, but this will suffice for a first look at the variables. The results can be seen in Table 4-3.

Because of the variables used in this research, some of the interpretation is not always straightforward. For example, age was constructed with a six-point scale. So the results in the table do not relate to the respondents’ real age but where they are placed on that variable. The important aspect of these findings is to compare the different groups to each other to see if they significantly differ. As it concerns age, the scores between the entire sample and the top 25 percent on the RWA scale (or as I like to call them “authoritarians”) is so small that there is no real difference. For all practical purposes we can consider them the same age as the rest of the respondents in this sample. However, the difference between the entire sample and the top 25 percent on the CDS (or as I like to call them “dehumanizers”) is great enough that we are reasonably confident that the difference matters. Thus the dehumanizers are younger in age in our sample, and there is a good chance that they are younger in age in the general population.10 One factor that seems to predict a dehumanizer is age. Christian dehumanization may be a growing phenomenon in our society.

Table 4.3

Demographic and social variables of sample population, top 25% of RWA and top 25% of CDS

Entire Sample Top 25% RWA Top 25% CDS

Age 2.164 2.269 1.95b

Percent Male 50.2% 48.1% 53.7%

Percent White 79.1% 75% 82.6%

Percent Married 31.6% 43.5%b 20.7%b

Education 4.173 3.935a 4.19

Income 2.67 3.213b 2.215b

Political View 3.305 4.667c 2.165c

Percent Christian 39.1% 68.5%c 7.4%c

Percent Atheist/Agnostic 39.8% 12%c 76.9%c

Attend Religious Service 2.364 3.63c 1.372c

a

p < .1 from entire sample

b

p < .01 from entire sample

c

p < .001 from entire sample

Age based on 6-point scale labeled: 18–25, 26–35, 35–45, 46–55, 56–65, and over 65 Education based on 8-point

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