The Relationship between Religion and Religious Prejudice: A Cross-National Study of the Religious Societal Context

Abstract

Using data of the sixth wave of the World Value Survey (Nindividual = 66,241, Ncountry = 56), this cross-national study extends the current understanding of the relationship between religiosity and religious prejudice by systematically examining the religious societal context. On the individual level, religious prejudice was found to be positively related with theological exclusivism, and negatively related with horizontal conceptions of religiosity. These opposite effects of different aspects of religiosity were not generalizable across all sampled countries in terms of direction, which could not be attributed to differences in the religious societal context. On the country level, the prevalence of religious prejudice was found to be negatively associated with societal levels of religious diversity and religious freedom. Contrary to this, the prevalence of religious prejudice was not found to be related to monotheistic majority religions, and societal levels of secularism. Comparing religious prejudice with ethnic prejudice indicated that the significant main findings affect different prejudices identically, presumably due to similar mechanisms.