I'm reminded of your post from November (https://substack.com/home/post/p-177992744), which identified regular religious service attendance as more highly correlated with tolerance than many other demographic factors. In that, you noted: "Interestingly, the people who do worst are those who attend religious services very infrequently, whereas those who never attend do a bit better, perhaps suggesting atheists are more tolerant than religious backsliders." This current piece again identifies the importance of something like clarity or specificity -- "...the group willing to use more precise labels to describe themselves is significantly more tolerant." I think there's something here about clarity in itself, especially for young people, where a stronger and more traditionally grounded sense of self enables a less personalized, more objective view of "controversial ideas." I also think it's unavoidable that Protestant Christianity is very closely connected to the intellectual tradition that gave birth to ideals like free speech.
Birth is too strong a word. Freedom of conscience, and, by extension, freedom of speech, owes it's synthesis to Tertullian and Libertas Religionis within the Christian tradition, which in turn was drawn from the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus. It's a point that Chesterton made quite succinctly: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.'
It's also worth noting that early Judaism owed a lot to the ethos of Zoroastrianism. The concept of free speech in pursuit of truth-seeking goes back even further. It's more accurate to state that Protestantism was an amplifier of a signal already in existence.
Id say Protestants who self identify as protestants are more likely to be mainline than Protestants who identify as Christian, the latter will be full of "non-denominational" types.
So being more tolerant of just one side of the political spectrum (but not of the other) is just referred to as “more tolerant”? This seems like a pretty skewed way to interpret the results
Seems pretty obvious to me that belonging to the religion that’s been historically mainstream and normative, and never subject to any kind of pressure or prejudice as a result of one’s identity, would tend to nurture a sense of security and safety in society. Less insecurity equals less fear of the other equals more tolerance. If people’s views don’t threaten you, why would you feel the need to suppress them? You don’t fear them, so why not listen to them?
I would guess that at least some of the explanation of Protestant tolerance is that the least tolerant Protestants, evangelicals, tend to attend colleges of any sort at much lower rates than mainline Protestants of any denomination (and mainliners tend to be extremely tolerant).
I'm confused by your definition of tolerance. Say your survey-taker welcomes pretty extreme ideologues with whom they agree but shouts down similarly extreme ideologues with whom they disagree. If I'm understanding you right, this person would go down on your books as tolerant but biased.
I think most people would describe them as intolerant.
People who identify as "Christian" are probably evangelicals and non-denominationals; some of them literally don't know what "Protestant" means. People identifying as "Protestant" are probably Mainline (Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Lutheran) or UU, from wealthier more establishment families.
Wow, I'm generally a fan of your work, but can you not see that those survey questions are going to produce incredibly skewed results? There are empirically valid right-wing ideas which argue that the life of and teachings of Muhammed meant that it was more aggressive and warlike as a religion than all other religions combined. How do you think your respondents would have taken this particular observation on the part of a prospective speaker? It may be a controversial position, but that doesn't make it any less true as an observation.
My point would be that the survey questions created a confounding signal because they singled out a single sect of Christianity for criticism. As such, the results are highly questionable.
TLDR: This is a good thing to wonder about, but it's not affecting results meaningfully.
I recreated the scatterplots using only the other two left-wing speaker questions (policekkk and children transitioning) to calculate left-wing tolerance. Catholics see a very modest increase in left-wing tolerance (not even enough to make them more left-wing tolerant than generic Christians); the plot otherwise looks basically the same.
Plots here. Note that the first is for the raw values and the second controlled for gender and ideology.
Ok. Thanks for the feedback. It's a really interesting finding. I reread your article. I find it fascinating that nominal Catholicism predicts less tolerance than devout Catholicism. Do you think there is anything to the notion that those less secure in their moral and epistemic framework tend to be more defensive and kneejerk in their reaction of other viewpoints? They may not know well what they like, but they are certain what they don't like. If so, it makes the observations of J. S. Mill On Liberty all the more salient today (and also suggests my favourite Bertrand Russell quote may not be as axiomatic as I imagined).
I think this is something worthy of study. Does uncertainty of belief predict intolerance? Or to put it more succinctly: does a belief held strongly combined epistemic insecurity predicts intolerance? I came across a couple of metrics in psychology while I was pondering your findings: Intolerance of Uncertainty and Need for Cognitive Closure. Allport's is on point as well, with his old distinction that intrinsic believers can sometimes be more tolerant. Maybe those who have strong but shallow beliefs find disagreement more existentially destabilizing on an emotive level. It would certainly explain a lot of behaviour on both the woke Right and woke Left.
Regarding the idea that being less secure about one's ideas leads to more intolerance towards other views, it seems very plausible to me, but I don't have any empirical evidence on hand. The closest thing is that some studies have found neuroticism correlating with support for censorship.
Sure, I guessed as much. I just thought it might be an informative direction to take research and survey approaches. Personally, as I grow older, I find myself becoming less and less certain of things I used to consider axiomatic; but it’s not because my foundational knowledge is less secure, it’s that I know more, and have become innately suspicious of monocausal answers.
I think this is precisely the point: those who identified as Protestant or Atheist were more likely to have a better theological/philosophical grounding in their beliefs, therefore making them feel more confident in their beliefs and more tolerant of challenges to those beliefs. Identifying as Catholic, regardless of church attendance, in contrast to the Protestant and Atheist labels, does not signal greater understanding of theology/philosophical grounding. Catholics theology and philosophy underpin the very concept of tolerance, yet most cradle Catholics have very little knowledge of theology or the history of ideas. Most will attend church, complete the mysteries, and think very little about theology meaning of any of it. Interestingly, the Catholic Church doesn’t really teach children its more complex theology—most Catholics will look at me like I’ve got 6 heads if I bring up deontology. They listen to the politicized slogans the American church focuses on, usually centered on ending abortion. This often makes Catholics feel that choosing to vote for or listen to left-wing ideas would put them on the wrong side of the angels. The complexities of why this is the case are many, but it’s unfortunate that the religious tradition with the richest, most influential theology, especially in terms of the ideas of the Enlightenment, has done such a poor job of making people theologically conversant. The Church also does the best job, on balance, of educating kids (compare Catholic high school grads with public school grads: https://www.pacificresearch.org/in-americas-education-darkness-catholic-schools-are-a-bright-spot/). Anyway, I’d be interested in seeing the difference between theologically educated Catholics and cradle Catholics.
Great comment. You read my comment further up the thread? It's nominal Catholicism which causes intolerance, not devout Catholicism. I know what you mean about deontology. I've noticed the same thing on Apostolicae Curae. Come to think of it, go back several centuries and I would probably be considered a heretic. It's not necessarily that I necessarily reject co-equality within the Trinity, but I certainly see a superordinate role for God the Father in places like Daniel and the synoptic Gospels.
I asked an AI to define nominal Catholic. It was probably a little less than I was expecting. Raised Catholic. Attends Mass rarely. Limited engagement with prayer, confession, or other sacraments. Sees Catholicism more as culture or family heritage than living religious commitment. It makes me wonder whether nominal Catholicism has slipped by a degree of separation. We may not be talking about people who spent much time in church as children.
Think of a devout grandparent for whom intergenerational commitment really matters. The parents may only attend church rarely, nominal or partially lapsed. But they make a point of at least making sure that their child or children are baptised or confirmed, and are capable of attending weddings and funerals, just to bring happiness to the grandparent, for whom it really matters. Nominal Catholic may be a broader category than might be imagined at first glance.
Great point on the education issue. The story of Northern Irish Catholics vs Northern Irish Protestants is quite amazing, although it's not something the British progressive establishment tended to broadcast historically, and online information sources were quite scant before AI. If one goes back to before the Good Friday agreement there was significant discrimination. It was a real civil rights issue.
The Protestants lived in better neighbourhoods and leafy suburbs. The Catholics lived in tenement buildings and council estates. Despite this, by the late eighties the Catholics had overtaken the Protestants, and by the nineties the gap had become an embarrassment for the educational establishment. Labour market gains took longer to emerge than the educational flip might suggest. Today, it's the Catholics who live in better housing and have better jobs. A complete reversal of fortune.
So what changed? First, although the Catholic system accepted the British curriculum because it wanted the funding, it was less keen on adopting methodology and educational faddism, especially with regard to whether education was teacher-led or a child 'discovery' process. The progressive method made huge mistakes during this era, probably because of the fact that teachers were a bit brighter and found much of the rote work required to instil good sentence construction or times tables was boring. We now know this was disastrous because of what we know about cognitive load theory, with humans required to commit large sections of usable knowledge as building blocks to memory in order to perform even slightly more complex maths. The less smart kids needed that vital yet boring repetition. The lack thereof greatly increased functional illiteracy and innumeracy. It was form of intergenerational intelligence-induced blindness.
But there were other factors. The Catholic Church had a positive influence in preventing the dissolution of the family and encouraging stable family formation. From the research of academics like Raj Chetty we now know that the levels of fathers in a community are crucial for upward social mobility. As a rule, fathers working together to socialise teenage boys tend to moderate peer group behaviour and produce better educational outcomes for local schools.
What's happening with American Catholic schools is likely a repeat of what happened in Northern Ireland from the nineties to today, although the gaps have since closed somewhat. Interestingly, the exceptionally successful charters tend to be successful for a similar reason. They aren't allowed to be selective in terms of students, but they can and are highly selective in terms of parental commitments to education. They are effectively constructing strong communities to create educational excellence.
The other issue is what one might consider a consolidation phase of education. Homework only needs to be around 30 minutes a night. One exercise per the 3-4 hardest things learned during the day. Practising after the event with a delay in between actually makes the knowledge more likely to 'stick'.
High levels of parenting and parental support for education produces an educational community bonus. In order for each kid in the class to reap the benefit, almost all of the kids need to complete their nightly homework. If the teacher has to invest most of their time the next day catering to the 4-5 kids who didn't do their homework and have forgotten the skills they learned in yesterday's lessons then progress slows to a snail's pace. And he or she cannot just ignore them. If they fall behind, they will disengage from learning, and are likely to become disruptive through frustration.
It seems like posing such a question would affect the results on all questions and for all respondents? Were the questions asked in this order? It seems like calling out one sect in the first question would condition all further responses negatively for members and possibly positively for others. I don’t see how this question made it through the survey design phase without a control group that does not have this question or conversely that makes the same claim about the respondents faith or sect. You may have a finding that people are less tolerant when personally attacked
Perhaps the Protestants have a deeper history of "free speech" as those who testified according to their conscience at the Diet of Speyer in 1529 (and "protested" in the modern sense against restrictions on Luther's teaching)
I'm reminded of your post from November (https://substack.com/home/post/p-177992744), which identified regular religious service attendance as more highly correlated with tolerance than many other demographic factors. In that, you noted: "Interestingly, the people who do worst are those who attend religious services very infrequently, whereas those who never attend do a bit better, perhaps suggesting atheists are more tolerant than religious backsliders." This current piece again identifies the importance of something like clarity or specificity -- "...the group willing to use more precise labels to describe themselves is significantly more tolerant." I think there's something here about clarity in itself, especially for young people, where a stronger and more traditionally grounded sense of self enables a less personalized, more objective view of "controversial ideas." I also think it's unavoidable that Protestant Christianity is very closely connected to the intellectual tradition that gave birth to ideals like free speech.
Birth is too strong a word. Freedom of conscience, and, by extension, freedom of speech, owes it's synthesis to Tertullian and Libertas Religionis within the Christian tradition, which in turn was drawn from the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus. It's a point that Chesterton made quite succinctly: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.'
It's also worth noting that early Judaism owed a lot to the ethos of Zoroastrianism. The concept of free speech in pursuit of truth-seeking goes back even further. It's more accurate to state that Protestantism was an amplifier of a signal already in existence.
Id say Protestants who self identify as protestants are more likely to be mainline than Protestants who identify as Christian, the latter will be full of "non-denominational" types.
So being more tolerant of just one side of the political spectrum (but not of the other) is just referred to as “more tolerant”? This seems like a pretty skewed way to interpret the results
Catholics, "Everybody should just shut up and study!"
Seems pretty obvious to me that belonging to the religion that’s been historically mainstream and normative, and never subject to any kind of pressure or prejudice as a result of one’s identity, would tend to nurture a sense of security and safety in society. Less insecurity equals less fear of the other equals more tolerance. If people’s views don’t threaten you, why would you feel the need to suppress them? You don’t fear them, so why not listen to them?
I would guess that at least some of the explanation of Protestant tolerance is that the least tolerant Protestants, evangelicals, tend to attend colleges of any sort at much lower rates than mainline Protestants of any denomination (and mainliners tend to be extremely tolerant).
I'm confused by your definition of tolerance. Say your survey-taker welcomes pretty extreme ideologues with whom they agree but shouts down similarly extreme ideologues with whom they disagree. If I'm understanding you right, this person would go down on your books as tolerant but biased.
I think most people would describe them as intolerant.
Am I misunderstanding you?
I’m surprised by your findings even given the questions.
You did send it to students, who I believe are more tolerant than older adults.
People who identify as "Christian" are probably evangelicals and non-denominationals; some of them literally don't know what "Protestant" means. People identifying as "Protestant" are probably Mainline (Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Lutheran) or UU, from wealthier more establishment families.
I find it very fascinating that the groups with higher tolerance go to services more frequently!!
Wow, I'm generally a fan of your work, but can you not see that those survey questions are going to produce incredibly skewed results? There are empirically valid right-wing ideas which argue that the life of and teachings of Muhammed meant that it was more aggressive and warlike as a religion than all other religions combined. How do you think your respondents would have taken this particular observation on the part of a prospective speaker? It may be a controversial position, but that doesn't make it any less true as an observation.
My point would be that the survey questions created a confounding signal because they singled out a single sect of Christianity for criticism. As such, the results are highly questionable.
TLDR: This is a good thing to wonder about, but it's not affecting results meaningfully.
I recreated the scatterplots using only the other two left-wing speaker questions (policekkk and children transitioning) to calculate left-wing tolerance. Catholics see a very modest increase in left-wing tolerance (not even enough to make them more left-wing tolerant than generic Christians); the plot otherwise looks basically the same.
Plots here. Note that the first is for the raw values and the second controlled for gender and ideology.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ctDnpXD1t1nWN6uP4m119O9V13iHu-GQ5fK8SYo-kSQ/edit?tab=t.0
Ok. Thanks for the feedback. It's a really interesting finding. I reread your article. I find it fascinating that nominal Catholicism predicts less tolerance than devout Catholicism. Do you think there is anything to the notion that those less secure in their moral and epistemic framework tend to be more defensive and kneejerk in their reaction of other viewpoints? They may not know well what they like, but they are certain what they don't like. If so, it makes the observations of J. S. Mill On Liberty all the more salient today (and also suggests my favourite Bertrand Russell quote may not be as axiomatic as I imagined).
I think this is something worthy of study. Does uncertainty of belief predict intolerance? Or to put it more succinctly: does a belief held strongly combined epistemic insecurity predicts intolerance? I came across a couple of metrics in psychology while I was pondering your findings: Intolerance of Uncertainty and Need for Cognitive Closure. Allport's is on point as well, with his old distinction that intrinsic believers can sometimes be more tolerant. Maybe those who have strong but shallow beliefs find disagreement more existentially destabilizing on an emotive level. It would certainly explain a lot of behaviour on both the woke Right and woke Left.
Regarding the idea that being less secure about one's ideas leads to more intolerance towards other views, it seems very plausible to me, but I don't have any empirical evidence on hand. The closest thing is that some studies have found neuroticism correlating with support for censorship.
Sure, I guessed as much. I just thought it might be an informative direction to take research and survey approaches. Personally, as I grow older, I find myself becoming less and less certain of things I used to consider axiomatic; but it’s not because my foundational knowledge is less secure, it’s that I know more, and have become innately suspicious of monocausal answers.
I think this is precisely the point: those who identified as Protestant or Atheist were more likely to have a better theological/philosophical grounding in their beliefs, therefore making them feel more confident in their beliefs and more tolerant of challenges to those beliefs. Identifying as Catholic, regardless of church attendance, in contrast to the Protestant and Atheist labels, does not signal greater understanding of theology/philosophical grounding. Catholics theology and philosophy underpin the very concept of tolerance, yet most cradle Catholics have very little knowledge of theology or the history of ideas. Most will attend church, complete the mysteries, and think very little about theology meaning of any of it. Interestingly, the Catholic Church doesn’t really teach children its more complex theology—most Catholics will look at me like I’ve got 6 heads if I bring up deontology. They listen to the politicized slogans the American church focuses on, usually centered on ending abortion. This often makes Catholics feel that choosing to vote for or listen to left-wing ideas would put them on the wrong side of the angels. The complexities of why this is the case are many, but it’s unfortunate that the religious tradition with the richest, most influential theology, especially in terms of the ideas of the Enlightenment, has done such a poor job of making people theologically conversant. The Church also does the best job, on balance, of educating kids (compare Catholic high school grads with public school grads: https://www.pacificresearch.org/in-americas-education-darkness-catholic-schools-are-a-bright-spot/). Anyway, I’d be interested in seeing the difference between theologically educated Catholics and cradle Catholics.
Great comment. You read my comment further up the thread? It's nominal Catholicism which causes intolerance, not devout Catholicism. I know what you mean about deontology. I've noticed the same thing on Apostolicae Curae. Come to think of it, go back several centuries and I would probably be considered a heretic. It's not necessarily that I necessarily reject co-equality within the Trinity, but I certainly see a superordinate role for God the Father in places like Daniel and the synoptic Gospels.
I asked an AI to define nominal Catholic. It was probably a little less than I was expecting. Raised Catholic. Attends Mass rarely. Limited engagement with prayer, confession, or other sacraments. Sees Catholicism more as culture or family heritage than living religious commitment. It makes me wonder whether nominal Catholicism has slipped by a degree of separation. We may not be talking about people who spent much time in church as children.
Think of a devout grandparent for whom intergenerational commitment really matters. The parents may only attend church rarely, nominal or partially lapsed. But they make a point of at least making sure that their child or children are baptised or confirmed, and are capable of attending weddings and funerals, just to bring happiness to the grandparent, for whom it really matters. Nominal Catholic may be a broader category than might be imagined at first glance.
Great point on the education issue. The story of Northern Irish Catholics vs Northern Irish Protestants is quite amazing, although it's not something the British progressive establishment tended to broadcast historically, and online information sources were quite scant before AI. If one goes back to before the Good Friday agreement there was significant discrimination. It was a real civil rights issue.
The Protestants lived in better neighbourhoods and leafy suburbs. The Catholics lived in tenement buildings and council estates. Despite this, by the late eighties the Catholics had overtaken the Protestants, and by the nineties the gap had become an embarrassment for the educational establishment. Labour market gains took longer to emerge than the educational flip might suggest. Today, it's the Catholics who live in better housing and have better jobs. A complete reversal of fortune.
So what changed? First, although the Catholic system accepted the British curriculum because it wanted the funding, it was less keen on adopting methodology and educational faddism, especially with regard to whether education was teacher-led or a child 'discovery' process. The progressive method made huge mistakes during this era, probably because of the fact that teachers were a bit brighter and found much of the rote work required to instil good sentence construction or times tables was boring. We now know this was disastrous because of what we know about cognitive load theory, with humans required to commit large sections of usable knowledge as building blocks to memory in order to perform even slightly more complex maths. The less smart kids needed that vital yet boring repetition. The lack thereof greatly increased functional illiteracy and innumeracy. It was form of intergenerational intelligence-induced blindness.
But there were other factors. The Catholic Church had a positive influence in preventing the dissolution of the family and encouraging stable family formation. From the research of academics like Raj Chetty we now know that the levels of fathers in a community are crucial for upward social mobility. As a rule, fathers working together to socialise teenage boys tend to moderate peer group behaviour and produce better educational outcomes for local schools.
What's happening with American Catholic schools is likely a repeat of what happened in Northern Ireland from the nineties to today, although the gaps have since closed somewhat. Interestingly, the exceptionally successful charters tend to be successful for a similar reason. They aren't allowed to be selective in terms of students, but they can and are highly selective in terms of parental commitments to education. They are effectively constructing strong communities to create educational excellence.
https://www.the74million.org/article/pondiscio-i-just-wrote-a-book-about-success-academy-charter-schools-it-does-not-support-your-preferred-narrative-i-hope-you-hate-it/
The other issue is what one might consider a consolidation phase of education. Homework only needs to be around 30 minutes a night. One exercise per the 3-4 hardest things learned during the day. Practising after the event with a delay in between actually makes the knowledge more likely to 'stick'.
High levels of parenting and parental support for education produces an educational community bonus. In order for each kid in the class to reap the benefit, almost all of the kids need to complete their nightly homework. If the teacher has to invest most of their time the next day catering to the 4-5 kids who didn't do their homework and have forgotten the skills they learned in yesterday's lessons then progress slows to a snail's pace. And he or she cannot just ignore them. If they fall behind, they will disengage from learning, and are likely to become disruptive through frustration.
It seems like posing such a question would affect the results on all questions and for all respondents? Were the questions asked in this order? It seems like calling out one sect in the first question would condition all further responses negatively for members and possibly positively for others. I don’t see how this question made it through the survey design phase without a control group that does not have this question or conversely that makes the same claim about the respondents faith or sect. You may have a finding that people are less tolerant when personally attacked
Perhaps the Protestants have a deeper history of "free speech" as those who testified according to their conscience at the Diet of Speyer in 1529 (and "protested" in the modern sense against restrictions on Luther's teaching)
The irony that Buddhists tend to be intolerant.
Specifically, American college students who identify as Buddhists. Perhaps not the most representative subset of the religion generally.
Good point.