Religious Worldviews

Human cognition and behavior are largely influenced by a person’s beliefs about life and reality, and these beliefs can shed light on many different aspects of humanity, such as faith, coping, and conflict (Koltko-Rivera, 2004). These beliefs affect and are affected by religious worldviews. While many religions teach peace and love, studies have shown that many religious people are prejudiced and discriminate against certain groups (Rowatt et al., 2006; Leak & Finken, 2011). An explanation for this relationship between religion and prejudice is terror management theory. Terror management theory states that faith in a meaningful worldview serves as “a critical anxiety-buffering function,” and this causes people to protect their worldviews in
They found that, in the use of the scale, strong Christian religious worldviews were positively correlated with explicit prejudice towards Hinduism, Judaism, and Atheism, as well as religious intolerance and aggression towards other religious groups and science. The study also supported the fundamental idea of terror management by confirming that other worldviews “contribute to religious prejudice because religious outgroups threaten strong RWV people’s worldview” (Goplen and Plant, 2015, p.1478). The scale was also strongly correlated to religious fundamentalism, or a belief that “there is one set of religious teachings that clearly contains the fundamental truth” about humanity and the ultimate good and evil (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992, p.118). The study, however, did not use mortality salience as a way of increasing religious worldview, and also did not correspond with prejudice towards race (Goplen & Plant,
In another study, religious fundamentalism was even the strongest predictor of sexual orientation prejudice compared to other measures of religiosity (i.e. right-wing authoritarianism and orthodox Christianity; Rowatt, et al., 2006). Leak and Finken (2011) suggested that the increased strength of the correlation between sexual orientation prejudice and fundamentalism is due to the cultural prevalence of rhetoric surrounding same-sex relationships during the time of the study. Further, religious fundamentalism is also positively correlated with transphobia (Nagoshi et al.,