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Islamophobia? Religion, Contact with Muslims, and the Respect for Islam

  • Research Note
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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

In the midst of growing reservations about Muslims in America, this study seeks to explore the factors accounting for Islamophobia by utilizing nationally representative data. The findings suggest that religious affiliations have differential effects on the degree to which one respects Islam, with Christians more likely to have low regard for Islam. The image of a God who punishes his followers for their sins has a positive association with the odds of Islam being least respected among all religions. While higher frequency of contact with Muslims predicts an overall improved opinion for Islam, evangelical and black Protestants present the opposite picture. Their increased exposure to Muslims leads to lower respect for Islam. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of intergroup contact and subcultural identity.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Notes

  1. Next to Islam, Mormonism was the religion for whom respondents hold the least respect (10.6%), followed by Other (9.2%), Buddhism (6.3%), Hinduism (2.4%), Christianity (2.3%), and Judaism (2.2%).

  2. As one of the reviewers noted, measuring contact with Muslims by the number of conversations per year is problematic since most people do not immediately or primarily identify the individuals they encounter in daily living as “Muslim.” To overcome this shortcoming, Moore (2002) used a probe to measure familiarity with Muslims. Lee et al. (2009) introduced a proxy measure; they used “the number of friends a participant reported” as a proxy measure for effective contact with Muslims. However, because of the limitation of the data, the current study could not use a probe nor measure the number of Muslim friends.

  3. Previous scholarship has used different and more detailed questions than what this study used to measure the image of God who is angry and judgmental (Froese and Bader 2007; Froese, Bader, and Smith 2008; Mencken, Bader, and Embry 2009). Respondents in other studies were asked how well the adjectives “critical,” “punishing,” “severe,” and “wrathful” describe God, out of which an index was made. In other cases, respondents were asked to locate their understanding of God between two distinct character descriptions (king-friend, judge-lover, master-spouse, and father-mother) and responses that selected king, judge, master, and father constituted an image of wrathful God. The current study cannot measure the image of God in a more nuanced way due to limitations of the data.

  4. The question is not actually measuring “literalism” which has been frequently used as an indicator of religious fundamentalism. Literalist belief is a belief that the Bible (or religious texts) is “literally true, word for word.” However, given the limitation of the questionnaire, the measure the current study employed can serve as an approximation of literalism.

  5. Although black Protestants have developed a distinct and unified religious culture due to the history of discrimination and disadvantage in the US, there exist substantial denominational differences among them, such as sectarian conservative Protestant, mainline Protestants, and nondenominational Protestants (Sherkat 2001). However, because the data do not provide an easy way of differentiating black Protestants by denominational identity, the current study considers black Protestants as culturally homogenous, bent on conservative theology (Sherkat, De Vries, and Creek 2010).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dan Olson who assisted in the preparation of Figures. Thanks also to the helpful comments of the members of the informal seminar in sociology of religion at Purdue University as well as the three anonymous reviewers. In addition, I am grateful to Catherine Jun for her assistance in preparing earlier versions.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Purdue University, 700 W. State St, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Jong Hyun Jung

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Jung, J.H. Islamophobia? Religion, Contact with Muslims, and the Respect for Islam. Rev Relig Res 54, 113–126 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-011-0033-2

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