Spectrums Project Portal

In Europe and North America, most religious people are Christian. This means that debates between theological liberals and conservatives in these countries are often about things like the divinity of Christ, the validity of other world religions, and the existence of Hell. But the Spectrums project team has been researching patterns in ideology that transcend just the Christian tradition, and contemporary Buddhism offers a powerful example of how conservative/liberal differences play out in non-Christian faiths. A series of innovative websites on Buddhist culture and secularism demonstrates exactly how.

Most have long recognized that political liberals and conservatives have different outlooks on life. More precisely, research indicates that liberals tend to emphasize provision and conservatives tend to emphasize protection. Naturally, psychologists Kathrin Hanek (University of Michigan), Bradley Olson (National Louis University), and Dan McAdams (Northwestern University) wanted to see if these preferences would emerge in prayer. Much to their surprise, they found that while liberals’ prayers did in fact stress provision more than conservatives’, the prayers of both liberals and conservatives laid equal emphasis on protection.

We’ve all seen it: religious extremists with signs protesting a seemingly innocuous event. Or perhaps hardcore believers dogmatically arguing with someone about religion. But are these diehards really more dogmatic and less open-minded than others? Does this common perception have any basis? In fact, the answer appears to be a qualified yes – research conducted more than thirty years ago suggests that the indiscriminately antireligious are, indeed, more open-minded than the religious.

It’s a “love drug.” It’s a “cuddle chemical.” The hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin has gotten a lot of good press in the recent past, as research has shown that it seems to increase people’s level of affection, trust, and warmth for one another. But new research from the University of Amsterdam shows that oxytocin’s role isn’t always benign: in addition to stimulating positive, bonding emotions, oxytocin also appears to increase bias and prejudice against outsiders. Might this research have implications for political and religious prejudice as well?

In general, the stereotypical religious conservative understands God as ready to punish those who sin. By contrast, the stereotypical religious liberal views God as ready to forgive anyone and everyone. These views need not be completely incompatible, but each view has a different emphasis: one on justice and the other on love. Psychologists Azim F. Shariffa (University of Oregon) and Ara Norenzayan (University of British Columbia) have found that the former conception of God rather than the latter correlates with increased moral behavior.

Since 1990, more and more Americans have begun considering themselves “non-religious” (or “nones”). When plotted on a graph, the number of nones skyrockets at around 1990 and continues full steam ahead, making America seem destined for secularity within a generation. Well, a generation has passed and yet America remains quite religious. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer (both University of California, Berkeley) have reanalyzed the data on America’s waning religiosity and found that what Americans oppose is organized religion rather than religion itself.

It is often taken for granted that children will just inherit the religion of their parents. Clearly, it seems, nurture trumps nature in terms of religion. In 1990, Neils G. Waller and others (all from the University of Minnesota) dared to challenge this conventional wisdom. They sought to determine whether genetics played a role in religious orientation. Astonishingly, they found that genetics play a decisive role in about half of the variance observed in the measures of religion they employed.

"You’re not religious because you never go to church!" accuses one friend. "Well, you only go to church to socialize with your friends!" comes the retort. Is the person who goes to church in order to socialize more religious than the person who doesn't go to church at all? If only there were some way to measure a person’s religiosity! In fact, there is – the religiosity scale designed by C. Daniel Batson and W. Larry Ventis captures what it means to be religious with three poles: religion as means, religion as ends, and religion as quest.

Most people like to think they've carefully thought out their positions. They’ll say that they’ve fairly assessed both sides of an issue and have come to their particular position through thoughtful analysis. Well, what if a large part of their decision-making process had absolutely nothing to do with the substance of the issues but instead with their genes? What if their thought process was more rationalization than analysis? This very well may be the case: a gene has been discovered that influences liberal beliefs.

Do liberals and conservatives really see the world differently? Maybe it’s more like they feel it differently. Recent research (e.g., Tomkins 1995) has suggested that conservatives and liberals experience different sorts of emotional responses. Specifically, some emotions, like joy and distress, are more associated with people who identify as liberal, while emotions like anger, disgust, and excitement are more commonly felt by conservatives. However, a recent Italian study suggests that the main difference between conservatives and liberals is more likely to be that conservatives avoid emotions while liberals try to experience them.