Concomitant Attenuation and Amplification of Religious Prejudice: A Preliminary Theoretical Synthesis and Illustrations from a Muslim Society

Abstract

Religion is a multifaceted phenomenon whereby psychic, emotional, social, moral, and interpersonal attitudes become taken-for-granted realities. The manifold complexity of religious attitudes has produced various models that try to explain religious prejudice as an outcome variable. At the same time, youth in Muslim countries are susceptible to a dual religious prejudice anchored in religion on the one hand and sectarian doctrines on the other. Additionally, many overlapping correlates, such as discrimination, social exclusion, stereotypical behavior, and threat perception, produce additional data that need to be placed within the broader theoretical perspective. Moreover, the study of religious prejudice poses a series of the above-mentioned challenges. For instance, in Muslim societies, many social groups may display both sectarian and religious prejudice. The case of concomitant religious and sectarian prejudice treated as a compound cognitive, social, and moral behavior is sporadic in the theoretical and empirical literature. The present overview is based on a preliminary review of some of the fundamental theoretical literature in the field with the goal of informing new strands of studies on the subject aimed at collecting empirical data from traditional societies that are still very passionate about religious identities.