Religion and Prejudice Toward Immigrants and Refugees: A Meta-Analytic Review

ABSTRACT

Religion is often a driving force in negative attitudes; however, in the specific case of migrant-based attitudes, research has produced conflicting findings. That is, religion can paradoxically facilitate either tolerance or intolerance toward this group. In light of these inconsistent findings, we conducted a meta-analytic review to estimate the effect size of this relationship with two major aims—first, to explore differences as a function of how religion was operationalised, and second, to explore differences in the target migrant-type (e.g., differences in religion-based attitudes toward immigrants and refugees/asylum seekers). Our search strategy was applied to PsycINFO, EBSCO Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, Web of Science, PsycEXTRA, and ProQuest Central for peer-reviewed English language studies and made calls for unpublished data through relevant professional bodies. This search strategy yielded 37 records (including 43 studies; N = 472,688). Religion was quantified in two ways: either as categorical religious affiliations (k = 60) or as individual differences in self-reported religiosity (k = 30). The meta-analyses revealed that religion quantified as affiliation, but not religiosity, was related to negative migrant attitudes. Specifically, religiously affiliated samples report more negative attitudes than nonreligious affiliated samples, and this effect was often stronger when the target groups were refugees rather than immigrants. In addition, analyses revealed that Muslims have more negative attitudes toward migrants than Christians. Religiosity was unrelated to negative attitudes. These findings are discussed in light of rising antimigrant attitudes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1 There is a fourth subcategory: Sojourners are individuals who temporarily reside in a foreign country. They have not been included in this meta-analytic review due to the temporary nature of their relocation. They are unlikely to be affected by negative attitudes in the same way as other migrant groups.

2 For the sake of parsimony, the term refugee is used as an umbrella term to describe both asylum seekers and refugees throughout this article.

3 The current article differs from the aforementioned meta-analysis in its focus on both immigrants and refugees, as opposed to only refugees. Further, Anderson and Ferguson (2018) did not examine religiosity and examined only religious affiliation without any further distinction between categories of religious affiliations.

4 Before making these decisions, we assessed if there were enough effect sizes available to conduct separate meta-analyses or to explore this as a moderator through a subgroup analyses. There were not enough effect sizes to allow this.

5 Please refer to the online extraction table for specific details about how religiosity was operationalised https://osf.io/9q3xg/.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Australian Catholic University.