Study Links Religious Groups and Racial Bias

My colleague referred me to an article which he read this morning linking racism to religiosity.

A meta-analysis of 55 independent studies carried out in the US with more than 20,000 mostly Christian participants has found that members of religious congregations tend to harbor prejudiced views of other races. The study appears in the February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review.

Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at USC College and the USC Marshall School of Business, lead author of the analysis, said: “Religious groups distinguish between believers and non-believers and moral people and immoral ones”… “So perhaps it’s no surprise that the strongly religious people in our research, who were mostly white Christians, discriminated against others who were different from them — blacks and minorities.”

While Wood does add that racist tendencies would not be limited to one religion: “All religions offer a moral group identity, and so across world religions — including Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Judaism and Christianity — the religious ingroup is valued over outgroups”, the conclusion reached above is very much targeted at one particular religion – Christianity.

This is unfortunate especially since there is truth in the basic conclusion that religious people have a tendency towards racism. However, I think that it is more fundamental than that – people are racist. I think it stems from our basic and intrinsic need to categorize and distinguish things. Religion is just one of the many ways in which people achieve this. But, I suppose a study coming to the conclusion that people are racist wouldn’t get much coverage in the media.

In a way, the study was conducted in such a way that the conclusion they reached was inevitable.

As noted above, the study included mostly Christian participants. This begs the question why the scope of the study wasn’t open to a wider demographical grouping, perhaps with participants from other religious faiths or just no religious beliefs? If, as Wood notes, a bigger proportion of participants were “white Christians” does this mean that religious people have a tendency to be racist or white religious people have a tendency to be or white people have a tendency to be racist? What about non-white Christian or other religious people – Do they have a tendency to be racist too?

Wood does go on to say that the results may ring false to practicing Christians in mixed-race congregations. But maintains that those are only a minority. She says: “There aren’t many churches that practice with a mixed-race congregation.” Clearly she and her colleagues have not been outside the US – in multi-racial countries, of which there are many and Singapore is one, you will find many mixed congregations. Certainly one is able to find a large number of such churches in any cosmopolitan city in the US. This conclusion simply cannot be true.

Now even if the conclusion that the study (or article) reached was valid, I think a clear distinction has to be made between the people who subscribe or pledge allegiance to the religion and the teachings of the religion itself. This can be most clearly seen in the case of militant jihadist terrorist groups, who claim that they have a moral and/or religious duty to kill innocent people. These views have rightly been disavowed by the mainstream religious establishment as being against the clear teachings of religion.

In this regard, perhaps the best example that racism is not condoned by Christianity is contained in the parable of the Good Samaritan, which ironically, the author of the article begins his article by quoting. While the story recognizes that some people, and in this case the religious leaders and priests, were racist, the entire moral thrust of the story is that racist is wrong and ungodly.

Bottom line – Are there racist people in the church? Sure there are. Are they racist because of the religion – surely not! If they are racist, then they clearly are not abiding by the teachings of the religion and hence not very devout or religious at all!