Traditional religiosity and social conservatism: A test of the relationship across three religious orientations
The influence of religious variables upon the formation of social attitudes has received much scholarly attention over the last two decades. Controversy has centered upon whether religious systems of belief continue to shape the entire world views of individuals and societies. In this research project I examine the relationship between religious traditionalism and attitudes towards modernity within mainline and fundamentalist Protestant denominations and Roman Catholicism. It is hypothesized that the effects of traditional religiosity, especially adherence to biblical literalism, will prove similar across denominations. This is also predicted to hold true across groups for the secularizing influences of several structural variables Previous work suggests that such observations would be attributable in part to the association believed to exist between religious traditionalism and social conservatism and authoritarianism. While the causal dynamics may operate similarly across denominational affiliations, it is expected that the impact of religious variables will prove most profound for Fundamentalist respondents and less salient for Catholics and liberal Protestants. The opposite conclusion is predicted for the importance of the secular variables to the causal schematic. NORC's General Social Survey provides a useful database from which to pursue the proposed investigation. Data from the years 1984-1989 are subjected to causal modelling designed to test the relative salience of four religious factors of interest, especially as they operate in consort with demographic variables in influencing attitudes towards moral and secular issues The results reported here indicate that traditional religiosity functions as a consistent predictor of social conservatism for most of the dependent variables included in the analyses. The belief in biblical literalism serves as an especially promising predictor of social conservatism, regardless of organizational context. Several of the demographic variables of interest also prove salient as predictors of religious and social conservatism when included in the full models. The strength and consistency of the causal processes do not apparently differ appreciably among any of the three groups of interest. Hence, Fundamentalists, Catholics, and mainline Protestants are most likely fairly similar in the degrees to which structural and religious phenomena impinge upon the social construction of their world views