Date:
Location: University of Dayton, Alumni Hall
Speaker: : Laura Leming, Facilitator
Hosts: Judith Griffith and Debra Geier
Handout For Meeting
Sightings 5/1/05
Good News for the Tolerant
-- Jonathan C. Gold
The Religion and Values department at Gallup recently initiated a new index
called the "Gallup Religious Tolerance Index," which will now be part of
Gallup's regular polling. To publicize this new initiative, Gallup organized an
on-line seminar led by Al Winseman who described the format of the new index and
some preliminary findings. The web seminar was March 25, and I "attended" along
with 60 or 70 other subscribers to Gallup's web services.
Winseman and his team use five questions to categorize individuals into three
"levels" of religious tolerance: Isolated, Tolerant, and Integrated. The
figures show America today as 17 percent Isolated, 46 percent Tolerant, and 37
percent Integrated.
The least tolerant, "Isolated" individuals have a view that Winseman describes
as "my tribe or no tribe," believing that their faith is right and others
wrong. Individuals with a medium level of tolerance are called "Tolerant,"
which is here described as a "'live-and-let-live' attitude towards people of
other faiths" that is "not a negative view, but not a positive view" of other
faiths. The most tolerant, the "Integrated" individuals, not only respect other
traditions but "feel respected by them as well," and "actively seek to know more
about and from others of different religious traditions."
Once these categories were defined, Gallup investigated break out analyses in
order to determine the social and psychological "consequences" (statistically
speaking) of tolerance. One of Gallup's most significant discoveries (if, in
fact, it can be shown that this has not been smuggled into the definitions of
the categories) is that a higher level of tolerance is correlated with a higher
likelihood of membership in a faith community. As Winseman writes, this
suggests that "most faith communities are doing a good job in promoting respect
for other faiths." What's more, Integrated individuals -- the most tolerant
among us -- are distinguished as being by far the most likely to be actively
Engaged in their faith communities. (Religious "Engagement" is itself a new
Gallup category summarizing answers to a separate group of questions.)
Life is better for those most open to other faiths. In answer to Gallup's
standard "Life Satisfaction" question, a full 47 percent of Integrated
individuals say that they are "Completely Satisfied," compared to a mere 35 and
36 percent of Isolated and Tolerant individuals, respectively. When Winseman
suggests in this context that people "pay the price" for intolerance, he is
mistaking a correlation for a cause: perhaps satisfied people are more likely to
be open to others. Nonetheless, even this alternative possibility suggests that
an intriguing characterology lies behind these statistics.
To round out this characterization of tolerance, it turns out that the more
tolerant you are, the more likely you are to serve your community and to be
spiritually committed -- statistics that belie the paranoid notion that learning
about others undermines one's own faith commitments.
Whites are far more often Tolerant (48 to 38 percent) and far less often
Integrated (35 to 45 percent) than non-whites, while whites and non-whites have
an equal number of Isolated individuals (17 percent). Females are in general
far more tolerant than males, with only 13 percent Isolated as compared with 22
percent of males, and 43 percent Integrated as opposed to only 33 percent of
males.
The more education a person has, the more likely he is to be Tolerant, rather
than Isolated: this we would have hoped for and expected. But increased
education levels are also correlated with decreased levels of Integration --
suggesting that education teaches one to be tolerant, but does not teach one to
be outgoing.
Still, this way of putting it suggests that the index would more properly be
called the "Religious Integration Index." (We would not ordinarily say that my
wanting to be your friend would make me more "tolerant" of you than my wanting
to be left alone.) This points to the reason academic institutions fail to
promote the full measure of "tolerance" that the index measures. Religious
integration -- that is, the cross-fertilization of religious groups -- is
innately an activity of religious communities, not of non-religious academic
ones.
One hopes that in upcoming studies Gallup will be able to break out these
findings into other relevant categorizations, especially age, religious
denomination, and geographical distribution. In any case, as global events
place religious communities into ever closer connections and confrontations,
these will be numbers worth watching.
Jonathan C. Gold is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy of Religions at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
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