Ofta har människor en bild av religion som en god kraft i samhället, som verkar i riktning mot tolerans och acceptans. Så är inte alltid fallet, enligt den nya studien ”Priming Christian Religious Concepts Increases Racial Prejudice”, publicerad i Social Psychological and Personality Science:

Positive correlations have been found between several self-report measures of religiousness and racial prejudice; however, no experiment has yet examined the direct effect of religion on racial attitudes. In the current studies, persons were subliminally primed with Christian or neutral words. Then covert racial prejudice (Study 1) and general negative affect toward African-Americans (Study 2) were assessed. Participants subliminally primed with Christian words displayed more covert racial prejudice against African-Americans (Study 1) and more general negative affect toward African-Americans (Study 2) than did persons primed with neutral words.

De kristna kodord som användes, och som visades i 35 ms, var: ”Bible, faith, Christ, church, gospel, heaven, Jesus, Messiah, prayer, and sermon”. En möjlig förklaring till resultatet skulle kunna vara att religion har en tendens att skapa ett vi-och-dem-tänkande:

These findings suggest that ”‘religious prosociality is not extended indiscriminately: the ‘dark side’ of within-group cooperation is between-group competition and conflict. The same mechanisms involved in in-group altruism may also facilitate out-group antagonism” (Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008, p. 62).

I vilket fall är religion ingen garanti för ”godhet”: det kan t.o.m. förhålla sig så att religion förstärker eller skapar negativa förhållningssätt, attityder och beteende mot andra människor.