Prayer frequency and belief exclusivity are separable dimensions of religiosity

Evidence

Hansen and I examined an international sample of over 10,000 people in ten nations: the United States, the UK, Israel, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Russia, Mexico, and Nigeria. As an indicator of religious devotion, we looked at frequency of prayer. We also considered what James called religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the “spirit of dogmatic dominion.” We got a measure of religious exclusivity: “My God (beliefs) is the only true God (beliefs).” We called this exclusivity because it asserts the truth of one’s own beliefs to the exclusion of all other beliefs. (These tendencies are related, as James suspected, but not perfectly so. There are many people who pray but don’t think that their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and there are those who don’t practice a religion but have exclusivist beliefs.) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 520

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘religious exclusivity’ operationally and shows why devotion and dogmatism must not be conflated in analysis.
• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s distinction between Big God mechanisms (devotion, monitoring) and rigid boundary enforcement—mirroring fumi-e forcing apostasy as an exclusivity test rather than a devotion act.