The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer

Author:Bob Altemeyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

11To illustrate the point about generalizations always having exceptions, one can think of some very unauthoritarian Baptists, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and ex-president Jimmy Carter. The first socialist premier in Canada, who pioneered medicare and other programs in Canada’s social “safety net,” was the Baptist minister Tommy Douglas.

12 See Bob Altemeyer, “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to be Prejudiced?”The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2003, 13, 17-28.

13 The Promise Keepers quote is from Bill McCartney with David Halbrook, Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference, 1997, Nashville: Word Publishers, and was given by Donald J. Sider in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, 2005, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, on pages 25-26.

14 Want some numbers to get an idea how strong these generalizations are? In that 2005 study of 638 parents of university students I described in note 7, Religious Fundamentalism correlated .74 with Right-Wing Authoritarianism (an “almost unheard of” strong relationship), .89 with Barna’s measure of being an evangelical (an even bigger “almost unheard of” relationship), .72 with scores on the Religious Ethnocentrism scale (yet another almost unheard of relationship), and (THUD!) .19 with scores on the Manitoba Ethnocentrism scale that measures racial and ethnic prejudice (a weak relationship). (See note 12 of Chapter 1 to see where these labels came from.) The size of the last correlation is hardly alarming, but the question I have tried to answer is, why is there a positive correlation between being a religious fundamentalist and being racially prejudiced—as there has been in study after study? Why are “holy people” more prejudiced than “unholy people”? Shouldn’t holy people be less prejudiced than most?

Recently Gary Leak and Darrel Moreland at Creighton University in Omaha tested my hunch that religious ethnocentrism plays a pivotal role in the appearance of non-religious prejudices in fundamentalists. Using a mediated hierarchical regression analysis of Religious Fundamentalism and Religious Ethnocentrism scores from nearly 300 students to predict general racial prejudice, hostility toward homosexuals and prejudice toward African-Americans, they found religious ethnocentrism mediated fundamentalists’ other hostilities so powerfully that controlling for it always appreciably reduced the fundamentalist-prejudice relationship. In all cases, religious ethnocentrism proved to be the mediator in the relationship, not fundamentalism. After I learned of their study I performed their analysis on my sample of 638 parents’ answers to the Manitoba Ethnocentrism scale and the Attitudes toward Homosexuals scale, and found the same thing. A considerable amount of fundamentalists’ nonreligious prejudices thus are attributable to their strong religious prejudices. Learning to dislike people on religious grounds seemingly has powerful consequences for how we react to people who are different in other ways.

15 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 1994, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.

B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., pages ix, 3.

16 I recently looked to see if Christian fundamentalists had a double standard about Mormons proselytizing door-to-door. They did not. Most of them (52%) said no restraints should be placed on such activity, and only a very few (6%) said it should be forbidden.

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