The Prejudice Paradox: How Religious Motivations Explain the Complex Relationship between Religion and Prejudice

Although we think of religion affecting political discussions revolving around moral issues, past research has shown a strong relationship with how out-groups are treated in democratic society. This has created a paradox within the study of religion and prejudice: religions that teach love and acceptance tend to produce followers who are more prejudiced and intolerant than the non-religious. This paper examines this paradox by asking four primary research questions. First, how the differences between the religious relate to prejudice? Are some differences more important in explaining the relationship between religion and prejudice? Is the relationship between religion and prejudice altered when considering sexual prejudice instead of racial prejudice? And finally, is it possible to isolate religion’s direct effect on racial and sexual prejudice to see its varied effect on religious citizens? Employing Gordon Allport’s Religious Orientation Scale as a measure of religious motivation, I demonstrate that individual differences in motivation alter the relationship between religiosity and prejudice with aid of a nationally representative randomized survey-experiment. Analysis of the survey data confirms the persistence of the prejudiced-religious paradox in modern-day political campaigns. However, the existence of the paradox is not uniform across believers. Individuals possess different motivations for being religious, with some correlated with increased prejudice and others correlated with decreased prejudice. Importantly, these measures of religious motivation are more potent correlates of prejudice than typical measures of religiosity — religious tradition and frequency of attendance. Analysis of the experimental data confirms that religious motivations play a key role in moderating the effect of religious campaign rhetoric on prejudice. Consequently, the relationship between religion and prejudice is more complex that previous scholarship has suggested and is contingent on individual differences in the motivation to be religious.