To Hell with Tolerance: Salvific Exclusivity and Political Attitudes

• In Event: Bringing Belief Back In

Abstract

Political theorists have long viewed intolerance as deleterious to democracy. Their accounts, from Rousseau's _Second Discourse_ to Rawls' _Political Liberalism_, often highlight the negative role that uncompromising religious belief plays in this dynamic. Over the past few decades, behavioralists have substantiated many of these claims through empirical studies featuring consistently negative correlations between political tolerance and religiosity (variably defined). Some recent research, however, has called into question this seemingly ironclad relationship, specifically pointing our attention to the need for disaggregation and more precise measurement. Along these lines, the present project elaborates and tests the influence of a hitherto ignored component of religiosity: views on salvation.

More specifically, this study examines the extent to which exclusivist beliefs in salvation condition tolerance judgments, thereby offering the most direct mapping of theological intolerance to political intolerance. The analysis presents evidence from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, which incorporates both minoritarian and majoritarian viewpoints. Previous analyses on original data indicate that salvific exclusivity not only taps into a unique dimension of religiosity, but that it is also a highly impactful determinant of political intolerance. This suggests that researchers examining the influence of religiosity on tolerance judgments should incorporate this novel measure in future empirical models.

Author

• Youssef Chouhoud, Christopher Newport University