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Opiate of the Masses? Social Status, Religion, and Politics

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Opiate of the Masses? Social Status, Religion, and Politics OPIATE OF THE MASSES? SOCIAL STATUS, RELIGION, AND POLITICS Landon Schnabel* Indiana University, Bloomington Abstract: This study considers the assertion that religion is the opiate of the masses and examines whether this way of understanding religion can be used to account for two key sociological questions: (1) sociodemographic differences in religiosity and (2) apparent inconsistencies in the positionality principle of politics. Using a special module of the General Social Survey, I first demonstrate that groups with less status—women, racial minorities, those with lower incomes, and sexual minorities—receive more compensatory psychological benefits from religion and spirituality and that these compensatory benefits help explain group differences in religiosity. I then demonstrate that religious compensation acts as a suppressor variable between status and politics, suppressing the liberal politics of disadvantaged groups by facilitating and reinforcing religiosity. This study, therefore, provides empirical support for Marx’s general claim that religion is the “sigh of the oppressed creature” and suppressor of political consciousness. It expands and refines the argument, however, by showing that (1) it can apply to disadvantaged social status in addition to disadvantaged economic status; (2) the suppression of progressive politics appears to be due to the conservatizing nature of religiosity as much or more than other-worldly distraction; and (3) this suppression is stronger on issues closely linked to traditional religious values than on economic issues. I conclude that compensatory benefits from religion should be more central to and frequently measured in the study of religion, inequality, and politics. Key Words: Religion; Politics; Public Opinion; Gender; Race; Ethnicity; Class; Sexuality; Inequality; Well-being; Marx Last Revised: 6/1/2017 Running Head: Opiate of the Masses? Word Count: 11,996 Tables: 7 Figures: 0 THIS IS A DRAFT. DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHOR PERMISSION. * The author is grateful to Brian Powell for exceptional feedback. He would also like to thank Art Alderson, Clem Brooks, Youngjoo Cha, Andy Halpern-Manners, Patricia McManus, Chris Munn, Roshan Pandian, Brian Steensland, Evan Stewart, and members of the Indiana University Politics, Economy, and Culture Workshop for helpful comments on this project. Direct correspondence to Landon Schnabel, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, 744 Ballantine Hall, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405. Email: [email protected]. Opiate of the Masses? 2 Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. -Karl Marx (1970 [1843]) According to Marx, religion is the opiate of the masses. In other words, religion appeals to the disenfranchised and helps them through suffering, but in so doing distracts from the root causes of their suffering and suppresses the development of political consciousness.1 This study considers the assertion that religion is the opiate of the masses, extending the argument from the materially disadvantaged to the socially disadvantaged to determine whether it can help account for two key sociological questions: (1) sociodemographic differences in religiosity and (2) apparent inconsistencies in the positionality principle of politics. Although the “opiate” argument is frequently invoked theoretically, the mechanism by which religion is said to operate as an opiate remains underspecified and undertested. I propose and employ compensatory psychological benefits from religion, including comfort received from religion and spirituality, as a way to measure and examine the potential opiate function of religion. The idea that religion and spirituality provide comfort, consolation, and validation is not new to the literature and is central to some theoretical frameworks (such as the deprivation- compensation hypothesis). Despite their theoretical centrality, compensatory benefits from religion and spirituality typically go unmeasured. Previous research on the gender gap in religion has similarly highlighted social psychological benefits to religion to argue that women’s lack of status might contribute to them being more religious, but has not directly measured the proposed compensatory benefits to religion that appeal to women and other disadvantaged groups (Norris and Inglehart 2008; Schnabel 2016c; Walter and Davie 1998). 1 Weber similarly argued that other-worldly religion can alleviate this-worldly suffering and Durkheim argued that religion functions to legitimate social arrangements. Opiate of the Masses? 3 In Marx’s view, religious compensators for material deprivation provide comfort to the disadvantaged and thereby suppress their political consciousness. Several perspectives in the study of public opinion—such as the “underdog” positionality principle and related status and identity theories (Davis and Robinson 1991; Hunt 2007; Robinson and Bell 1978; Schuman and Harding 1963)—suggest that disadvantaged groups develop a liberal political consciousness because of their marginalized status in society, recognition of structural inequalities, sympathy for and solidarity with other disadvantaged groups, and development of progressive identity and partisanship. Yet, women and racial minorities, to whom the positionality principle has been most frequently applied, are not always more liberal than their counterparts on particular issues, especially those linked in one way or another to religion—for example, abortion, same-sex marriage, and physician-assisted suicide (Schnabel 2016b). A few studies have suggested that religion suppresses the liberalism of women (Barkan 2014) and Blacks (Wilcox 1992) on abortion specifically, but religion may operate as a more general suppressor of progressive politics and thus explain apparent inconsistencies in the positionality principle. Were it not for diversion by that which helps them through hardship, disadvantaged groups may have a stronger political consciousness and hold more consistently progressive social attitudes on issues linked to religious values. This study first considers whether groups with less status—women, Blacks, Latinos, those with lower incomes, and sexual minorities—receive more compensatory psychological benefits from religion and spirituality. It then examines whether these psychological compensators can help explain one of the most consistently found and frequently debated patterns in the social scientific study of religion: women’s greater religiosity. Finally, this study considers whether and why compensatory psychological benefits from religion suppress the Opiate of the Masses? 4 liberal politics of disadvantaged groups. In the course of testing hypotheses related to the opiate of the masses thesis, I find empirical support for Marx’s general claim that religion is the “sigh of the oppressed creature,” “heart of a heartless world,” and suppressor of political consciousness. I expand and refine the argument, however, by showing that (1) it can apply to disadvantaged social status in addition to disadvantaged economic status; (2) the suppression of progressive politics appears to be due to the conservatizing nature of religiosity as much or more than other-worldly distraction; and (3) this suppression is stronger on issues closely linked to traditional religious values than on economic issues. I conclude that the compensatory benefits provided by religion are a key component in religious processes and, subsequently, the political attitudes, identities, and behaviors of disadvantaged groups. Deprivation and Religious Compensation Deprivation-compensation theories of religion have long existed and have frequently been used to make predictions about religiosity. Davis (1948) said that the greater a person’s disappointment and frustration in this life, the more s/he would believe in and focus on a future life. According to Davis, focusing on goals beyond this world allows people to compensate for frustrations trying to reach present goals. In other words, people shift their focus to a better future life as Stark and Bainbridge (1985, 1987) highlighted when they said that religion provides “supernatural general compensators” that replace unavailable material rewards with future spiritual rewards. Therefore, as far as the human experience leads to unmet material needs, people will seek future immaterial compensation for these unmet needs. Even when scholars such as Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke (1996) eventually shifted more explicitly to the rational- choice framework, benefits provided by religion were a key foundation to their economics-of- religion reward-seeking perspective. The importance of considering what people do with and get Opiate of the Masses? 5 from religion in their everyday lives (e.g., receive comfort and make meaning out of hardship) becomes all the more important in light of the more recent cultural turn in the sociology of religion (Edgell 2012). Class and material deprivation certainly remain relevant, but gender, race, and sexuality can be equally salient to contemporary American religious life (Stewart, Frost, and Edgell 2017; Wilde and Glassman 2016). Although some applications and tests of the deprivation- compensation principle continue to focus primarily on economic deprivation (Becker and Woessmann 2013; Wimberley 1984),
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