Get started
Work

The Struggle for Group Membership: Religion and American Identity

Year: 2011
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: If the United States is considered by many to be a Christian nation, how does that affect individuals who are American citizens but not Christian? We test two hypotheses: 1) Americans consider Christians to be more fully American than non-Christians. Politicians occasionally refer to the United States as a “Christian nation” and many Americans assume the Constitution says it is so. We examine whether Americans explicitly connect being Christian with being a true American and go further by testing whether they make the implicit connection as well; 2) We know from previous research that prototypical group members are more patriotic and tend to set more exclusive group boundaries than atypical group members. As such, we hypothesize that Christian Americans will be more likely to express patriotism and set exclusive boundaries on the national group than will non-Christian Americans. Among non-Christians, however, those who want to be fully accepted as American will also be more patriotic and set more exclusive boundaries on the national group to emulate prototypical group members (i.e. Christians) than non-Christians who place less emphasis on national group membership. We test these hypotheses using data from both a national random-sample survey data and a laboratory-based Implicit Association Test (IAT). We find that Americans in general associate being Christian with being a true American. For Christians, this is true both explicitly and implicitly. For non-Christians, only the implicit measure uncovers an association. We also found that non-Christians exhibit significantly more pro-national group behaviors when they desire being prototypical than when they do not.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1542253295
Cites: 29
Cited by:
Related to: 10