Christian Identity, Political Identity, and Moral Virtues
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| Christian Political 2024 Image by Geoffrey W Sutton & Gemini |
My interest
is primarily in ethics and morality, which you can see by my previous writings (e.g., 2016).
It’s easy to understand why I have such an interest given my upbringing in a
conservative faith concerned with avoiding sinful behavior. Anyway, personal history
aside, I’ve been exploring the work of Jonathan Haidt (2012) and his colleagues
(e.g., Iyer et al., 2012) both as a thinker and as a researcher. That’s what
led to this study with two colleagues that explored morality and politics among
American Evangelical Christians.
An
Overview
We looked
at the political identities of US Evangelical Christians and their scores on a
multidimensional measure of moral foundations theory developed by Haidt and
others. [Chart below]
Moral Foundations Theory (known as MFT) finds almost universal support for thinking of human moral concerns as having five or six foundations. Originally, there were two subgroups of individualizing foundations based on virtues of care and fairness and three binding foundations of authority, loyalty, and purity. Later, a sixth dimension of liberty was added. Researchers have found that liberal thinkers emphasize the individualizing foundations and conservative emphasize many of the basic five foundations. At the time we conducted our study, no one else had studied the liberty foundation in a Christian sample. [Read more about moral foundations theory here]
What did
we do?
We were
able to recruit a large sample of Christians. Most reported a political
identity as Republican but there were Democrats and others, which we called
independents. We used questionnaires to ensure that they met the criteria for
having a Christian identity closely aligned with the beliefs of Evangelicals.
What did
we find?
We
conducted a lot of analyses, which you can read in the article. The bottom line
is that our Democrats scored higher than our Republicans on care and fairness
foundations and lower on the authority, loyalty, and purity foundations.
What about
the liberty foundation? Well, we found some support for the splitting of
liberty into two subtypes reported by the authors of the scale. That is, Democrats scored higher
on lifestyle liberty and Republicans scores higher on economic and government
aspects of liberty.
The chart
below shows how people with different political identities scored on the measure
of moral foundations.
You can read more details in our 2019 article (Sutton, Kelly, & Huver).
References
Haidt, J. (2012).
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Pantheon. [ AMAZON]
Iyer, R., Koleva,
S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J. (2012). Understanding Libertarian
morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified Libertarians. Plos
One, 7(8): e42366. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0042366.
Sutton, G. W. (2016). A house divided: Sexuality, morality, and
Christian cultures. Pickwick. ISBN: 9781498224888 [AMAZON]
Sutton, G. W., Kelly, H. L., & Huver, M. (2019).
Political identities, religious identity, and the pattern of moral foundations
among conservative Christians. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 48,
pp. 169-187. Accepted 6 September 2019. Online October 16, 2019. Issue
published September 1, 2020.
ResearchGate
Link Academia
Link
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Dr. Sutton’s posts are for educational purposes only. See a licensed mental health provider for diagnoses, treatment, and consultation.
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