Acceptance of Other Religions in the United States: An HLM Analysis of Variability across Congregations

Abstract

Interactions with people who are different become more common and significant as the world becomes more closely connected, both physically and culturally. One of the ways in which such cultural collisions are most deeply felt is over matters of religion. The author explores the importance of religious traditions in sculpting the attitudes religious people hold toward the validity of alternative faiths. By employing the statistical techniques of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), the current analysis is able to combine prior explanations of individual-level behavior with the contextual effects of the religious congregation, such as strictness, racial homogeneity, and membership size. This is accomplished with the 2001 United States Congregational Life Survey. Results indicate that all religions have distinct ways of influencing the relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and pluralistic attitudes, but that more particular features of the congregation are only sporadically significant.