The Authoritarians

by Bob Altemeyer

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  8 See Damon Linker’s, “The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,” by Doubleday, 2006.

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  9 The United States government called off further searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on January 12, 2005, conceding none had been found. A Harris Poll taken the following month found that 36% of the American public believed such weapons had been found—a drop of only 2 percent from a pre-concession poll taken in November 2004. By December 2005 the figure had fallen to 26 percent, but that’s still a quarter of the American people.

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  10 Dunwoody, Plane, Rice and Rothrock thus found that as late as August 2005 and January 2006 high RWA Pennsylvania college students were likely to have inaccurate perceptions of the war in Iraq in all the areas tested. They believed Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons against American troops, that Iraq’s government was highly connected with al-Qaida, that Americans had found evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with al-Qaida, that most people in the world favored the United States’ going to war in Iraq, and so did most people in Europe. They also believed that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but this was only statistically significant at the .09 level. In general the students were better informed than the American public as a whole, but the authoritarian followers among them still carried a lot of demonstrably erroneous beliefs around in their heads.

  McWilliams and Keil’s nationwide poll of 1000 Americans in 2005 found a correlation of .51 between RWA scores and being satisfied with “the job President Bush and his administration are doing.”

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  11 An NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll released on December 12, 2006 found only 23% of Americans still approved of President Bush’s policy on Iraq. Support on this issue is boiling down to the bed rock of hard-core right-wing authoritarians, who seem to make up roughly 20-25% of the American public. The same poll, and several others at the same time, found 34% still gave Bush’s overall performance positive marks. A month later, on the eve of Bush’s address to the nation pushing for a “surge” in troop strength in Iraq, a Gallup poll found his overall approval rating had dropped to 26%. A CBS News Poll on January 22, 2007 put the figure at 28%.

  At the end of 2006 an Ipsos Poll of the American public for AP/AOL News found the president was spontaneously named the baddest “bad guy” on the planet more often (25%) than anyone else. But he was also named by others the best “good guy” more (13%) than anyone else. GWB was also spontaneously named the “most admired man”in the annual Gallup Poll at the end of the year—again by 13% of the respondents, more than anyone else.

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  12 When bad news spills out about things that high RWAs support, they want to be told it isn’t true. So some governments have gotten used to issuing “non-denial denials” and flimsy counter-arguments, because that’s all it takes and it’s so effortless. If a well-researched paper by a prestigious scientific body concludes that human activity is seriously increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, culprit governments will say “the evidence is incomplete” and they will find someone, somewhere, with some sort of credentials, who will dismiss a great number of studies with a wave of the hand and give them the sound-bite they want.

  When someone responds to evidence with “a wave of the hand” or a bland dismissal like “It’s just nonsense,” they’re usually revealing they can’t say anything more specific because they’re whupped. But the government’s supporters will be reassured. For them, one sound bite cancels the other, and there really is no difference between a widely-confirmed fact and a speculation, between fifty studies and one.

  To take a non-political example of walking extra miles for authorities, when people first began to reveal they had been sexually assaulted as children by priests and ministers, bishops often issued statements saying they had thoroughly investigated the charge and found it had no merit. That was good enough for the authoritarian followers. If the evidence nevertheless grew against Father X, church authorities asked the public, “Whom are you going to believe, this obviously disturbed person who claims to have been assaulted, or the Church?” That too was an easy one for the high RWAs.

  If it eventually became known that the bishops’ own inquiries had discovered that Father X was indeed a pedophile, but the bishops still denied he was and sometimes even quietly transferred Father X to another parish, where he sexually assaulted still more children, do you think the high RWAs learned anything from this? How many “disconnects” do you think they have at hand to avoid realizing they allowed themselves to be deceived?

  I fear you will wait a long time before authoritarian followers wise up to their chosen leaders, and to themselves—and their leaders know it. When the Watergate revelations were sinking his ratings in the polls, Richard Nixon pointed out to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldemann, “I think there’s still a hell of a lot of people out there…[who] want to believe. That’s the point, isn’t it?” “Why sure,” Haldemann replied. “Want to and do.” (Conversation of April 25, 1973 recorded on the “Watergate tapes,” reported by the New York Times on November 22, 1974, p. 20.)

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  Chapter 4.

  Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism [1]

  The Plan for This Chapter

  So here’s the trip map for another seven-stop chapter. First we’ll square up the terms “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals.” Then we’ll bring the discussion into the context of this book, authoritarianism. We’ll analyze the ethnocentrism you often find in fundamentalists. We’ll see how some of the mental missteps we covered in the last chapter appear in them. We’ll appreciate the positive things people get from being fundamentalists. Then we’ll come up against the intriguing fact that, despite these benefits, so many people raised in Christian fundamentalist homes leave the religion. We’ll close our discussion with some data on shortfalls in fundamentalists’ behavior, including a surprising fact or two about their practices and beliefs. By the time we have ended, we’ll have learned many disturbing things about these people who believe, to the contrary, that they are the very best among us.

  1. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals in America

  “Fundamentalism” has a particular meaning in the United States. It refers to a movement that grew within Protestantism nearly a century ago in reaction to developments in the then modern world, most particularly to scholarly analyses of the Bible that cast strong doubt on its supposed divine origins. To refute these analyses a series of pamphlets called “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth” was widely distributed. At first they dealt mainly with scriptural issues, rebutting the charges that the Bible was man-made, rewritten as time passed, and laced with myths, biases and inaccurate history. Instead, the pamphlets claimed, the Bible has no error in it whatsoever; it is the original word of God, exactly as God wanted things put.[5] But the focus shifted by the end of the series, and essays came out against “The Decadence of Darwinism,” “Romanism,” Christian Science, Mormonism, and socialism. A Baptist editor in 1920 termed those who stood ready “to do battle royal for The Fundamentals” the “fundamentalists,” and the label stuck.

  Protestant fundamentalism suffered so much public ridicule after the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 that its influence waned for many years. In the late 1940s it reappeared as (or was transformed into) the evangelical movement, with the Rev. Billy Graham its most famous leader. [6]Evangelicals had a different “take” on the role of religion in society in some respects. In particular, they believed they had a responsibility not just to defend Christianity, but to evangelize, to preach the Gospel to others. The following seven items were developed by George Barna, an admirable evangelical pollster who closely follows religious development in the United States, to identify evangelicals.

  Do you believe Jesus Christ lived a sinless life?

 
Do you believe eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works?

  Do you believe Christians have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?

  Is your faith very important to your life today?

  Do you believe Satan is a real, living entity?

  Do you believe God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today?

  Do you believe the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches?

  If you say yes to all seven of these questions, you would be an evangelical by Barna’s definition.

  The word “fundamentalists” has gotten a lot of bad press lately, so conservative Protestants today tend to say they are evangelicals. But evangelicals score highly on the Religious Fundamentalism scale you just answered. In a 2005 survey I conducted of over six hundred parents of students at my university, which I shall refer to frequently in this chapt er, [7] 85 percent of the one hundred and thirty-nine parents who answered yes to all of George Barna’s seven questions were High fundamentalists (i.e. they landed in the top 25 percent of the scores on the Religious Fundamentalism scale). They racked up an average score of 86.6 on the measure—discernibly lower but still in the same ballpark as the American fundamentalists’ 93.1 in Witzig’s study.

  Looked at the other way, 72 percent of the Christians who scored highly on the fundamentalism measure qualified as “Barna evangelicals.”[8] So call them what you will, most evangelicals are fundamentalists according to our measure, and most Christian fundamentalists are evangelical s.[9] Whether you are talking about evangelicals or talking about Christian fundamentalists, you are largely talking about the same people.

  Some high religious fundamentalists turn up in all the faiths represented in my samples, including Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Within Christianity, I always find some Catholics scoring highly on the Religious Fundamentalism scale, a few Anglicans post big numbers, some Lutherans ring the bell, and so on. But in study after study the high scores pile up far more often in the conservative Protestant denominations than anywhere else, among Baptists, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Alliance Church, and so on. It bears repeating that this is a generalization, and some Baptists, etcetera score quite low in fundamentalism. But if you want to make a safe wager, see what odds you can get betting that these conservative sects will score higher on the Religious Fundamentalism scale than the other major Christian groups.

  2. Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism

  The first thing you need to know about religious fundamentalists, in case you haven’t inferred it already, is that they usually score very highly on the RWA scale. [10], [11] A solid majority of them are authoritarian followers. The two traits, authoritarianism and fundamentalism, go together so well that nearly everything I have said about high RWAs in the previous chapters also applies to high Religious Fundamentalists.

  Since authoritarianism can produce fundamentalism if one grows up submissively in a religiously conservative family, and (conversely), fundamentalism can promote authoritarianism with its emphases on submission to religious authority, dislike of out-groups, sticking to the straight and narrow, and so on, one immediately wonders which is the chicken and which is the egg.

  The evidence indicates authoritarianism is more basic. The RWA scale correlates better than the Religious Fundamentalism scale does with acceptance of government injustices, hostility toward homosexuals, willingness to persecute whomever the government targets, and most other things. (The big exception naturally comes when one raises distinctly religious issues.) So the problem’s not so much that some people are fundamentalists, but that fundamentalists so definitely tend to be authoritarian followers. But as I just said, religious fundamentalism does promote authoritarianism in some ways. And you can certainly see the influence of right-wing authoritarianism in many things that religious fundamentalists do.

  3. Fundamentalism as a Template for Prejudice

  Let me ask you a personal question: Who are you? What makes up your identity? How would you describe yourself?

  You would probably list your gender fairly quickly, your age, your nationality, marital status and your job—unless you are a student, in which case you’d say you’re poor and going deeply into debt. Would you mention a religious affiliation? You almost certainly would if you are a high fundamentalist. Furthermore, except for converts, this has probably been true of fundamentalists for all of their lives. They report that their parents placed a lot of emphasis on their religious identification as they were growing up. For example, “You are a Baptist,” or “We belong to the Assembly of God.” It would have become one of the main ways they thought of themselves. By comparison, they say their gender and race were stressed much less.

  What’s the effect of emphasizing the family’s religious affiliation to a child? Well, by creating this category of what the family is, you instantly create the category of people who are not that, who are different. You’re laying down an in-group versus out-group distinction. Even if you never say a nasty word about other religions, the enormous human tendency to think in ethnocentric terms will create a preference for “people like me.” Throw in some gratuitous nasty words about Jews, Muslims, Methodists, atheists, and so on, and you’ve likely sown the seeds of religious prejudice in a four-year old. Perhaps more importantly in the long run, you’ve given your child early training in the wonderful world of “Us versus Them”—training that may make it easier for him to acquire racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudices later on. [12]

  There can be little doubt that, as adults, Christian fundamentalists harbor a pointed dislike of other religions. Here are some items from my Religious Ethnocentrism scale that fundamentalists tend to agree with.

  Our country should always be a Christian country, and other beliefs should be ignored in our public institutions.

  Nonchristian religions have a lot of weird beliefs and pagan ways that Christians should avoid having any contact with.

  All people may be entitled to their own religious beliefs, but I don’t want to associate with people whose views are quite different from my own.

  At the same time, fundamentalists tend to disagree with:

  If there is a heaven, good people will go to it no matter what religion they belong to, if any.

  You can trust members of all religions equally; no one religion produces better people than any other does.

  People who belong to different religions are probably just as nice and moral as those who belong to mine.

  Yep, it’s Us versus Them. Religious prejudice does not draw as much attention or produce as much hatred in North America as it does in (say) the Middle East and southern Asia, but it’s still dynamite looking for a place to explode because it’s so often accompanied by the self-righteousness that releases aggression. And it runs deep in Christian fundamentalists because religion is so important to them.

  News that they score relatively highly on racial prejudice scales often stuns white fundamentalists. They will usually reply, “You must be mistaken. We’re not prejudiced. Why, we accept black people in our church.” And indeed, if you ask a white fundamentalist if he’d rather spend an evening with a black member of his church or a white atheist, he will almost certainly choose the former.

  But fundamentalists still hold more racial prejudices than most people—a fact known to social scientists for over fifty years. White churches were open to just white folks for generations in America, and many pastors found justification in the Bible for both slavery and the segregation that followed the demise of slavery. Vestiges of this remain in fundamentalist religions. Bill McCartney, the founder of the evangelical men’s movement called Promise Keepers, tells the story of what happened on a nation-wide speaking tour when he finished up his stock speech with a call for racial reconciliation:

  “There was no response—nothing…In city after city, in church after church, it was the same story—wild en
thusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue-like chill as I stepped away from the microphone.[13]

  Ironically, most fundamentalists say they believe in “the brotherhood of all mankind.” “We are all God’s children.” “Jesus loves you”—whoever you are. It says so in their mental boxes. But they still like best, by a long shot, the people who are most exactly like themselves. Where did this crushing rejection of others come from? Its earliest roots appear buried in the person’s religious training. [14]

  4. The Mental Life of Fundamentalists

  Mark Noll, an evangelical history professor at evangelical Wheaton College, begins his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, with a pithy thought: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll observes that “American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.” He points out that evangelicals support dozens of theological seminaries, scores of colleges, and hundreds of radio stations, but not a single research university. “In the United States he writes, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual.” “Modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.”[15]

  I have found nothing in my research that disagrees with this assessment. Indeed almost all of the findings in the last chapter about the authoritarian follower’s penchants for illogical thinking, compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy and dogmatism apply to religious fundamentalists as well. For example, David Winter at the University of Michigan recently found that fundamentalist students, when evaluating the war in Iraq, rejected a series of statements that were based on the Sermon on the Mount—which is arguably the core of Jesus’ teachings. Fundamentalists may believe they follow Jesus more than anyone else does, but it turns out to depend a lot on where Jesus said we should go. And we can augment such findings by considering the thinking behind three of the fundamentalist’s favorite issues: school prayer, opposition to evolution, and the infallibility of the Bible.