Religious RACIST.

[Ã¥scertain]

I find it amusing that in certain instances racism can be linked to religion. I inquired into this a few weeks ago when I stumbled accross Wendy Wood, who is a Professor of Psychology and Business. A meta-analysis of 55 independent studies carried out in the United States with more than 20,000 mostly Christian participants has found that members of religious groups tend to harbor prejudiced views of other races.

“Religious congregations distinguish between believers and non-believers and moral people and immoral ones,” Wood said. “So perhaps it’s no surprise that the strongly religious people in our research, who were mostly white Christians, discriminated against others who were different from them â€" blacks and minorities.”

Most of the studies reviewed by Wood focused on Christians because Christianity is the most common religion in the United States. Her analysis found significantly less racism among people without strong religious beliefs. Wood speculated that racist tendencies would not be limited to one religion, though: “All religions offer a moral group identity, and so across world religions â€" including Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Judaism and Christianity â€" the religious ingroup is valued over outgroups.”
Wood and her co-authors also found little difference in racist attitudes between religious fundamentalists and more moderate Christians. The second group tended to pay lip service to racial equality but harbored the same prejudices.
The causes of religious racism are complex. For example, while noting that "decades of research have demonstrated an empirical relationship between religion and prejudice," the authors of the 2001 study blame right-wing authoritarianism rather than religious belief for instances of racial prejudice among Christian fundamentalists.Wood's review places her among those scholars who find evidence of racial prejudice in a wide range of religious groups, from the highly devout and evangelical to the more moderate and less vocal.


*EDIT: Typo

[notself]

It appears that the more one identifies with a group, fundamentalist religion, the more one sees negative differences in those outside the group.  If she tested for political belief she may find the same thing.  The far right and far left might tend to hold negative views of people belonging to the "outside" party.  Perhaps strong identification with any group creates prejudice toward any non-member.

[ScaryBadReligion]

This simply confirms that people who have strong tendencies to identify with a group also have strong tendencies to exclude outsiders.