Attitudes and Familiarity

June 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston


In the previous post, I said that professors who have the most negative attitudes towards Evangelicals probably are those who have the least contact with them. I don't have any data on that specific issue, but studies on other topics generally confirm the idea that familiarity breeds content. Or if not content, at least a decrease in antipathy.

The graph shows some data from a survey that asked, among other things, if immigrants were a burden on the US.
The people who had little contact with immigrants were more than twice as likely to say that immigrants were a burden.

I live in New York. Buy food in a grocery store, take a cab, buy a newspaper, eat in a restaurant, check into a hotel or hospital — just about anything you do will bring you into contact with immigrants. I doubt that many New Yorkers see immigrants as a threat to the Republic.

The same principle holds for attitudes on issues that surround homosexuality—  should they be allowed to teach in schools, should they be able to marry.

The same is true of homosexuality.

People with no gay friends or relatives are more than twice as likely to favor allowing schools to fire gay teachers. People who do have gay friends or relatives are more than twice as likely to favor allowing gays to marry.

Evangelicals in the Classroom

June 11, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Q: What religious group do college faculty feel least favorable about?

A: Evangelicals.

That’s one result from a recent study, and in yesterday’s post, I offered my guess that faculty were really reacting to what they perceived as the politics of Evangelicals, not their religion. In that sense, the attitude is different from other kinds of prejudice, especially prejudice based on ascribed characteristics like race.

But I would also guess that the attitude shares something with other kinds of prejudice: those who have the most unfavorable attitudes towards Evangelicals are probably those who have the least contact with them. It’s true of homosexuality, and it’s true in the current debate over immigration.

So I wonder about those professors who say they view Evangelicals unfavorably. I think about the late Donna Darden, who taught sociology in Tennessee, where Evangelicals and fundamentalists were the rule rather than the exception. She had wonderful stories about her struggles to get students to think sociologically. I’m not sure whether Donna was an atheist or Wiccan, but whichever it was, when students learned of her views, some would stand up and “witness” right in class. Here’s an excerpt from something she posted to a sociology Internet group.

Their next assignment calls for them to post a completion to the stem, “If I had been born a member of a different race...” They have read good stuff about the social construction of gender and race. Many will still tell me that they cannot answer that question because God made them the persons they are, and they cannot second-guess God.

But for all her disagreement and frustration with her students, she certainly would never have answered the survey by saying she felt “cold” towards them.

My own contact with Evangelicals and other born-again students has been limited. Northern New Jersey ain’t Tennessee, and up here in Sopranoland, most people are content to be born only once. I started teaching before the Moral Majority became a strong political force, but even so, I may have shared some of the same pre-judgments as the professors in the recent survey. At the very least, I expected that Evangelicals would be closed-minded and dogmatic. But what I found was something else.

First, I never had Donna’s experience of students injecting their theology into sociological discussions. The only way I could even guess that a student was an Evangelical was this: on the first day, I ask students to fill out index cards with their name and phone numbers. But so I’ll have a better chance of remembering them and learning their names, I also ask them to put down the title of the best film they’ve ever seen. Not just the most recent, I say; take a minute to think. OK. Then do the same thing for a book and a record. I also ask for a TV show they watch regularly — one they’d record if they weren’t going to be home when it was on. (This exercise also gives me a small window onto all those areas of pop culture that I’m growing farther and farther away from.)

Every once in a while, there’ll be a student who for best book lists The Bible. So I figure here’s someone who, if not Evangelical, fundamentalist, or born again, at least takes their religion pretty seriously. My sample is small, but my impression is that compared with the average student, they are more conscientious— less likely to miss class and more likely to do the reading and to turn in assignments on time.

But it’s not just that they are well-behaved. They regard the sociological ideas from class as something important, not just a bunch of stuff that you leave behind each day once you walk out of the classroom, except maybe to remember for a test. Where many students are content to “learn” the material in a sort of Durkheim-said-this-Weber-said-that way, these students will follow the line of thought further and look for its corollaries, implications, and applications.

They engage the material more than most students because they walk into the course already having a more or less coherent world view. Most students at age twenty or so have an inchoate set of ideas for understanding the world. They take it as it comes and haven’t thought systematically about the way they are interpreting it. They don’t even see themselves as making interpretations. They have trouble seeing the differences between theories, between Weber and Marx for instance.

But the born-again students have a systematic scheme for encountering the world. They have a “theory,” a set of related ideas, and they are constantly alert to interpret the events of the real world with respect to that theory. Give them some new data or some new ideas, and they want to know how these fit with their own view.

They may reject sociological ideas. They may even, like some of Donna Darden’s students, shun these ideas as the work of Satan. But in order to make that judgment, they first have to think through those sociological ideas and see how they match up against their religious ideas. They have to take the material seriously.

Prejudiced Professors?

June 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

What are your overall feelings toward Catholics? Use a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is very cold or unfavorable, and 100 very warm or favorable.

That’s a question from a survey of college faculty. Sociologist Brad Wright has been blogging recently about one finding from this survey. On this warm-cold question, 13% of faculty have a view of Catholics that's below 50 out of 100. The religious group viewed most unfavorably is Evangelical Christians.
Evangelicals were the only group that a majority of faculty rated as less than 50. Brad Wright, himself an Evangelical, sees this as “prejudice,” similar race prejudice. And he thinks that this unfavorable attitude probably takes the active form of unfavorable treatment of Evangelical students.

The report has no evidence on discriminatory treatment, so we’re all just speculating on that. But in any case, prejudice is probably the wrong term for these unfavorable feelings. They are not based on some irrational stereotype. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t ask the faculty why they hold their favorable or unfavorable views. That’s one of the big problems with survey research— it doesn’t go very deeply into what people actually think. But from other evidence in the report, it’s pretty clear that the attitude towards Evangelicals is not primarily about religion; it’s about politics. Faculty are more liberal than mainstream America; Evangelicals are conservative. And what faculty were primarily concerned about was not someone else's personal relationship with God and Jesus but their political actions.

In fact, while a bare majority of faculty viewed Evangelicals unfavorably, 71% felt that “this country would be better off if Christian fundamentalists kept their religious beliefs out of politics.”

Strictly speaking, the terms fundamentalist and Evangelical are not interchangeable. It is the fundamentalists who are more politically active. But I suspect that many of the faculty surveyed ignored these differences (if they were aware of them at all) and lumped fundamentalists and Evangelicals together into the single undifferentiated category of conservative Christians. The people who designed the questionnaire did mention this distinction and may actually have encouraged the oversimplification. The question about politics referred to “Christian fundamentalists,” but the questions on warm or cold feelings asked only about Evangelicals and omitted fundamentalists entirely.


Conservative Christians have been loudest in their views condemning if not criminalizing abortion and homosexuality. (Does Jesus every mention either of these?) Most faculty (and most Americans) take a more tolerant view on these issues. But what if these Christians had instead been putting their political muscle into raising the minimum wage, creating more equitable health care and tax policies, restricting access to deadly weapons, protecting workers and the environment against powerful corporations, etc.? (I’m not a theologian, but I suspect that you could make a “what would Jesus do” argument for the liberal side of all these issues. In fact, some Evangelicals work for goals liberals would certainly support — adult literacy, food banks, day care, etc.) And then there’s the most important political issue of the day — Iraq.

If the politics of conservative Christians were different, with no change in their theology, faculty would surely view them more favorably.

(I'll continue tomorrow with a more personal take on this issue.)

Character and Conviction — Scooter Libby

June 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stanley Milgram’s experiments on “obedience to authority” and Philip Zimbardo’s prison simulation are two of the most famous studies in all social science. If there’s anything that we should have learned from them it’s this:
In new and unusual situations,

1. We are not very good at predicting what we ourselves or anyone else will do
2. Individual factors like character and personality are far less important than situational pressures.

Today, the New York Times reprinted excerpts of letters asking for leniency in the Scooter Libby case. The article should have carried the title “Fooled by Character.”

The judge had sentenced Libby to 2½ years in prison for lying to the FBI and to a federal grand jury. Libby frequently claimed not to be able to remember a lot of important things about the disclosure of the identity of a CIA agent. In the criminal trial, the jury concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was lying about these losses of memory.

Libby was trying to protect the Bush administration generally and perhaps specific members of it (Rove? Cheney?) in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. The Bush team leaked Plame’s identity in order to discredit her husband, who had undercut some of the administrations claims about Saddam’s WMDs.

None of Libby’s supporters (mostly Bush administration biggies) argued that Libby had been wrongfully convicted and that he hadn’t committed the crimes he was convicted of. But clearly, they found it difficult to believe. A man of such good character could never commit such crimes, could he? Here’s James Woolsey, former head of the CIA:

His conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice is completely inconsistent with my knowledge, and highest evaluation, of this man's character and integrity.

And Richard Perle (something of a slimeball himself):

Having known Scooter Libby for many years, I am unable to reconcile the man I know with the crime for which he has been convicted.

Obviously, Woolsey and Perle have not learned the lessons of Milgram-Zimbardo.

More sophisticated is Henry Kissinger:

I would never have associated the actions for which he was convicted with his character. . . . Having served in the White House under pressure, I have seen how difficult it sometimes is to recall precisely a particular sequence of events. This does not justify the action, but it may help you consider mitigating circumstances.

Kissinger at least recognizes situational pressure. But he sees that pressure as affecting only the ability to remember, not the willingness to lie to authorities in order to protect a bankrupt policy and the claims that it was based on. Still, Kissinger, like the others, is blinded by character.

It all reminds me of official reaction when the abuses of Abu Ghraib were exposed and could not be covered up. A military spokesman said, “It's just not something we would do.”

The Daily Show* caught this paradox perfectly when it had Rob Corrdry explain, “We shouldn’t be judged on our actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn't mean it’s something we would do.”

Committing the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice was not something that Scooter Libby would do. It was just something he did do.

* Personal note: I will be in the audience at today’s taping of The Daily Show.