For almost 50 years, psychologists have been theorizing about and measuring religiosity essentially the way Gordon Allport did, when he distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. However, there is a historical debate regarding what this scale actually measures, which items should be included, and how many factors or subscales exist. To provide more definitive answers, we estimated a series of confirmatory factor analysis models comparing four competing theories for how to score Gorsuch and McPherson's commonly used measure of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. We then formally investigated measurement invariance across U.S. Protestants, Irish Catholics, and Turkish Muslims and across U.S. Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims. We provide evidence that a five-item version of intrinsic religiosity is invariant across the U.S. samples and predicts less warmth toward atheists and gay men/lesbians, validating the scale. Our results suggest that a variation of Gorsuch and McPherson's measure may be appropriate for some but not all uses in cross-cultural research.
The article outlines a framework for the analysis of religion and foreign policy. Despite the increased attention to religion in international relations, questions remain. Particularly controversial, yet relatively unexplored, is the role of religion in the foreign policies of states. We extrapolate from theories in the fields of international relations and comparative politics to explore religion's potential avenues of influence on foreign policy. There are potential tools of analysis in these fields, which can be fruitfully extended and applied to understand the role of religion in foreign policy. We propose a framework within which various causal pathways and mechanisms can be situated. We also show how contributions from the field of religion and politics might be used to frame theories and specify further hypotheses about religion and foreign policy. After identifying the main threads of these lines of research, we discuss how to apply them to the question of the role of religion in foreign policy and set out a new research agenda. We conclude that the potential of these theoretical approaches to the analysis of religion has not yet been exploited.Religion's influence in the interactions of states is one of the great and least understood security challenges of the twenty-first century. Religion's role in international politics also presents an intellectual challenge to scholars of international relations and religion and politics. While religion has emerged as a significant factor in some analyses of international relations, controversial and unexplored questions remain concerning the role of religion in the foreign policies of states studies have attempted to assess the opinions that adherents of different faiths hold about foreign policy and to assess whether international conflicts since the end of the Cold War have occurred along religious lines (Jelen 1994;
How might religion shape intergroup conflict? We tested whether religious infusion-the extent to which religious rituals and discourse permeate the everyday activities of groups and their members-moderated the effects of two factors known to increase intergroup conflict: competition for limited resources and incompatibility of values held by potentially conflicting groups. We used data from the Global Group Relations Project to investigate 194 groups (e.g., ethnic, religious, national) at 97 sites around the world. When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them-despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research.
Religions such as Catholicism and Islam are generators of substantial amounts of charitable donations and volunteer work, and they sustain themselves as organizations. How do they produce charitable public goods and their own religious club goods when they are open to extensive free-riding? We argue that mainstream religions facilitate club and public goods provision by using their community structures and their theological belief systems to activate the pro-social, generous tendencies of their members. The study is based on in-field essay-prime experiments with over 800 Catholics and Muslims in Dublin and Istanbul and on case studybased interviews with over 200 Catholics and Muslims in Dublin, Istanbul, Milan and Paris. Our findings highlight the role of the religious concepts of duty to God, God's grace, and deservingness on adherents of the two religions, as well as religious community, though not in the way typically expected by rational choice theory. The evidence shows support for understanding individuals as being pro-social, not just strictly self-interested utility maximizers. Our argument about the role of beliefs and community help explain why mainstream religions can produce club and public goods despite their lack of strong monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms. The paper also demonstrates the advantages of using a methodology that combines field experiments with case study-based interviews.
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