Religion makes—and unmakes—the status quo: religiosity and spirituality have opposing effects on conservatism via RWA and SDO

ABSTRACT

Although religiosity and conservatism often go hand-in-hand, some approaches to religion may challenge the status quo. Indeed, spirituality—a religious orientation that fosters universalism (i.e., an ideology of egalitarianism and inclusivity; see Hirsh, Walberg, & Peterson, 2013. Spiritual liberals and religious conservatives. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(1), 14–20. doi:10.1177/1948550612444138)—may correlate negatively with conservatism via decreases in the preference for group-based hierarchy (i.e., social dominance orientation; SDO). We investigated this possibility in a national sample of religiously identified adults (N = 7417). As hypothesized, religious identification correlated positively with conservatism via right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), whereas spiritual identification correlated negatively with conservatism via decreases in SDO. Moreover, political identity centrality strengthened the negative association between spirituality and SDO, as well as the positive associations RWA and SDO had with conservatism (though the RWA × Political Identity Centrality interaction was only marginally significant). Political identity centrality did not, however, moderate the positive association between religiosity and RWA. Collectively, these results demonstrate that religious and spiritual identification have countervailing associations with conservatism via distinct pathways and suggest that political awareness helps to connect some—but not all—religious orientations to socio-political views.

KEYWORDS:

• Spirituality
• religiosity
• SDO
• RWA
• political sophistication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We used Time 8 because it was the first time we assessed spiritual identification.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by PBRF grants jointly awarded to the second and third authors, as well as a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust (TRT0196) awarded to the second author; University of Auckland.