Abstract
Why do some religious authorities empathize with outsiders while others espouse xenophobia? This paper argues that church leaders are less likely to display empathy when their religious identity is dominant within the nation. While the overlap of church and nation reinforces antipathy towards outsiders, lower levels of dominance imbue religious networks with empathy. The author develops this argument through a comparison of Catholic discourse on Jews in the Low Countries at the onset of the Holocaust. The analysis reveals that Catholic leaders in the religiously mixed Netherlands were empathetic to Jews while their counterparts in homogeneously Catholic Belgium espoused antisemitism. Moreover, Belgian Catholics displayed less empathy towards Jews than Belgian seculars, while the opposite was true in the Netherlands. Subnational statistical analyses provide suggestive evidence that these different discourses had important consequences. While antisemitic mobilization in the Netherlands was much weaker in Catholic strongholds, this relationship was reversed in Belgium. Analyses of ethnic conflict and religious mediation across the globe confirm the importance of religious dominance outside of the Low Countries. This suggest that it is the interplay of nation and denomination -not something inherent to either of the two- that produces religious empathy and that we need to situate groups in their broader multi-cleavage contexts to further our understanding of intergroup relationships.
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Notes
Empathy is distinct from sympathy as described by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 2010a). Whereas the latter denotes the pleasure that one derives from a broad sense of fellow feeling with whatever passion, the latter captures one distinct and specific process through which people become more sympathetic by recognizing shared vulnerabilities due to social similarity. Although Smith believed that situational similarity could facilitate sympathy, he did not see them as one and the same thing. In addition, he thought sympathy was unlikely to occur if there were stronger preferences at play and if fellows were held in low esteem. Given the risks involved in expressing sympathy with Jews during the German occupation, it seems unlikely he would consider it a site to observe sympathy.
I did not select a Protestant Dutch newspaper as there is no comparison group in Belgium. In addition, the biggest Protestant congregation, the Dutch reformed church, did not publish a nationwide newspaper.
In almost all cases the largest newspaper was available for each community. However, for Dutch Catholics, I had to rely on the newspaper with the second largest readership. Number one newspaper De Maasbode is not available for all years. However, I have conducted a robustness check using Maasbode data for the years 1930-1932. Results are in line with the ones presented below: 77 percent of all Catholic claim were pro-Jewish while the same is true for 55 percent of all claims made by seculars. This is in line with earlier research that indicates that the type of newspaper does not necessarily affect the measurement of elite position in public debates when using overall aggregates, see Koopmans and Statham (1999).
For the Belgian case I excluded nationalist organizations that drew connections between religion and nationalism. This was done to prevent me from conflating nationalist and Catholic discourse. This coding decision is a conservative choice and makes it less likely that I find support for my main hypothesis. Coding these organizations as Catholic makes the difference in discourse between the two countries even more pronounced.
Over time trends can be obtained upon request. It is important to highlight that although the Flemish and Walloons lived in the same state they do not have similar views of the nation. Whereas Dutch speakers adhered to Flemish nationalism, French speakers conceived of the nation as Walloon or Belgian.
Joden* OR Joodsch* OR Jood* OR Israel*
Claims by the same actor made on the same occasion and location are coded as one single claim.
This analysis assumes that all claims are equally important. However, even within elite discourse some statements carry more weight than others. However, there is no reason to believe that this would differ between Belgium than the Netherlands.
A fully automated content analysis would probably result in more efficient and reliable coding. However, full automation requires access to a a complete body of text to train and run classification algorithms. Unfortunately, this is not available for Belgium. While the Royal Library in Brussels owns this body of text and allows for the in house use of search engines on it, it does not allow users to work with the raw text files.
Unpaired T-tests of these differences suggest that these differences are significant with P-values<.0001. In the Netherlands, Flanders and Wallonia Belgium 4, 3 and 3 percent of the Catholic claims were neutral in tone respectively.
Unpaired T-tests of these differences suggest that these differences are significant with P-values<.0000001. If we analyze liberal and socialist discourse separately we get remarkable similar results. Whereas socialist claims were positive 66 percent of time, the same is true for 62 percent of all liberal claims.
Unpaired T-tests of these differences suggest that these differences are significant with P-values<.0000001. Again, socialist and liberal claim making was remarkably similar. Whereas socialists were pro-Semitic 61 percent of the time, the same is true for 60 percent of all liberal claims.
In both countries 4 percent of all secular claims were neutral in tone, underlining the overall similarity in secular discourse.
Size is calculated by the taking the percentage of claims deploying the frame in question.
Thickness of the ties is calculated based on the percentage of all co-occurrences between frames.
Referring to the legend that Jews were destined to wander around the world until the second coming of Christ.
Descriptives, detailed descriptions of models and sources can be found in the online appendix.
Replicating results presented by Croes and Tammes (2004).
Bormann et al. (2017). Descriptives, estimated models and a detailed description of the sources can again be found in the supplementary materials.
This analysis adds the religious dominance measure to model 2 presented in Bormann et al. However, 2,441 same group dyads are excluded from the analysis to avoid the overestimation of cleavage effects. Descriptives, detailed descriptions of models and sources can be found in the online appendix.
I marked each country 10 years before or after the outbreak of ethnic warfare as experiencing ethnic conflict
Descriptives, detailed descriptions of models and sources can be found in the online appendix.
In a similar vein, the religious dominance proposition might be less relevant in contexts where, due to a lack of pluralism, the presence of religious diversity is perceived as a threat to the overarching moral unity of society. In these cases, church leaders confronted with competing religious groups might choose to deploy xenophobia to strengthen overall moral commitments to existing social hierarchies (Bailey and Snedker 2011).
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Acknowledgements
Bruce Carruthers, Marc Chaves, Neil Fligstein, Jeff Guhin, Aliza Luft, Jan Rademakers, Theo Salemink, Mary Shi, Martha Wilfahrt, several anonymous reviewers as well as participants in Berkeley’s European Politics Working Group and Berkeley’s CCOP workshop provided excellent comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would like to thank Onno Boonstra, Marnix Croes, Peter Tammes, Herman van Rens, Sven Vrielinck, Dorien Styven, Laurence Schram, Guy Vanthemsche, the Kazerne Dossin and LOKSTAT/UGent for sharing data. Shape-files were provided by NLgis, the Kadaster and LOKSTAT/UGENT. This project has been made possible by a Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies, the National Science Foundation (grant #1122985), the American Association for Netherlandic Studies and the Council For European Studies.
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Braun, R. Religious dominance and empathy. Theor Soc 49, 387–415 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09378-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09378-1