Does Christianity Make You Racist?

I just read through some of the comments over there. Same old BS; ‘try that with Islam’, ‘why attack religion’, etc. Pathetic.

I’d be interested to see the study replicated with other words that we associate with certain groups – governmentally/politically-charged words, words we associate with advocacy organizations, etc. Right now there’s not enough info as to whether it’s religion, or the association with rewards or absolute truth, or the association with a particular group.

interesting post…but does not suprise me one bit.

here a interesting youtube video “Frank Schaeffer – Author of “Crazy For God”” related to this topic,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uSdl2jCWRk

do agree with Hemant, not all christian are like this

“They can cue fundamentalism or political conservatism, which can isolate “out-groups,” – that really resonates with me. i can see that for sure. I don’t know about the “Protestant work ethic” – I’ve never heard of that. I definitely think that even if your brand of Christianity is not extremist or racist, you still have a certain sympathy with the more extreme versions of your faith, based on the fact that you both believe basically the same thing. Really, the extremists are often just taking what you claim to believe to its logical extreme, and there could likely be a subconscious respect for that among more moderate Christians or those sympathetic to the Christian faith.

Note that the groups weren’t divided into Christians vs. non-Christians. It’s the words themselves that were changed between the groups, so the affect has nothing to do with the people in question being Christians per se. It’s the Woody Allen effect (paraphrased, “whenever I listen to Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland”).

Other research along this line has looked at how people rate the lightness/darkness of “religious themed” and “neutral” words written in shades of gray, and has found that people will consistently think that the religious words are lighter/darker than they really are based on connotation (e.g., heaven is lighter, sin is darker). Atheists demonstrate the same effect. (Try it yourself at yourmorals.org – “Grayscale Perception” study).

@mikero:

I’d be cautious to single out Christianity as a cause here. Wouldn’t any ingroup-specific language trigger the same response? How would seeing words like “reason”, “secular”, “skeptical” affect those of us who strongly identify with freethought? Or “progress”, “liberty”, “equality” for those who associate with the Democratic party?

This assumes that the language depends on the in-group, which is not necessarily the case. (Although, given the predominance of Christianity in the U.S., it may have been a factor.) At any rate, words like “reason,” “progress,” “liberty,” and “equality” are not in-group specific. In particular, Republicans spend much more time talking about “liberty” than Democrats do, although their policy record is of course just as bad if not worse than the Democrats. Incidentally, on the Rokeach scale (in The Nature of Human Values), support for both liberty and equality is equated with socialist/anarchist beliefs, and not with the beliefs of managerial liberalism (which tends to view equality favorably and liberty negatively).

No idea what the implications of the study are, but on a complete tangent, I do notice that religions tend to be racially appealing for the local culture.

How rare is it for the depiction of a religious leader to be radically different in race from the race of the majority of local followers? Certainly Jesus had an image makeover in transition from Middle East to West.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_of_Jesus#Artistic_portrayals

Most white US Christians will be aware of the geographical context of Jesus, but I wonder how readily they would accept a Jesus that did not live up to their racial aesthetic ideals?

MikeTheInfidel, I disagree with the first two of your objections (though I agree with the third):

1. There was no control for existing racial prejudice, only for religiosity and spirituality.

The very fact that the subjects were randomly assigned to either the neutral-word group or the Christian-word group controls for these two factors. That is, if it were merely a matter of existing racial prejudice, then that prejudice would be just as likely to occur regardless of which words were shown.

2. There was no method used to determine whether priming with Christian words would increase a particular individual’s racial prejudices.

By splitting the people randomly into the two groups, and still seeing a measurable difference, doesn’t that clearly indicate the causal effect of the Christian words in individuals? Even without testing anybody more than once, the study shows that, on average, flashing the Christian words will tend to make a typical individual act more racist.

Now, I disagree with the conclusion that this study means that Christianity makes people racists; as other people have pointed out, it’s at least as plausible that it’s just that certain words prime an us vs. them mentality. I’d also like to see another similar experiment tried with various political and non-Christian-religious words.

So…what would happen if they tested black people? If they’re non-Christians, they’re 100% not racist?

This sounds like an odd study.

By the way, Robyn, they did test black people. I originally objected to that as well, but then I noticed that their statistics do mention the demographics:

A total of 73 college students (57 women and 16 men; M = 19.6 years) were recruited from introductory psychology classes to participate in a personality and language usage study. Participants were somewhat ethnically diverse (37 Whites, 13 Asians or Pacific Islanders, 13 Hispanics, and 10 African Americans) but predominantly Protestant or Catholic (n = 43, n = 17, respectively). A few participants were of other religions (Muslim n = 1, Buddhist n = 1, “other” religion n = 8 ) or had no religious group at all (n = 3).

Of course… 78.1% female? That’s an awfully small male sample size.

Unless you know the degree to which they are already racist, how can you make that assertion about a specific individual?

The study can’t make any assertions about any specific individual. But with a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups, it can still support a claim of an average causal increase in racism, because whatever pre-existing racist tendencies there are would be randomly distributed between the control and experimental groups.

Of course… 78.1% female? That’s an awfully small male sample size.

That’s true. And the overall sample size seems small too (at least, to my gut; IANAS)

DSimon: I essentially agree with what you’re saying. My problem is that the researchers appear to be insisting on causality rather than correlation here, and I’m not quite ready to accept that based on such a small study.

Mike, saw your reply after I made my long post. 🙂 Agreed on the issue of the study size being a (at least, on a gut level…) too small for a really confident statement that this was causation instead of just noise.

@Chal, yeah I’m with you.

@Miketheinfidel, this: “Not to mention: They specifically picked African Americans because of the historical racism toward them in America. Couldn’t this create an exaggerated effect?” is a really dumb statement. You know what its called when a people have an exaggerated negative attitude to a historically and currently oppressed racial minority? Racism. You are essentially saying a study on racism is flawed for looking at racism.

As to the demographics of the study, women and Asians are overrepresented in the field of psycology right now, so the fact that these studies, which tend to recruit heavily from intro to psych classes, are woman and Asian heavy aren’t really surprising. Though, it does make a difference that the students in this study are of a certain age, economic class, region, etc. It usually takes a number of these smaller studies for researchers to get funding for longer term, larger studies that do give a better view of application to the rest of the population, though, so while the limits of the study are relevant, they aren’t a cause for criticism of this researcher, who makes the demographics and methodology used very clear for just that kind of analysis and further study.

It makes perfect sense to me. I never understood how you could be religious and not racist.

Think about it logically. (I know, hard to do when religion is in the mix) God creates the heavens and the earth. He makes the animals and the fishes. Then he makes man.

Ok, so he made man. Thus man is made exactly how he wanted him. So if there are different ‘types’ of humans, the obviously he did it for a reason. Check back in the holy book, and sure enough you can find passages that describe some people as better than others, including complex rules about how you can enslave, rape, torture and murder those other humans.

Only through science is a racism free society possible. Sample the DNA of the darkest skinned person you can find, then sample a blond pale skinned person. Compare them, and you will find them 99.9999999% similar. Done, racism is ended. We’re all the same.

And of course now I’ve completely lost track of the fact that the hypothesis was that racist tendencies would increase, not that they’d be created. I think I’ve been arguing against a bit of a straw man here. My bad.

I’d have to spend several hours refreshing my statistics (if I can still find my textbook) to do a proper analysis, but this is a small sample and the effects are only marginally significant. At most I’d say this study suggests that it’s worthwhile repeating the experiment with a larger sample, to see if the effect is real. Until then it hardly seems worth discussing.

I’m assuming this study was only done on students at Baylor.

If so then that’s clearly not a large enough sample to draw any conclusions.

Further, it is Baylor. Baylor is a very white, very religious school.

Hey, at least Baylor has a pretty fair basketball team.

3 comments from a non-religious grad student at Baylor (apologies for the long post):

1. I was going to say something like what Ron From Houston said, but was beat to it. Yes, the study was done on Baylor Intro to Psych students, and BU students (in my experience) tend to be quite devout Christians (about 1/2 of them Baptists). So the subjects were primed with keywords from their own religion. I think that that lends support to the “in-group vs. out-group” suggestion in the discussion of the paper. Interestingly, potential explanations weren’t really discussed in the in-house publicity for the study (http://www.baylor.edu/lariat/news.php?action=story&story=72270).

2. Say what you will about Baylor’s administration and the average undergrad, the folks doing actual research at BU do pretty good work even when the results make Christianity look bad. For example, someone in Sociology did a study last year about sexual misconduct by clergy targeting adult women that generated some in-house controversy, but they published anyway (rumor has it that one person actually refused to be named co-author because they feared that the results would do harm to African-American churches…again, just a rumor I heard; I don’t know anyone involved in the study). And in the science departments we get plenty of support from the uni and surprisingly little flak about evolution/Big Bang/etc.. I’ve had perhaps 3 such conversations with undergrads in 4 years, and in each case they seemed genuinely interested in my explanations.

3. MikeTheInfidel and DSimon: 78% female in a class at BU is about average…great odds if you’re a Christian guy…not so great for us non-Christians.

If this is a “friendly atheist” site, I’d hate to view an unfriendly one.

The researchers seem to have approached the studies with their own preconceived anti-Christian bias and selected those students who would conform to their own preconceptions.

Christianity teaches that there is one race, the human race, and all people are created equal by God. People should be judged on their character, as the great Christian preacher Martin Luther King said.

On the contrary, Atheism says nothing against racism and actually encourages racism due to it’s materialistic worldview which says that people are mere physical objects who can be categorized according to their physical attributes as opposed to spiritual attributes.

As for slavery, unlike atheism which allows anything including slavery, Christianity condemns slavery. The NT says their is no difference between slave and free, or male and female, Greek and Jew, but all are one in Christ. People forget that Atheists have been around for hundreds of years. Slave owners were mostly atheist, and any who used The Bible were hypocrites. It was Christians such as William Wilberforce who had slavery abolished in Christian countries (slavery continues today in some Muslim lands).

http://www.jubilee-centre.org /document.php?id=51

@ True Freethinker, I usually know better than to feed the trolls, but I disagree with this part of your comment. “On the contrary, Atheism says nothing against racism and actually encourages racism due to it’s materialistic worldview which says that people are mere physical objects who can be categorized according to their physical attributes as opposed to spiritual attributes.

I don’t think you know a whole lot about atheism as a whole. Never have I once encountered an atheist group which encouraged categorizing individuals based on something as trivial as skin color. In fact, it is quite the opposite. As an atheist with a lot of atheist friends, I can say that from my own experience, we don’t classify people based on physical attributes. We classify them based on actions. That is the logical thing, after all.

As far as the ingroup/outgroup thing–we all do that. Atheists, Christians, women, men, whites, blacks. It’s part of being human, a social animal. We make social groups, and a person’s religious beliefs or lack thereof make a convenient grouping. Christians do it to us, other religious groups do it to each other. We all do it.

And maybe Christianity as a theoretical institution tries to teach equality, but Christian people have not always followed that. The most bigoted people I know have some sort of religious basis to that prejudice. And that prejudice exists regardless of the supposed overarching teachings of equality in the bible.

I’d love to tell you how the bible certainly does not treat everyone equally or even attempt to, but I think my words would do little good. I’ll just say there’s a lot of shitty things in the bible, and I don’t care which testament they’re in, they’re still terrible. And you don’t get to ignore them just because “we don’t believe that anymore.”

I have to second nomads comment. They are the friendliest I have ever seen. 🙂

@Revyloution

God made man exactly how he wanted him spiritually. Skin color or race are not even described in The Bible because they are irrelevant. There are different ‘types’ of humans because of evolution/ natural adaptation to diverse environments, not because God “did it”. The Bible describes some people as better than others only in their faith and behavior, not in their race. Slavery, rape, torture and murder are banned by God. The Bible describes these things happening when people abandon God and make up their own rules.

As for science freeing us from racism, ask the Jews and Gypsies tortured by the scientist Dr. Josef Mengele. So what if everyone’s 99.9999999% similar, people will become racist over the 0.0000001% difference.

We’re all the same because God made us the same.

“Revyloution Says:

April 9th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
It makes perfect sense to me. I never understood how you could be religious and not racist.

Only through science is a racism free society possible. Sample the DNA of the darkest skinned person you can find, then sample a blond pale skinned person. Compare them, and you will find them 99.9999999% similar. Done, racism is ended. We’re all the same.”

Why do you believe that atheism is the answer to racism? Even with all the “there is no such thing as race” talk that scientists engage in, I am sure that there can be racism amongst scientists. After all, there is something about Black people that makes them look different than Whites, and vice versa.

Please see the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism