The cross and the sword: A multidimensional investigation of the links between gendered facets of honor and Religiosity among American Christians

ABSTRACT

Honor ideology and religion possess a number of commonalities, yet little research to date has examined whether and how the two relate to each other. Such a relationship is of special interest because despite their commonalities, potential exists for both synergy and conflict between the two ideological systems. Two studies examine associations between honor ideology and religiosity among American Christians. In Study 1, we identified modest associations between facets of honor and various religious orientations. In Study 2, we experimentally induced a “faith/honor conflict” between the prescriptions of each belief system. Results reveal the complex associations between honor and religiosity, showing that these two ideological systems are far from synonymous and can influence adherents in conflicting ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Honor
• retaliation
• religion
• culture
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our initial sample size was 247, with 47 agnostics/atheists, 1 Muslim, 2 Buddhists, 5 adherents of Judaism, and 18 “others.” These sample sizes were too small for sub-group analyses, in addition to the conceptual problems of qualitative differences between the faiths and our religiosity measures having been written primarily with Christianity in mind. Additionally, as previously stated, there is limited utility in investigating non-religious participants’ responses to scales designed to differentiate the nuances of religious orientations. Finally, as our manipulation involved texts specific to the Christian religion, it was unlikely to produce the hypothesized effect in non-Christian participants.

2. The separate use of the HIM’s two content domains of retaliation and reputation, as done in Studies 1 and 2, is not common practice within the literature. However, it is important to note that even at construction, the scale’s creators did draw from two distinct areas in formulating the HIM’s reputation and retaliation-based items. Given the differential predictive power of each subscale in Study 1, and the unique relationships between each subscale and religious orientation in Study 2, we believe the separate use of these subscales to be appropriate. In addition, using the complete HIM scale did not result in any changes to the central conclusions of these studies. Results using the full scale are available from the authors upon request.

3. As a part of our study, we also obtained a measure of participants’ familiarity with religious texts, specifically, how often participants read them, that could potentially also explain the differential effect of our experimental prime. However, this measure showed no relationship with our dependent variables, and thus was not included in subsequent analysis.