Are Religious People More Compassionate and Does This Matter Politically?

Abstract

Analyzing a unique module of the General Social Survey, we test hypotheses that three religion dimensions — affiliation with specific religious traditions (belonging), service attendance (behaving), and religious orthodoxy (believing) are associated with compassionate feelings, and that these feelings carry over into support for government efforts to help the poor, blacks, and the sick. The religiously orthodox report more compassionate feelings toward others than do modernists and, partly because of this, are more supportive of government intervention to help the poor. Yet attending religious services frequently does not increase compassionate feelings and makes people less supportive of government efforts to help the poor. There are no differences among religious traditions in compassionate feelings, and the only difference on economic policy preferences is for Black Protestants to support government assistance to blacks. Compassionate feelings have comparable effects to political ideology and party identification on support for government assistance to the disadvantaged and misfortunate. We conclude that people of faith, variously defined, do not constitute a monolithic “Religious Right” and are potentially open to policy appeals from both political parties.

Factors facilitating nurses to deliver compassionate care: a qualitative study

“…According to the participants, spiritual and/or religious belief is another main motivator, especially when they were overwhelmed by heavy workload. Blouin et al states that all of the main faith traditions recommend their followers to show compassionate behaviour when they encounter suffering of others. Bradshaw considers nursing a quasi‐religious profession, in which some attributes are from a religious origin.…”

The Impact of Religion on Voting For Female Congressional Candidates

“…We specifically consider the five largest religious groups: evangelical Protestants (27% of the sample), Catholics (26%), mainline Protestants (16%), black Protestants (7%), and secular Americans (23.5%, and the reference category for most of our analyses). Following other scholars’ lead (e.g., Blouin, Robinson, and Starks 2013), we dropped from our analyses respondents who fell into Steensland, Robinson, and Wilcox's “other” category, which combines traditions as diverse as Judaism, Mormonism, Hinduism, and Islam. As a second modification for conceptual clarity, we identified respondents as non-religious seculars only if they met Steensland, Robinson, and Wilcox's definition of being unaffiliated (i.e., identified as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”), and also indicated that they neither saw religion as “important in their life,” nor prayed on a regular basis.…”

“And Who Is My Brother?” The Scope of Religious Communitarianism in Europe

“…We examine how three dimensions of religion—what Leege and Kellstedt (1993) referred to as “believing, behaving, and belonging”—are associated with compassionate concern for the well-being of others and universalistically extending this equally across social categories. These dimensions of religion are well established in U.S. studies (Blouin et al 2013; Friesen and Wagner 2012; Olson and Green 2006; Olson 2011), but infrequently applied to Europe (but see Kotler-Berkowitz 2001). In Europe, these religious dimensions may embody cultural as well as religious identities (Casanova 2007), and so we take special care to consider how organizational and social context might influence our expectations and findings.…”

“…Several theoretical strands in the sociology of religion have posited that the religiously orthodox, frequent attendees at worship services, or adherents of specific faith traditions tend to be “communitarian,” as opposed to “individualistic,” with communitarian referring to a compassionate concern for others beyond oneself (Davis and Robinson 2006; Greeley 1990; Marty and Appleby 1992; Tropman 1995). Holding compassionate attitudes has been found in U.S. studies to be associated with support for greater government assistance to the poor, blacks, and the sick (Blouin, Robinson, and Starks 2013; Feldman and Steenbergen 2001). Here, we focus specifically on economic communitarianism, defined by Davis and Robinson’s (2006) as viewing society as responsible for providing for those in need, reducing disparities between individuals, and intervening in economic affairs to provide for community needs.…”

“…The few studies of the effects of religious belonging, behaving and believing on compassion, humanitarianism, or social concern have been limited to the United States (e.g., Blouin et al 2013; Feldman and Steenbergen 2001; Keyes 2002). Our focus on 40 European countries allows us to address questions that cannot be explored through analyses of a single country—especially one that many scholars of religion consider to be unique: Does a country’s predominant faith tradition affect the economic concern of its citizens regardless of whether they adhere to this tradition?…”