Faith, truth, and tolerance: Religion and political tolerance in the United States

There have been few political tolerance studies in the U.S. which have included religious variables, but those few have concluded that the religiously-committed, orthodox believers, or fundamentalists tend to be less tolerant than other citizens. There are problems with these earlier studies, however, especially in how political tolerance and religiosity have been measured. Most studies have relied on the tolerance measures developed by Stouffer in 1955 and adopted by the General Social Surveys. They have also relied on simple measures of religion--often church attendance and religious preference or denomination. My analysis utilizes the content-controlled or least-liked tolerance measures developed by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus (1982) and employs a more sophisticated measurement approach for religious belief and commitment developed by Kellstedt, Green, Guth and Smidt (1996). My contention is that the relationship between religion and intolerance found in the earlier studies is an artifact of the measurement approaches employed. My explanation for why religion does not influence tolerance judgments is based on information processing and attitude accessibility theories. Research on political information processing has demonstrated that people tend to simplify their decisionmaking, relying on those few attitudes or pieces of information most immediately accessible, relevant, and salient to the decision. As Sullivan et al. (1982) and Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse and Wood (1995) have demonstrated, the attitudes most likely to be accessible and salient to political tolerance judgments are psychological and political predispositions. Religious beliefs are not as likely to be elicited because they are not closely linked to those constructs related to tolerance judgments. The analysis is structured around three arguments: (1) religion is not related to political tolerance, (2) religion is not related to the predispositions which do affect political tolerance, and (3) political tolerance is explained primarily by psychological traits and political attitudes not related to religion. I also provide a comparison of results using both the Stouffer-type and the least-liked tolerance measures to demonstrate the bias inherent in the Stouffer-type measurement approach