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To Love Or Hate Thy Neighbor: the Role of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism in Explaining the Link Between Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice

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To Love Or Hate Thy Neighbor: the Role of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism in Explaining the Link Between Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice bs_bs_banner Political Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2014 doi: 10.1111/pops.12077 To Love or Hate Thy Neighbor: The Role of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism in Explaining the Link Between Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice Mark J. Brandt Tilburg University Christine Reyna DePaul University Fundamentalism is consistently related to racial prejudice (Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010), yet the mechanisms for this relationship are unclear. We identify two core values of fundamentalism, authoritarianism and tradition- alism, that independently contribute to the fundamentalism-racial prejudice relationship. We also contextualize the fundamentalism-racial prejudice relationship by suggesting that fundamentalists may show prejudice based on conceptions of African Americans as violating values but show tolerance when prejudice is less justifiable. These ideas are tested and confirmed using three data sets from the American National Election Studies. Across all three samples, fundamentalism is related to increases in symbolic racism but decreases in negative affect towards African Americans, and these relationships are mediated by both authoritarianism and traditionalism. KEY WORDS: religious fundamentalism, symbolic racism, authoritarianism, traditionalism, prejudice Two important features of American political life are race and religion. Racism is a key component in debates on welfare politics and affirmative action (e.g., Reyna, Henry, Korfmacher, & Tucker, 2006; Sears & Henry, 2005), and religion is often implicated in debates over cultural issues such as same-sex marriage (e.g., Brandt & Reyna, 2010; Campbell & Monson, 2008). However, these two sets of beliefs, religion and racism, are not independent. Fundamentalists tend to be more prejudiced against racial minorities, such as African Americans (e.g., Feagin, 1964; Kirkpatrick, 1993; Laythe, Finkel, Bringle, & Kirkpatrick, 2002), a finding further confirmed in a recent meta- analysis (r = .13, 95% CI = .06–.21, Hall et al., 2010). Fundamentalist prejudice against African Americans is, in many ways, surprising and not easily amenable to a “prejudice against religious value violators” hypothesis (cf. e.g., Brandt & Reyna, 2010; Hunsberger & Jackson, 2005; Jackson & Esses, 1997) because African Americans, as a group, are defined by race—not religion—and share many values and beliefs with religious fundamentalists in the United States. For example, many nationally representative samples in the United States suggest that African Americans are one of the more religious racial groups in the country (Taylor, Mattis, & Chatters, 1999), and religious fundamentalism is not related to the perception of racial and ethnic minorities as violating and threatening fundamentalists’ values (Jackson & Esses, 1997). Nonetheless, research suggests that fundamentalists tend to be more racially prejudiced. 207 0162-895X © 2013 International Society of Political Psychology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, and PO Box 378 Carlton South, 3053 Victoria, Australia 208 Brandt and Reyna We argue that the core values of religious fundamentalism can be used to predict both when and why religious fundamentalists will be prejudiced against African Americans. First, based on the psychological definition of fundamentalism as the belief in an inerrant religious authority that “must be followed today according to the fundamental, unchangeable practices of the past” (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992, p. 118), we expect that two components of the fundamentalist belief system— submission to authority and support for traditions—orient believers towards prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities that may pose a challenge to group values and traditions. Second, because not all expressions of prejudice are the same, we expect that fundamentalists will be selectively intol- erant depending on whether or not the expression of racism portrays African Americans as violating values important to fundamentalists (cf. Blogowska & Saroglou, 2011; Rowatt, LaBouff, Johnson, Froese, & Tsang, 2009). By specifying both when and why fundamentalists will be racially preju- diced, it is possible to more fully understand the dynamics of fundamentalist belief systems, especially as it relates to other politically relevant beliefs like racism, authoritarianism, and traditionalism. Why Are Fundamentalists Prejudiced? There are at least two important values and social cognitive orientations associated with reli- gious fundamentalism that we expect to directly contribute to the fundamentalism-prejudice rela- tionship. The first is obedience and submission to religious authority—including the authority of religious texts, leaders, and supernatural beings (Hood, Hill, & Williamson, 2005). Fundamentalism is often defined and measured by the belief in the infallibility of scriptures. These scriptures are seen as the final arbiter of knowledge and are the foundation for understanding other religious texts, religious experiences, and religious behaviors (Hood et al., 2005). This all suggests that the funda- mentalist meaning system may be associated with a tendency for authoritarianism, that is, the adherence to a set of values promoting obedience to and respect for established religious and civil authorities (Feldman, 2003; Stenner, 2005). The second component of the fundamentalist belief system that contributes to the expression of prejudice is moral traditionalism, i.e., beliefs and values that are oriented towards preserving the sociomoral status quo. Religious teachings are often an important part of cultural traditions, passed down through the generations for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and fundamentalism is associated with support for these traditional values and ideas (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992). By supporting traditional values, fundamentalists may be able to maintain and promote their beliefs (Hood & Morris, 1985) and a sense of order and predictability (Brandt & Reyna, 2010; see also Jost et al., in press). Previous research has confirmed that fundamentalism is associated with authoritarianism and traditionalism. For example, fundamentalism is moderately correlated with both the authoritarian submission and conventionalism subscales of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale (Mavor, MacLeod, Boal, & Louis, 2009), the desire for obedient children (Danso, Hunsberger, & Pratt, 1997), and across several countries, the religious are more likely to endorse traditional values (Saroglou, Delpierre, & Dernelle, 2004). Moreover, in a nationally representative sample of the United States, Evangelical Christians (a group that scores high on religious fundamentalism scales; Altemeyer, 2003) were the most authoritarian religious group (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009). Research also consistently indicates that authoritarianism is a strong contributor to prejudice around the world, especially towards groups who are not considered a part of the dominant social group (Napier & Jost, 2008; Stenner, 2005). Similarly, moral traditionalism is also associated with racial prejudice because interacting with a diverse array of people introduces the possibility of having one’s traditions challenged. In a representative sample of the United States, moral tradition- alism was associated with more negative stereotyping of ethnic minorities and greater support for the Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice 209 notion that Blacks are lazy (Feldman & Stenner, 1997), showing that traditionalism is related to racial prejudice. Others have found that moral traditionalism and absolutism is related to ethnic intolerance in 19 countries (Napier & Jost, 2008) and that values of traditionalism are often associated with greater intergroup prejudice (Schwartz, 1994). Taken together, we propose funda- mentalism’s association with authoritarianism and traditionalism can account for part of the fundamentalism-prejudice relationship. Past Support. Other research has documented instances where the relationship between fun- damentalism and racism is mediated by Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA; e.g., Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Laythe et al., 2002; for meta-analytic evidence, see Hall et al., 2010)—evidence consistent with our perspective. RWA consists of three subcomponents: authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, and conventionalism (Altemeyer, 1996; Mavor, Louis, & Sibley, 2010). Unfortunately, these components of the RWA scale are measured using a variety of political and religious attitudes and behaviors that closely represent traditionalism, obedience to authority, fun- damentalism, and prejudice, thereby conceptually and empirically confounding fundamentalism, traditionalism, authoritarianism, and racial prejudice within the scale and making it difficult to meaningfully interpret the relationships among fundamentalism, RWA, and prejudice (for discus- sions and empirical demonstrations of these issues, see Feldman, 2003; Feldman & Stenner, 1997; Mavor et al., 2009; Mavor, Louis, & Laythe, 2011; Stenner, 2005; Oesterreich, 2005; Van Hiel, Cornelis, Roets, & De Clercq, 2007). Although our predictions regarding authoritarianism and traditionalism are tentatively supported by research using the RWA scale, this prior work suffers from methodological shortcomings that obscure the potential independent contributions of authori- tarianism and traditionalism to the fundamentalism-racism relationship. Support for the status quo and authoritarianism are distinguishable constructs that both differentially
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