Abstract
The ability to cooperate with others, both individuals and institutions, is an essential social function built on trust. We explore the competing religious logics that shape the radius of trust, placing emphasis on communicated values in the social context of the congregation. Using cross-sectional data from American adults, we show the effects of religious beliefs that augment risk, values that demand outreach, and practices that capture experience with collective action. With a survey experiment, we show that priming different religious styles (inclusive of beliefs, values, and outreach) shifts the propensity to trust government and the social other in expected ways. In this way, we attempt to make sense of previous variant findings by suggesting that religious influence is dynamic and dependent on the religious style choices communicated to congregants.
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Notes
See the Online Appendix for discussion of the sample.
This is not a denominational measure, but starts with identity with a religious family and then uses evangelical/born again status and race to differentiate among Protestants. Thus “Black Protestants” self-identify as black and select either Protestant or “Other Christian.” For updated code, please see Stetzer and Burge (2016).
Evangelical identification was significantly correlated to belief in the Devil (r = .42, p = .00), belief in Jesus’s eventual return (r = − .50, p = .00), and the belief that God decides the course of one’s life (r = .38, p = .00).
See the Online Appendix for descriptive results in Fig. A.2 of how religious attendance and religious engagement beyond attendance are linked to both forms of trust.
For these models we used OLS, though the results are almost identical using ordered logit.
In another dataset (a different national sample of American adults fielded through Qualtrics Panels), we find a positive correlation between belief in the Devil and threat perceived from the respondents’ least liked groups (r = .10, p = .01).
We also assessed whether these interactions varied by race (white–nonwhite) and evangelical ID. Neither of these triple interactions suggested additional conditional effects.
We also tried this interaction successfully with religious engagement (engagement and attendance are correlated at r = .4, p < .01). The same pattern obtains—holding more or less inclusive values has no effect on the highly engaged and holding more inclusive values strongly boosts trust among the non-engaged.
The Online appendix reports some results (Fig. A.4) to show the distribution of political churches across evangelical status and religiosity.
There are two ways to read this result. One is as stated in the paper following this note. The second is available in the Online Appendix (Fig. A.5), which suggests that political distrust is actually a function of experiencing political disagreement in the congregation.
Please see the Online Appendix for further description of the sample. While MT samples are notoriously irreligious, the religious respondents in the sample show roughly the same relationships with political variables as GSS respondents (see Lewis et al. 2015).
Although there was some variation in the composition of the treatment groups, ANOVA tests confirmed that randomization was successful across demographic groups. There was no significant variation in gender (p = .57), education (p = .47), or age (p = .89). We include controls in the models of treatment effects to balance out the cells. This survey included another experimental design that allowed a manipulation check, which 96% passed. We excluded the 3.8% who did not pass this test.
The items in the two religious style batteries were highly internally consistent with alphas of .87 for the inclusive and .93 for the exclusive battery. These levels obtained regardless of placement in the survey (if they were not primed with the battery, it was asked later, well after the trust measures). Moreover, the levels of agreement with the two sets of questions were statistically identical whether primed or not (both p > .10). Please see the Online Appendix for a full description of the religious styles.
The model also controlled for age, race, education, and gender; the results suggest that older, more educated, Democratic females trust more than less educated, poorer, Republican males.
In survey data from a 2012 US national sample, more exclusive values (measured the same way as in the cross-sectional survey) were related to a decreased likelihood of having a political discussion partner with whom the respondent disagrees and an increased likelihood of having a church-member discussion partner.
Issues caused by measurement error could be at fault as suggested previously. Not only do the Social Trust OLS Models return smaller adjusted R2 values for both the cross-sectional and experimental designs (.040 and .062 respectively), the control measures which were significant for each political trust model exhibit considerable variation and movement around 0 in the social trust models (see Table A.2).
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Acknowledgements
This research was developed with the support of the Denison Summer Scholars program and supplementary research funds from the Gilpatrick Center. We thank both for their support. The data and code necessary to replicate the analyses contained in the paper and Online Appendix are available on Dataverse here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2S5CKF.
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Hsiung, B.O., Djupe, P.A. Religion and the Extension of Trust. Polit Behav 41, 609–631 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9466-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9466-4