Religion and Anti-Immigration Sentiments in Context: Field Studies in Jerusalem

ABSTRACT

Political and social changes in the past decade have rendered questions about religion and immigration more salient than ever. However, we know very little about the potential impact of religion as it operates in the real world on attitudes toward immigrants. In this investigation, we tested whether and how contextual religious cues in the public sphere might affect tolerance toward immigrants. In two studies, we compared the effects of a religious and a secular context (Study 1: religious location; Study 2: religious attire) on attitudes toward Jewish immigrants (i.e., a religious ingroup) and non-Jewish immigrants (i.e., a religious outgroup). Across studies, contextual religious cues predicted ingroup favoritism, as expressed by less social rejection toward religious ingroups and less support for anti-immigration policies affecting religious ingroups. However, contextual religious cues were unrelated to anti-immigration attitudes toward religious outgroups. In Study 2, these patterns were moderated by participants’ religiosity, such that they were found among more (but not fewer) religious participants. These findings extend prior laboratory findings and shed light on how religion influences attitudes toward immigration in rich and complex real environments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ The sample size (i.e., 30 per cell) was set before any data were collected. We did not conduct a priori power analyses in Study 1 but instead relied on a rule of thumb for 30 participants per cell for detecting a medium effect size (Cohen, 1988), based on the effect size reported by a recent meta-analysis for contextual religious primes (d = 0.49; Shariff et al., 2016).

² This scale was originally used as a measure of religious identity, with the assumption that “participation in organized religious communities, places of worship, and social networks … enable individuals to claim group membership” (Ben-Nun Bloom et al., 2015, p. 2).

³ Other measures included in the questionnaire were education, religious belief, income, immigration attitudes toward specific groups of immigrants (from USSR, Ethiopia). We also asked for religious denomination (all participants indicated that they were Jewish).

⁴ MLM-RM is capable of handling hierarchically structured data that violate the assumption of independence and allows simultaneous estimation of effects of predictors from different levels. Further, MLM-RM is more flexible than conventional RM-ANOVA, as it is robust against violations of sphericity, homoscedasticity, and missing data (Hoffman & Rovine, 2007).

⁵ The simple effects of type of immigrants were significant at the .001 level in both models.

⁶ In addition, we conducted a post hoc analysis, isolating the social distance preferences for the two types of social interactions: symbolically threatening interactions (having an immigrant as a relative) and more economically threatening interactions (having an immigrant as a boss). Models are presented in the online Appendix B.

⁷ The sample size of 60 per call was set before any data were collected.

⁸ Other measures included in the questionnaire: education and religious belief. We also asked for religious denomination (all participants indicated that they were Jewish).

⁹ The religious and secular Jewish populations in Jerusalem suffer from tension and conflict, such that the secular residents often accuse the religious residents for invading secular neighborhoods and public spaces (Shelef, 2010). The two groups fiercely struggle over the nature of the city—whether to open stores and maintain cultural events on the Sabbath, allocating public spaces to parks versus religious facilities, funding religious versus orthodox education, and so on. An indication to this explanation is that a similar three-way interaction for social distance emerges with political ideology (p_{social-distance} = .047; p_{impair-culture} = .114), such that supporters of the political center and left-wing react to the religious dressing with a boomerang effect (the negative effect of the religious cue for non-Jewish immigrants is statistically significant starting from ideology [left] > 3.5).

¹⁰ The exhortation to care for the foreigner dwelling in one’s midst (ger) appears numerous times in the five books of Moses (e.g., “You shall neither mistreat a stranger [ger] nor oppress him, for you were strangers [gers] in the land of Egypt”, Exodus 22:20; “And if a stranger [ger] dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him”, Leviticus 19:33; NKJV).

¹¹ It is possible that our studies were powered just enough to detect statistically significant two-way interactions in Study 1, a statistically significant three-way interaction in Study 2, and another three-way interaction, which produced a p value just below the acceptable confidence level.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was reported by the authors for this work.