Religious Influences on Understandings of Racial Inequality in the United States

Edgell, Penny; Tranby, Eric

doi:10.1525/sp.2007.54.2.263

Cited by 78 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…However, their conclusions have not been universally echoed in other social science research [49,51,52]. This study and recent work by Taylor and Merino [55,56] indicate the need for important qualification to claims about the influence of religion on racial attitudes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…Future research should examine how involvement in congregations and their religious subcultures shapes both opportunities for and preferences regarding social connections across racial and ethnic lines, particularly when religious culture contributes to racial identity [81]. As Edgell and Tranby suggest, -if religious subcultures are shaped in the context of highly salient racial boundaries, they may in fact be about race‖ ( [51], p. 284). In addition, the cultural tools individuals acquire through participation in religious subcultures color their experiences with racial and ethnic diversity [51,75,82,83].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The decision to limit the sample to non-Hispanic whites was guided by two main considerations. First, beginning with Emerson and colleagues' work [20,30], much of the recent research on religion and race has focused on white evangelical Protestants, including Blanchard's study linking the size of a community's white evangelical institutional base to its level of black-white residential segregation [23,51,52]. Second, because whites' majority status and avoidance of racially mixed neighborhoods are thought to contribute to and uphold residential segregation, much of the research on neighborhood racial preferences focuses on whites [8,26].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Emerson and Smith's research has sparked a new debate about whether white evangelical Protestants' racial attitudes differ significantly from those of other whites [49,[51][52][53][54]. Evidence for the distinctiveness of evangelical Protestants' attitudes is mixed, however, and these studies have varied widely in their methodological approaches to the question.…”

Section: Racial Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neighbors Like Me? Religious Affiliation and Neighborhood Racial Preferences among Non-Hispanic Whites

Merino

2011

Religions

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Abstract:Research on racial residential segregation has paid little attention to the role that social institutions play in either isolating or integrating racial and ethnic groups in American communities. Scholars have argued that racial segregation within American religion may contribute to and consolidate racial division elsewhere in social life. However, no previous study has employed national survey data to examine the relationship between religious affiliation and the preferences people have about the racial and ethnic composition of their neighborhoods. Using data from the -Multi-Ethnic United States‖ module on the 2000 General Social Survey, this study finds that white evangelical Protestants have a significantly stronger preference for same-race neighbors than do Catholics, Jews, adherents of -other‖ faiths, and the unaffiliated. Group differences in preferences are largely accounted for by socio-demographic characteristics. Negative racial stereotyping and social isolation from minorities, both topics of interest in recent research on evangelical Protestants and race, fail to explain group differences in preferences.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Racial Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neighbors Like Me? Religious Affiliation and Neighborhood Racial Preferences among Non-Hispanic Whites

Merino

2011

Religions

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“…To do so, we rely on the connectionist theory of cognition, which implies that individuals have mental models that are composed of associations between concepts (D'Andrade 1995; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Although previous research has employed the notion of schemas to investigate people's understandings about the causes of racial inequality (Edgell and Tranby 2007), we are, to our knowledge, the first to operationalize and apply the insights of schema theory to beliefs about poverty. In their foundational work on stratification beliefs, Kluegel and Smith (1986, 16) briefly mention schemas and suggest how they may be relevant to beliefs about poverty, but this aspect of their work has remained largely undeveloped.…”

Section: Patricia Homan Lauren Valentino and Emi Weedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural Schemas Shape Beliefs About Poverty

2017

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Prior research on stratification beliefs has investigated individuals' understandings regarding the causes of poverty in America. These past studies have uncovered demographic characteristics associated with individualist and structuralist explanations for poverty. In the current study, we will argue that Americans, like social scientists, envision poverty as a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon. We utilize a cultural cognition theoretical approach to conceptualize these understandings of poverty as schemas. We contend that a schema of poverty contains a set of unique associations regarding both demographic beliefs (who the poor are) and causal attributions (why they are poor). Using original data in a mixed-methods design that incorporates inductive and experimental components, we find that people differentiate between two key types of poverty: intergenerational poverty and downward mobility. People perceive each type of poverty as caused by a different set of factors and as experienced by a different group of people. The type of poverty envisioned is, in most cases, as important as or more important than a respondent's own demographic characteristics in predicting what type of causal attributions he or she makes for poverty. These findings underscore the importance of investigating different schemas of poverty in future stratification beliefs research.The authors wish to thank Mark Chaves, who supervised this project as part of the Logic of Inquiry course at Duke University. This study would not have been possible without his guidance and generous provision of funding. The authors also wish to thank Lynn Smith-Lovin for her support of this research project. Naomi Quinn and Claudia Strauss also provided eminently helpful feedback on this paper. We address this gap in the literature through a two-stage mixed-methods design. First, we inductively assess people's understandings of poverty using structured interviews. Next, we use these interviews to construct a survey that includes new items of poverty beliefs that reflect both interviewees' understandings of poverty and empirical facts about poverty from the current sociological literature on stratification.Finally, we utilize the theoretical concept of cultural schemas to identify the constituent parts of beliefs about poverty. To do so, we rely on the connectionist theory of cognition, which implies that individuals have mental models that are and Tranby 2007), we are, to our knowledge, the first to operationalize and apply the insights of schema theory to beliefs about poverty. In their foundational work on stratification beliefs, Kluegel and Smith (1986, 16) briefly mention schemas and suggest how they may be relevant to beliefs about poverty, but this aspect of their work has remained largely undeveloped. We concretize schemas of poverty as shared mental models of who is poor and why they are poor. We then demonstrate that people's perceptions regarding types of poverty differ in these two key respects, employing a survey-experiment to show that this is t...

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Examining awareness of privilege among midwestern college students: An analysis of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion

Todd

Blevins

et al. 2022

American J of Comm Psychol

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Dominant group members often are not aware of the privileges they benefit from due to their dominant group membership. Yet individuals are members of multiple groups and may simultaneously occupy multiple categories of dominance and marginality, raising the question of how different group memberships work in concert to facilitate or inhibit awareness of multiple forms of privilege. Examining awareness of privilege is important as awareness may be linked to action to dismantle systems of privilege that maintain oppression and inequality. Grounded in intersectional scholarship, in this study we examined how occupying intersecting categories of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion corresponded to an awareness of White, male, and Christian privilege. In a sample of 2321 Midwestern college students, we demonstrated that students from marginalized groups broadly reported greater awareness of all forms of privilege than students from dominant groups, and the difference between marginalized and dominant groups was most pronounced when the specific group category (e.g., gender) aligned with the type of privilege (e.g., male privilege). We also tested interactions among race/ethnicity, gender, and religion, only finding an interaction between race/ethnicity and religion for awareness of White and male privilege. These findings helped to clarify that multiple group memberships tended to contribute to awareness as multiple main effects rather than as multiplicative. Finally, we examined mean differences among the eight intersected groups to explore similarities and differences among groups in awareness of all types of privilege. Taken together, these findings quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which group memberships work together to contribute to awareness of multiple forms of privilege. We discuss study limitations and implications for community psychology research and practice.

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Religious Influences on Understandings of Racial Inequality in the United States

Cited by 78 publications

References 42 publications

Neighbors Like Me? Religious Affiliation and Neighborhood Racial Preferences among Non-Hispanic Whites

Neighbors Like Me? Religious Affiliation and Neighborhood Racial Preferences among Non-Hispanic Whites

Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural Schemas Shape Beliefs About Poverty

Examining awareness of privilege among midwestern college students: An analysis of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion

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