Religious Racism: Study Ties Organized Religion to Racist Attitudes

[MrsSmith]

an David  Donating Member  (1000+ posts)  Journal  Click to send private message to this author  Click to view this author's profile  Click to add this author to your buddy list  Click to add this author to your Ignore list      Sun Jun-06-10 01:39 PM
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Religious Racism: Study Ties Organized Religion to Racist Attitudes   Updated at 12:20 PM
   
Edited on Sun Jun-06-10 01:40 PM by Ian David
Religious Racism: Study Ties Organized Religion to Racist Attitudes

Each Sunday morning in the U.S., an estimated 40% of Americans (118 million) attend a weekly religious service. We like to think that going to church makes us better – less racist – people, but does it? A new study suggests just the opposite.

The new study offers evidence for a link between involvement in organized religion and racism. The study, “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism,” was conducted by Deborah Hall (Duke University), David C. Matz (Augsburg College), and Wendy Wood (University of Southern California), and appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review. The authors analyzed data from 55 studies on religion and racism in America dating to the civil rights era. Combined, the studies include more than 22,000 participants, mostly white and Protestant. The researchers looked not only at things like religious affiliation, church attendance and other participation but also at the motives behind their involvement to avoid clumping all religious adherents into a single category. Racial prejudice was measured principally as self-reported attitudes and behaviors, such as preferred levels of social distance toward blacks and other minority groups.

As expected, the authors found a positive correlation between religious affiliation and racism. Religious fundamentalism — the unwavering certainty in basic religious truths — correlated even more strongly with racist attitudes. And, the authors looked exclusively at Christianity and did not consider other religious traditions. The link among people who expressed purely spiritual pursuits as the motivating influence of religion was less clear.


<snip>

Is part of the problem who we’re going to church with? Perhaps if churches were more racially integrated then they wouldn’t foster racist attitudes. The evidence suggests that, as Dr. Martin Luther King observed decades ago, Sunday morning is still the “most segregated hour” of the week. A study by sociologist Michael Emerson showed that churches where 20 percent of members were of a racial minority comprised only 7 percent of U.S. congregations. Overall, 5 percent of Protestant churches and 15 percent of Roman Catholic churches were multi-racial.

<snip>

Still, integrating churches by calling on people of color to step inside predominantly-white churches is perhaps not the best solution. As an anonymous contributor to this blog noted recently, “People of color who have taken the leap of faith to join white churches usually find those churches to be houses of racialized pain, and suffer many wounds as a result.”

More:
http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2010/06/06/organized-r...

Studies dating back to 1964 are valid for today's Christians??  Instantly, I have a problem with this, especially given the "as expected" phrase and the fact that those "racist" fundies are the same people spending their own money (not Uncle Sam's) to help people, regardless of race, in foreign countries, homeless shelters, food pantries and crisis pregnancy centers, etc.  In point of absolute fact, fundies give more money to all types of charities than liberals.  So I decided to track down whatever info I could...without spending $25 to read the linked report.  (yes, I'm cheap.)

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1388176?cookieSet=1

n a study designed to investigate the respective roles of religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism as predictors of prejudice against racial minorities and homosexuals, participants (47 males, 91 females) responded to a series of questionnaire measures of these constructs. Data were analyzed using multiple regression. Consistent with previous research, authoritarianism was a significant and strong positive predictor of both forms of prejudice. With authoritarianism statistically controlled, however, fundamentalism emerged as a significant negative predictor of racial prejudice but a positive predictor of homosexual prejudice.

A study with the exact opposite result?  Imagine that...  

Of course, that's no reason to "assume" the original study "found" what it "found" because it was "expected."  

[Doc]

This is an interesting phenomenon.....at least from my personal perspective.

When I was a kid, growing up in a small town in the middle of  Missouri, there were two Baptist Churches, one white and one black.......today, there are STILL two Baptist Churches, one predominately white, and the other predominately black......

Now I know, since I belong to that church, that blacks are more than welcome in the predominately white church, in fact the two share  choirs and vocalists on special Chjristian holidays, and occasionally the two pastors switch churches for a Sunday or two......however, there remains two churches, and they remain segregated to an large extent.  I suspect that this has much more to do with common values and "community" than it does with racism......

What's missing from the study is a "solution".......I'm surprised that they don't propose "affirmative action" quotas, mandated by the government for church membership......

doc

[JohnnyReb]

The Methodist church I belong to was 1/3 white and 2/3 black until the yankees decided they couldn't allow that and made the whites leave.....in 1865. A lot of southern churches were that way until the civil war was over....maybe it was the yankees that were the original racist and just made us southerners in their mold.

[blitzkrieg_17]

What a bunch of pseudo-intellectual, left-wing crap.

[Carl]

Of course the leftist pulpit of Revs Wright,Sharpton and Jackson never had any anti white racism spouted from them because as we all have been told they just can`t be racists.

[terry]

Of course the leftist pulpit of Revs Wright,Sharpton and Jackson never had any anti white racism spouted from them because as we all have been told they just can`t be racists.

I wonder why they didn't include those churches in their study?  I think they would have found the 'expected' results there for sure.

[Carl]

I wonder why they didn't include those churches in their study?  I think they would have found the 'expected' results there for sure.

As always because the left seeks to define the terms...

Racial prejudice was measured principally as self-reported attitudes and behaviors, such as preferred levels of social distance toward blacks and other minority groups.

In other words the fact that I don`t want to live in urban war zones which just happen to be predominately minority makes me a racist rather then prudent.

I wouldn`t want to live in or near an all white anarchist jungle either but that doesn`t count.

[AllosaursRus]

I have a question, DUmbass, then why in the world did we teach them Christianity?

If our intention was to be racist and keep them under our thumb, why did we teach them they were...........
 

EQUAL???

[jukin]

The study must have included the black liberation churches.