Implications of Religious Identity Salience, Religious Involvement, and Religious Commitment on Aggression

ABSTRACT

Social identity can affect perceptions of external threats and the type of response elicited to those threats. Religion is a social identity with eternal group membership and revered beliefs and values; thus, religious identity salience, religious commitment, and religious involvement may have implications for aggressive responses to perceived threats to a person’s religious identity. In a sample of 176 Christians, Muslims, and Jews, we investigated whether people respond aggressively to collective threat as a function of religious identity salience, religious commitment, and religious involvement. Religious commitment was positively related to anger only when religious identity was salient. Religious involvement was negatively related to anger and hostility only when religious identity was salient. Religious identity salience appears to act as a moderator by either enhancing perceptions of threat or by activating internal religious beliefs and values.

KEYWORDS:

• Aggression
• religiosity
• religious identity
• social identity
• threat

Acknowledgments

Data used in this article were collected as part of the first author’s MA thesis. The authors thank Monica Tomlinson and Jacqueline Carleton for their excellent recommendations regarding earlier drafts of this paper and to Rebecca Huselid and Paul Tremblay for their thoughts regarding data analysis. We also thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments have greatly improved this manuscript.

Notes

1. It is also likely that the direct content being disseminated in houses of worship will impact the direction of the relationship between religious involvement and aggression. We do not address this possibility in the present study but do recognize this possibility. We refer the reader to Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, and Busath (2007) and Wright (2015) for further reading.

2. Predominantly Catholic and Protestant but also other belief systems.

3. This is referred to as an enhanced social identity salience condition because it could be argued that all participants are primed to some extent on religion since everyone answers a series of questions about religion. However, if answering these questions were priming participants before the enhanced salience manipulation, this would reduce the effects seen in the current study. Under these circumstances, the effects described in this paper would be larger if preliminary priming could be avoided through a longitudinal design, for example.

4. Alpha coefficient is highly impacted by the number of items (inflated values for larger numbers of items) and repetition of content and tends to be lower in belief- and value-laden constructs (see Peterson, 1994). Tavakol and Dennick (2011) make clear that a lower alpha can be due to number of test items even when interitem correlations are adequate. As an example, assuming the average interitem correlation of .372 and increasing to 10 items, alpha would inflate to .86. Alpha is a conservative lower bound estimate of internal consistency (Kline, 2005), and lower-item scales with higher interitem correlations can actually be more internally consistent than greater-item scales with lower interitem correlations (Field, 2009), despite that the former will have a lower coefficient alpha.

5. At a reviewer’s request, we analyzed three-way interactions among condition, religion, and religious commitment/religious involvement as exploratory analyses. No three-way interactions were statistically significant. Also, because of overlap between ethnicity and religion, we also categorized participants into White majority and minority status and entered this dummy-coded variable into an additional set of analyses. Because the results were not altered when controlling for this variable, we report the original results without this added variable or the three-way interactions.