Political tolerance and God's wrath in the United States.(Report)

 
  Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly 
  logical. 
  --Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1919) 

The U.S. Declaration of Independence asserts, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." With this eloquent proclamation, Thomas Jefferson indicates that prioritizing the rights of the individual does not undercut but, in fact, is premised on the idea of an almighty creator. Nonetheless, this famous sentiment appears at odds with the empirical reality that religious individuals in the United States tend to be less likely to approve of extensive civil liberties.

In fact, those who defend the sacredness of religious concepts are often pitted against those who defend the freedom of individuals to express "profane" points of view. This recurring tension was most evident in the recent controversy concerning cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, in which Islamic conservatives argued that their publication should be banned while Western civil libertarians prominently displayed them as expressions of free speech. In contrast to this ongoing tension between faith and freedom, the United States began as an experiment to reconcile the dictates of religious devotion with a commitment to guard individual freedom and, from this experiment, the United States has grown into one of the most democratic and religious countries in the modern world. While the United States provides an example of how the tension between faith and freedom can be peacefully reconciled, a clear discord between religion and political tolerance persists even within the borders of the United States.

Over the past fifty years, researchers have consistently shown that religious affiliation and/or church attendance tend to decrease an individual's willingness to grant civil liberties to fringe groups (Stouffer 1955; Filsinger 1976; Beatty and Walter 1984; Ellison and Musick 1993; Katnik 2002). While the statistical link between religious affiliation, church attendance, and political intolerance is evident, there has been little attempt to understand this connection beyond the simple assumption that religion makes people closed minded. But what is it about being religious that makes a person less tolerant of divergent viewpoints? The most obvious answer supposes that certain religious beliefs lead individuals to diminish the importance of individual freedom in appeasement of a higher religious authority. This paper seeks to test this basic notion.

To better investigate the hypothesized relationship between faith in a higher authority and political intolerance we draw upon the work of Andrew Greeley (1995). Greeley argues that an individual's image of God provides the narrative link between complex religious systems of belief and attitudes concerning more secular topics such as public policy, law, and civil society. In sum, individuals who posit a wrathful God will tend to defer to religious texts and doctrines when forming opinions about secular topics. Conversely, those who view God as a relatively benign force (interestingly, a Jeffersonian conception of God) will place more importance on individual rationality when forming their opinions about social justice.

Using Greeley's general theoretical framework, we examine the effects of an individual's image of God on political intolerance. We expect that when people conceive of a God who is actively judging and punishing human behavior, they will be less tolerant. The logic of this hypothesis is simple: if God is intolerant of certain behavior, believers should be intolerant, too. To ensure that our measure of a wrathful God is not simply a proxy for other measures of religious beliefs, behaviors, or affiliations, we control for religious affiliation, church attendance, and view of the Bible in our analyses.

SOURCES OF POLITICAL TOLERANCE