The Authoritarians

exceptions, one can think of some very unauthoritarian Baptists, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and ex-president Jimmy Carter. The first socialist premier in Canada, who pioneered medicare and other programs in Canada’s social “safety net,” was the Baptist minister Tommy Douglas.

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12 See Bob Altemeyer, “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to be Prejudiced?”The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2003, 13, 17-28.

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13 The Promise Keepers quote is from Bill McCartney with David Halbrook, Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference, 1997, Nashville: Word Publishers, and was given by Donald J. Sider in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, 2005, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, on pages 25-26.

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14 Want some numbers to get an idea how strong these generalizations are? In that 2005 study of 638 parents of university students I described in note 7, Religious Fundamentalism correlated .74 with Right-Wing Authoritarianism (an “almost unheard of” strong relationship), .89 with Barna’s measure of being an evangelical (an even bigger “almost unheard of” relationship), .72 with scores on the Religious Ethnocentrism scale (yet another almost unheard of relationship), and (THUD!) .19 with scores on the Manitoba Ethnocentrism scale that measures racial and ethnic prejudice (a weak relationship). (See note 12 of Chapter 1 to see where these labels came from.) The size of the last correlation is hardly alarming, but the question I have tried to answer is, why is there a positive correlation between being a religious fundamentalist and being racially prejudiced—as there has been in study after study? Why are “holy people” more prejudiced than “unholy people”? Shouldn’t holy people be less prejudiced than most?

Recently Gary Leak and Darrel Moreland at Creighton University in Omaha tested my hunch that religious ethnocentrism plays a pivotal role in the appearance of non-religious prejudices in fundamentalists. Using a mediated hierarchical regression analysis of Religious Fundamentalism and Religious Ethnocentrism scores from nearly 300 students to predict general racial prejudice, hostility toward homosexuals and prejudice toward African-Americans, they found religious ethnocentrism mediated fundamentalists’ other hostilities so powerfully that controlling for it always appreciably reduced the fundamentalist-prejudice relationship. In all cases, religious ethnocentrism proved to be the mediator in the relationship, not fundamentalism. After I learned of their study I performed their analysis on my sample of 638 parents’ answers to the Manitoba Ethnocentrism scale and the Attitudes toward Homosexuals scale, and found the same thing. A considerable amount of fundamentalists’ nonreligious prejudices thus are attributable to their strong religious prejudices. Learning to dislike people on religious grounds seemingly has powerful consequences for how we react to people who are different in other ways.

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15 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 1994, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.

B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., pages ix, 3.

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16 I recently looked to see if Christian fundamentalists had a double standard about Mormons proselytizing door-to-door. They did not. Most of them (52%) said no restraints should be placed on such activity, and only a very few (6%) said it should be forbidden. So it is not true that fundamentalists use double standards in every judgment they make.

One is always tempted to make such over-generalizations when a string of findings all come out pointing in the same direction. Exceptions exist, in my own studies and possibly in others’, to most of the conclusions I am drawing here. Fundamentalists/authoritarians do not always think illogically, think everything is our greatest problem, hold starkly contradictory ideas, act without integrity, respond dogmatically, and so on. But it is easy to find situations in which they do, compared with others, so with the bulk of the data on one side, I draw the conclusions I do. Thus in this case, I have often found that fundamentalists/authoritarians use double standards in their judgments. I have moreover tried several times to see if their opposites do the same thing when given the chance, and it is much harder to find evidence that they do.

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17 For a clear explanation of the ways in which creation science and intelligent design run afoul of accumulated evidence and fail to make the grade as sciences, see Francis Collins’ The Language of God, 2006, New York: Free Press. Dr. Collins, an evangelical Christian, heads the Human Genome Project in Washington D. C., and along with many other scientists has no difficulty reconciling his deeply held religious beliefs with a total acceptance of the theory of evolution. David G. Myers of Hope College, a man of strong faith and the author of the textbook I assign my introductory psychology students, would be another example.

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18 For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity’s ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to monkeys. Instead, he correctly inferred that the “anthropomorphous apes” (chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, orangutans, and ourselves) had descended from an ancient anthropomorphous forerunner (Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man, New York: The Modern Library, p. 518-519.)

Our “grandma” and “grandpa” were not monkeys or chimps but australopithecines, whose fossil record now goes back several million years. It is one thing to look at a rhesus monkey and say, “We could never have come from that.” It is another thing to look at “Lucy”and say the same thing—and fundamentalists would go much farther out on a limb and deny the relevance of even Homo erectus. But of course most fundamentalists probably have no knowledge of such discoveries which-while they have an endless capacity for igniting controversy among paleoanthropologists—long ago supplied many possible “missing links” between humans and our “recent” predecessors. The problem is not, “Where is the link?” but “Which one was it at this point in time?”That said, the total primate fossil record is by no means complete; fossils only form under certain rare conditions, and exploration for them is still going on.

As for evolution being “just a theory,” people who say this are using “theory” in the sense of a theory being an untested hypothesis, a hunch. When scientists talk about the theory of evolution, they mean “theory” in the sense of a set of testable propositions that have been shown to explain and predict a lot of things. Thus you have Newton’s theory of gravity (and on a broader scale, Einstein’s). Does anybody think gravity is unproven because there is a theory of gravity? If so, I hope they don’t try stepping off a tall building.

In just the same way, virtually every scientist working in a relevant field believes evolution occurred and is still occurring. Evolution itself is not a hypothesis, not a hunch. Evolution is as accepted as a fact in science as the belief that if you lift a pencil now and let go, it will fall. (Go ahead, try this, even at home.) And if you want a demonstration that evolution still occurs, get yourself infected by one of the treatment-resistant bacteria that have evolved and spread since the introduction of antibiotics. (No, don’t try this, anywhere.)

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19 Hence I was not surprised to read on December 3, 2006 that Bishop Adoyo, the head of the Pentecostal Church in Kenya, wants the National Museum in Nairobi to place its priceless collection of hominid fossils in a back room where the public cannot see them. He explained that these fossils support the theory of evolution, which his religion opposes. The bishop threatened to organize protests to force the museum to comply if it did not agree to his request. The bishop’s message seems crystal clear: We don’t believe this, so we don’t want the public to see the evidence that we are wrong.

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20 You may understandably be wondering where I get off putting students’ religious beliefs to such a test as part of a psychology experiment, so let me tell you more about the study. The students knew when they signed up for the experiment that it involved “interpreting certain passages