How Do Religiosity and National Identity Relate to Cosmopolitanism? An Empirical Study Using Representative Samples in Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist Societies

ABSTRACT

Cosmopolitan Orientation’s (COS) relationship with personal religiosity, organizational religiosity, and national identity was examined in nationally representative samples from 19 societies (13 mainly Christian, 2 Muslim, and 4 societies with historically Buddhist influences, N = 8740). Multi-group structural equation models found that personal religiosity was a positive and significant predictor of global prosociality (willingness to help others in a global community) overall (b = .18), and in 13 of 19 societies. This relationship was stronger in countries higher on the Human Development Index. National identity was overall a weak and positive predictor of global prosociality (b = .06) and respect for cultural diversity (b = .07), but results were culturally variable. There were negative relationships between national identity and COS indicators in Germany, the UK and USA (countries with active anti-immigration discourses popularized by populist right-wing politicians). Separate analyses for different religious groups found that among Christians, personal religiosity was positively associated with global prosociality, respect for cultural differences, and cultural openness (in that order). Among Buddhists, both personal and organizational religiosity were associated with global prosociality and cultural openness. For the smaller sample of Muslims, the only significant association was the positive link between personal religiosity and global prosociality. Findings support the idea that, contrary to much established literature, there are country-level moderators, but no overall negative relationship between cosmopolitanism and religiosity or national identity at the individual-level across cultures.

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 See McFarland et al. (2019) for a more comprehensive review of empirical measures of global identification and citizenship.

² The Republic of Turkey was founded on tenets of secular nationalism as the “correct formula” for modernization, that in recent decades has been over-turned in favor of religious nationalism.

³ Note that the same pattern of findings reported herein was found using the four items, only the three items adapted from Huddy and Khatib (2007), and only the single-item social identification measure (Postmes, Haslam, & Jans, 2013), so the finding are robust.

⁴ Measurement invariance testing suggested that these two scales had metric invariance across 19 countries/societies, and scalar invariance across seven religious affiliations (see Supplementary Tables 1 and 2).

⁵ Because these involve three separate regression analyses, we report standardized beta coefficients to allow comparison between the three religious groups.

⁶ A non-significant, but negative coefficient was also found in Italy, another advanced Western economy with salient anti-immigration and anti-globalization discourses.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Grant FA2386-15-1-0003 from the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development.