The notion of tolerance is widely embraced across many settings and is generally considered critical for the peaceful functioning of culturally diverse societies. However, the concepts of tolerance and intolerance have various meanings and can be used in different ways and for different purposes. The various understandings raise different empirical questions and might have different implications for the subject positions of those who are tolerant and those who are tolerated. In this study, we focus on cultural understandings of tolerance and intolerance and how these terms are used in discourses. We first describe how in an open-ended question in a national survey lay people use a classical and a more modern understanding of tolerance to describe situations of tolerance and intolerance. Second, we analyze how those who tolerate and those who are tolerated can flexibly use these different understandings of (in)tolerance for discursively making particular “us–them” distinctions. It is concluded that the notions of tolerance and intolerance have different cultural meanings which both can be used for progressive or oppressive ends.

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The relation between religiousness and prejudice has been the topic of a large research literature, yet this was so far mostly limited to Western societies with a Christian heritage. Using global data from the 6th wave of the World Values Survey, this study compared the religiousness-prejudice relationship between adherents of monotheistic and non-monotheistic religions. Focusing on inter-religious prejudice we examined whether theological exclusivism moderated this relationship. Using multi-group structural equation modeling, no support was found for the expected divide between religious groups. Religious identity, belief, and practice each related differentially to prejudice across the religions. Exclusivism was more consistently negatively related to prejudice and moderated the relation with religious identity for Orthodox Christians and Buddhists. We conclude that religious attitudes or orientations (i.e., how people believe) are more important to understand prejudice towards religious others than religious traditions or multiple dimensions of religiosity (i.e., what and how strongly they believe).

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