Why did Switzerland, a country of four minarets, vote to ban those structures? How did a proposed Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan ignite a fevered political debate across the United States? Nussbaum surveys such developments and identifies the fear behind these reactions. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, she suggests a route past this limiting response and toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society.
Overcoming intolerance requires consistent application of universal principles of respect for conscience. Many fundamentalists claim to possess knowledge of the absolute truth concerning matters of morality, and they perceive dissenting perspectives as threats to eternal salvation.
RF individuals are inclined to support and defer to the divinely sanctioned right to rule of theocratic leaders that impose and enforce legal regimes grounded in exclusive revelatory doctrine Allport The cultural isolation and high internal homogeneity of fundamentalist groups can exacerbate pre-existing dispositions toward intolerance.
Finally, RF is associated with increased levels of aggression, especially toward values-violators Altemeyer Thus, it seems that the prosocial effects of religiosity are overridden when a religious person is a fundamentalist who is confronted with an individual who threatens his or her core values Batson et al. If we control for authoritarianism, there may be a weak, or even negative, correlation between fundamentalism and intolerance Hunsberger ; Laythe, Finkel, and Kirkpatrick ; Laythe et al.
Thus, both the RF and RWA studies suggest that it is the way that people are religious, rather than religiosity per se or the content of religious belief, that disposes them toward prejudice and intolerance. Hansen and Norenzayan Or might these cognitive-behavioral dispositions have mutually reinforcing effects? The answers to these questions constitute important topics for future research.
Most major world religions include norms of tolerance, forgiveness, and equality. That these norms are motivating when internalized is shown by the negative correlation between Christian Orthodoxy and some types of prejudice, discussed above.
Yet there are also prescribed prejudices in most major world religions Coward For example, there are Biblical passages denigrating homosexuality and condoning the subordination of women.
For example, Laythe, Finkel, and Kirkpatrick found that a positive correlation between RF and intolerance to homosexuals remained even after RWA was controlled for see also Laythe et al. This may be due in part to the fact that anti-homosexual discrimination is arguably a prescribed or at least not proscribed prejudice in many Christian churches. In another study, Bushman et al.
They presented individuals who believe in God with a vignette, supposedly based on the Bible or ancient scrolls, in which Yahweh commands that innocent people be murdered along with the perpetrators of a rape.
They found that subjects who believed in God, after being exposed to the vignette, were more likely to demonstrate aggression to their laboratory partner than non-believers or be- lievers who had not been presented with the vignette.
The extent to which religion-associated intolerance can be explained as the correlate of personality traits, or rather as the product of a principled motivation to follow the contentful norms of a religion, remains an open question Batson et al. That being said, RWA has been shown to be a stronger predictor of prejudice than the content of community norms Duck and Hunsberger , and this would seem to explain why the degree of intolerance that RF individuals hold towards homosexuals and others is often in excess of that prescribed by religious doctrine Fulton, Gorsuch, and Maynard Prejudice and tolerance do not, however, sit on opposing ends of a cognitive-behavioral continuum.
Sullivan et al. A commitment to political tolerance typically involves a commitment to democratic proced- ures, the rule of law, and equal protection under the law. Instead of providing subjects with a list of out- groups and then asking a series of tolerance-probing questions about these, the least-liked paradigm allows subjects to pick their most disliked group from a list of groups and if their least-liked group is not listed, subjects may write it in.
Least-liked groups are used since, for tolerance to be possible, it is crucial that the values, norms, and interests of the out-group are not only regarded as different, but actually disliked, or deemed to have a negative moral valence.
These three components of prejudice are likely to reinforce one another, given the nature of motivated reasoning and the demonstrated effects of negative affect in general, and disgust reactions in particular, on moral judgment processes see Haidt Saroglou et al.
Work on attitude—behavior consistency has found that attitudes and behav- iors can be highly aligned when the right sort of moderators are present see Fazio and Zanna for a review. Thus, as stereotyping, disgust responses, and prejudicial attitudes increase, the behavioral tolerance of values-violating out-group members decreases.
For these reasons, the existence of a pathway from prejudice to intolerance is extremely plausible. In practice, however, this combination is the exception rather than the rule. Some political scientists have hypothesized that a prejudiced population can be more effectively mobilized by elites to perform varying levels of intolerant behavior, ranging from discrimination against immigrants or minorities to segregation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide Green and Seher Groups in general, and religious groups in particular, provide their members to varying degrees with shared norms, values, traditions, and metaphysics, which in turn helps to mobilize, coordinate, and justify collective action see Kruglanski et al.
Alterna- tively, out-group attack in the face of epistemic threat may amount to the misattribution or projection of negative arousal i. Some scholars, such as Kimball and Armstrong , interpret the rise of militant Islam and Christian funda- mentalism as a reaction to the social and epistemic threat that modernity poses to established religions.
But all indicators suggest that prejudice, political intolerance, and out-group derogation are consistently more severe for religious members of religious groups than for non-religious members of non-religious groups, such as atheists.
Prejudice and intolerance is directed from religious people to atheists much more so than the other way around see Gervais and Norenza- yan, this volume. Little is known about the individual psychological mechanisms that motiv- ate extreme intergroup behaviors.
These may be grounded in long-standing interethnic hatreds, or constructed from the strategic necessities of local circumstances, or both or neither. Most adaptive explanations of religion focus on its postulated role in coordinating large, cohesive, and distantly related groups of co-oper- ators, enabling them to solve ecological design problems that no individual group member could solve on her own, and that could not otherwise be solved through more limited coalitions Sosis and Bressler Wilson ; Kirkpatrick ; Dunbar In this way, religion may have served as the epistemic and behavioral glue for larger, more cohesive human groups, both prior to and after the emergence of agriculture and the rise of chiefdoms with specialized divisions of labor.
Reli- gious tolerance may have played a similar role in the subsequent expansion of cooperating communities that took place over the last few centuries in Europe. As an effective marker of group boundaries, religious identity may have contributed to an evolutionary solution to the Goldilocks problem of group altruism. Among the various group-identifying characteristics, religion may have played a unique role, since many of its core elements, such as prayer and ritual, have been shown to generate neuropsychological states that attenuate the boundary between self and group, increase the sense of interconnectedness and belonging, and reduce the sense of personal identity so as to enable individuals to identify more strongly with a collective entity.
The effects of communal ritual are psychologically powerful, inducing a degree of de-indi- viduation that leads to a convergence in mood, mutual affection, and a sense of belonging in convening co-believers Marshall It would not be surprising if the outer limits of individual tolerance coincided with the perceived boundaries of a cooperating community.
Indeed, we have seen that with the exception of Quest orienta- tion, all modes of religiosity seem to underwrite limited coalitions of cooper- ators, creating a moral community of unrelated individuals that rate fellow members more highly on virtually every relevant social scale especially those having to do with trust than individuals belonging to out-groups. There is a general perception that religious individuals are more cooperative than non- religious ones.
From a psycho-developmental perspective, humans rely heavily on their kin and peers for developing a coherent, action- guiding narrative regarding the events and objects in their environment. Kruglanski and colleagues 85 have argued that a shared social reality is a necessary precondition for effective group action. It follows that under some ecological circumstances, intolerance may be conducive to the viability and success of collective action, as may be the case when a group is compelled to make decisions quickly or under high stress, or when an out-group is perceived to present a threat to in-group identity.
Although intolerance in its various manifestations, from subtle discrimin- ation and avoidance to outright aggression and homicide, may have been adaptive in the intergroup competition for limited resources or as a defensive response to potential parasite transmission between groups Fincher and Thornhill , this in no way implies that intolerance is ethically acceptable or even pragmatically desirable. For more on this dichotomy, see Mendus Lecture Three.
Similar sentiments are expressed by Stern Not surprisingly New Atheist polemics have been met by theistic polemics. These terms will be used interchangeably. Other accounts of toleration are due to Nicholson , Mendus , and Fotion and Elfstrom Churchill argues similarly I might live in a community where everybody smokes, including myself.
However, I might disapprove of smoking even though I smoke and decide that it ought to be tolerated. This point is also made by Heyd In addition to preventing the interference of some groups in the activities of others, the state may sometimes need to actively promote the value of tolerance, especially when intolerant attitudes become prevalent within a particular society.
Mill ch. See also Halbertal Note, however, that although evangelicals lag behind other groups in relative tolerance, they are still generally tolerant in terms of the absolute proportion of tolerant to intolerant evangelicals Smith While there have been some reports that the relationship between religiosity and prejudice is curvilinear rather than linear—that is to say, people who attend church either at very high or very low frequencies are the least likely to be highly prejudiced—these results are controversial see, e.
Hunsberger and the references cited therein. Note that religion-related variables are probably not the most important predict- ors of social and political intolerance. Threat perception Jackson and Esses , personal insecurity Eigenberger , and lack of commitment to norms of democracy appear to be stronger indicators of prejudice and intolerance Sullivan et al.
When political tolerance is measured in the abstract, that is, in terms of support for democratic institutions per se, such as equal protection under the law, majority rule, minority rights, freedom of speech, etc. When group content is added, however, the responses change considerably, as the foregoing discussion suggests. Note that although tolerance conceptually requires a negative or disapproving attitude toward an out-group, it need not, and indeed usually will not, involve extreme stereotyping or disgust directed at out-group members.
Conversely, an out- group need not be disliked to be the subject of intolerance, since the latter can be motivated by desires for conformity or some other end, rather than negative affect. While there is probably a causal trajectory from prejudice to intolerance, classic work in twentieth-century social psychology such as the Milgram obedience and Zimbardo prison studies shows that prejudice is not a necessary condition for intergroup hostility.
For recent discussion, see Powell and Clarke Frenkel-Brunswik, D. Levinson, and R. Sanford The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper. Allport, G.
The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley. Kramer Ross Altemeyer, B. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Altemeyer, R. The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Aquinas, T. Summa Theologiae, English Translation. New Advent. Accessed October 18, Arendt, H. London: Penguin Books. Armstrong, K. London: Harper Collins. Ashcraft, R. Bloom, J. Martin and W.
Proudfoot eds. New York: Columbia University Press. Atran, S. New York: Oxford University Press. Norenzayan Aukst-Margeti, B. Margeti Bacharach, M. Gambetta Cook ed. New York: Sage,. Barber, B. New York: Norton. Batson, C. Gray Raynor-Prince Ventis The Religious Experience. Naifeh, and S.
Pate Oleson, J. Weeks et al. Schoenrade, and W. Floyd, Julie M. Meyer, and Alana. Winner Intrinsic religion as a source of universal compassion. Eidelman, S. Higley, and S. Russell Snyder and S. Lopez eds. Denton, and J. Vollmecke Bayle, P. Philosophical Commentary, A. Tannenbaum tr. New York: Lang. Beatty, K. Walter Bering, J.
Bloom, P. Murray and J. Schloss eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyer, P. Religion Explained. London: Vintage. Bushman, B. Ridge, E. Das, C. Key and G. Busath Canetti-Nisim, D. Cavanaugh, W. Churchill, R. Ravazi and D. Ambuel eds , Philosophy, Religion and the Question of Intolerance, pp. Clarke, S. Basingstoke: Pal- grave Macmillan. Cohen, A. Coward, H. Darley, J. Batson Dawkins, R. The God Delusion.
De Dreu, C. Yzerbyt and J. Leyens Demoulin, S. Saroglou and M. Van Pachterbeke Dennett, D. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking. De Roover, J. Balagangadhara Donahue, M.
Washington: Regnery. Duck, R. Hunsberger Duckitt, J. The Social Psychology of Prejudice. New York: Praeger. Dunbar, R. Eigenberger, M. Eisenstein, M. Felling, and J. Peters Ellison, C. Musick Fazio, R. It powerfully reveals the narrow gap between intolerance and violence in America. The second edition contains a new chapter on Islamophobia and adds fresh material on the Christian persecution complex, white supremacy and other race-related issues, sexuality, and the role played by social media.
John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal's overarching narrative weaves together a rich, compelling array of textual and visual materials. Arranged thematically, each chapter provides a broad historical background, and each document or cluster of related documents is entwined in context as a discussion of the issues unfolds.
The need for this book has only increased in the midst of today's raging conflicts about immigration, terrorism, race, religious freedom, and patriotism. Author : Chris Beneke,Christopher S.
Spanning more than two centuries across colonial British America and the United States, The First Prejudice offers a groundbreaking exploration of the early history of persecution and toleration. The twelve essays in this volume were composed by leading historians with an eye to the larger significance of religious tolerance and intolerance.
Individual chapters examine the prosecution of religious crimes, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, the British imperial context of toleration, the bounds of Native American spiritual independence, the nuances of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, the resilience of African American faiths, and the challenges confronted by skeptics and freethinkers.
The First Prejudice presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America.
It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U. By incorporating a broad range of groups and religious differences in its accounts of tolerance and intolerance, The First Prejudice opens a significant new vista on the understanding of America's long experience with diversity.
Author : Ira Eisenstein Publisher: N.
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