Defining the Contours of Religion, State, and Modernity

Who commits religious discrimination, and why? Recent findings at the country level show an inverse relationship between societal religiosity and social religious discrimination, but findings at the individual level show an increase in conservatism among religious practitioners. In this study, I seek to bridge the gap these levels with a novel framework of religious identity. I argue that the threat of secularism can cause religious communities to reinforce boundaries between themselves and other groups. This should manifest itself in hostile attitudes toward members of other religions. I test this theory using multilevel data. I find that as aggregate religiosity declines, individual religiosity increasingly predicts inter-religious hostility. At the same time, this effect is only the case concerning community- and practice-based aspects of religiosity, and not among beliefs in-and-of-themselves. This study bridges a gap between macro-level findings regarding religion and state and micro-level findings regarding the modernization hypothesis.