A study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that believing in supernatural evil is a strong predictor of more restrictive attitudes on immigration. The researchers suggest that people who endorse strict boundaries between spiritual good and evil may also see a clear distinction between in-groups and out-groups in the real world.
Previous research has revealed that different components of religion have differential effects on a person’s attitudes toward immigration. For example, more frequent service attendance has been tied to more openness toward immigrants, while ideologies that combine nationalism with religion, such as Christian Nationalism, have been linked to more restrictive attitudes toward immigrants.
Study authors Brandon C. Martinez and his team proposed that belief in supernatural evil may be an underlying mechanism that links religion to views on immigration. Belief in supernatural evil underlies most world religions, along with a clear division between good and evil. This distinction can then extend into the material world, where a sharp line is drawn between ingroup and outgroup members. This may then translate to immigrants being demonized and portrayed as threats to society.
“I’m fascinated by the juxtaposition of anti-immigrant sentiment with religious teachings to love foreigners and love their neighbor. I was interested in exploring the religious roots of attitudes towards immigration. I have worked with the concept of belief in supernatural evil in prior research, so the potential connections here piqued my interest,” explained Martinez, an associate professor at Providence College.
“Spiritual warfare, the idea of a cosmic battle between good and evil occurring at a spiritual level, is a common meta-narrative within some traditions of American Christianity,” said co-author Joshua C. Tom, an assistant professor at Seattle Pacific University. “This spiritual conflict is often conflated with conflict in every-day reality, particularly when it comes to culture-war issues.”
“What would otherwise be merely human discord is attributed to a larger battle between supernatural forces. For Americans who believe strongly in supernatural evil the world has an added layer of hostility, and a good deal of literature shows that these beliefs predict a lot of attitudes and behaviors even when controlling for other social, political and religious attributes.”
“Belief in supernatural evil is both commonplace and consequential,” added co-author Joseph O. Baker, a professor at East Tennessee State University. “When I started research on this topic 15 years ago, there was almost no work addressing the issue in the social sciences, except for a handful of small-scale studies in social psychology.”
“Given my own background, both in terms of religious upbringing and growing up in a place steeped in religious conservatism (southern Appalachia), I felt like there were a lot of potentially important connections between religious evil and other key issues in both psychology and sociology. So I set about trying to map some of those connections, and to carve out a space for the study of supernatural evil in the social sciences.”
For their study, the researchers analyzed data from the fourth wave of the Baylor Religion Survey, a national survey of the American public administered by Gallup in 2014. The survey included questions about religious attitudes and behaviors, and a total of 1,572 responses were collected.
The surveys also included two questions pertaining to attitudes on immigration — one about opinions on restricting and controlling who enters the country, and the other about opinions on federal government spending related to border control. Participants were also asked three separate questions about whether they believed in the existence of the devil/Satan, Hell, and demons — these responses were added together to create a composite measure of belief in supernatural evil.
The findings revealed a strong, positive relationship between belief in supernatural evil and endorsement for restricting and controlling immigration. There was also a positive relationship between belief in supernatural evil and support for increased federal spending on controlling immigration. These effects remained significant after controlling for multiple other variables that have been known to predict views on immigration — such as partisan political identity, education, and identifying with the Tea Party Movement.
“Having a strong binary view of the spiritual world of good and evil makes it easier to view other relationships in an us/them dichotomy — usually with us being good and them being bad. It is important to be mindful of how this could devolve into a process of dehumanization,” Martinez said.
In fact, for views on restricting and controlling immigration, belief in supernatural evil was the strongest predictor in the model. For views on increasing government spending on border control, only age was a stronger predictor than belief in supernatural evil.
The authors said that these findings may reflect moral panic, a phenomenon whereby the public develops an exaggerated and unjustified fear toward a group or an issue. In the U.S., political leaders have been known to use language that frames immigrants as invaders or criminals, likely contributing to a fear of immigrants among the public.
“Dehumanization is a very real concern when we talk about immigration,” Tom told PsyPost. “Our study suggests that common features of American Christian folk theology can provide cultural resources that may lead to a dehumanizing mindset about immigrants, and thereby influence how we think about immigration policy. Americans who strongly believe in supernatural evil should think critically about how that worldview may color their perspective on social issues that involve their neighbor.”
Overall, the study authors said the findings strongly support the idea that belief in religious evil is associated with stricter views on immigration. This suggests that belief in supernatural evil plays a critical role in the link between religion and immigration attitudes.
“Belief in supernatural evil is strongly connected to the ‘othering’ of perceived outgroups,” said Baker. “In this study we show that is the case for positions on policies about immigrants, but other research has shown that to also be the case with punitive views of criminals and restrictive attitudes about gender and sexuality. So immigration views are simply a specific iteration of this general tendency. An easy way to think about why this is the case is to consider beliefs about supernatural evil as linguistic and cultural efforts to sacralize the rejection of particular categories, of both behavior and people. Supernatural evil is a shortcut to social demonization.”
The researchers noted that their study was confined to an American sample and a mainly Christian cultural context. Future studies would be needed to assess whether the link between belief in supernatural evil and views on immigration differs in other parts of the world.
“One thing to note is that the data for our study are from the pre-Trump era, so it will be important to explore how these connections may have changed over time with the increased public prominence of immigration issues as key political flashpoints,” Baker said. “Another important issue to address is to delve further into the social and psychological processes through which beliefs about supernatural evil are connected to other issues. Our study is showing a strong and persistent correlation between supernatural evil and specific attitudes, but better specification of the mechanisms at play awaits the application of different research methods, such as experimental and longitudinal designs.”
“More people, both among the general public and among academic researchers, should pay more attention to beliefs in and claims about supernatural evil,” he added. “Supernatural evil is a vitally important and socially consequential part of culture that is ‘hiding in plain sight.'”
The study, “Flowing Across with Demonic Hate: Belief in Supernatural Evil and Support for Stricter Immigration Policy”, was published April 20, 2022.
