Highly active church members show the least prejudice of all attendance groups

Evidence

A simple linear model proposes that inactive members of a religion—usually assessed by church attendance—will be more prejudiced than active members. A curvilinear model (such as Allport and Ross, 1967; Spilka, Hood, and Gorsuch, 1985) holds instead that prejudice initially goes up as activity increases, but at some point starts going down. Both models end up predicting that very active church members will be umprejudiced. While few people are so active, they counter the argument that churches create prejudice, since such people go to church more than anyone else. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1980

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates and complicates the vault’s Christian-nationalism claims (Whitehead & Perry) by suggesting intense religiosity correlates with lower, not higher, prejudice.