Xenosophia

Central question

This project included the investigation of prejudice and xenophobia in the German population, particularly against immigrants and refugees in times of high immigration to Germany. Representative samples were collected in August 2015 (n = 637), March 2016 (n = 625), and June 2022 (n = 1,339). Of interest for our study were the psychological, biographical, and religious contexts of developments that lead to prejudice and xenophobia, or to xenosophia, which is the opposite to xenophobia¹. Thus, the central question is this: What role do specific versions of religiosity play in reducing prejudices and supporting a culture of welcome?

Method

The questionnaires included a number of measures for religiosity, among them a question for religious affiliation, a scale for the centrality of religiosity, scales for fundamentalism and pluralism, for religious schemata², and single items ask for preferred self-rating as religious, spiritual, or atheist. The assessment of religious schemata is of special interest because we assume that the style in which religious beliefs, emotions, and experiences are processed is essential for the way in which religiosity affects attitudes either in a direction toward more tolerance or responsiveness toward the “strange,” or in a direction toward more prejudice and othering. Another set of measures focuses more directly on prejudice and xenophobia; the items were taken from measures of Group-Focused³ Enmity. They ask for attitudes toward certain groups such as immigrants, refugees, people of color, homosexuals, and women. Finally, personal interviews have been conducted with 27 participants in 2015.

Findings

The readiness to welcome war refugees is very high and did not change much between 2015, 2016 and 2022, but even slightly increases in 2022. But our respondents obviously make a clear distinction between refugees who seek shelter and flee the war in their home country on the one hand, and refugees who come to Germany because of better living conditions on the other, as the image above shows:

It became evident in the statistical analyses that religion identified only by the frequency of church attendance or of prayer, or by the degree of belief in God does explain little. The dividing lines are going right through religion itself: between a religion which is preoccupied with and focused on one’s own culture, group, family, on the one hand, and a religion which is open for dialog on the other hand. They represent distinct religious schemata that were measured with the Religious Schema Scale. As structural equation modeling⁴ shows, religious schemata and support for religious pluralism have a strongly positive effect on the welcoming war refugees, while toxic othering (responses to a selection of Group-Focused Enmity items) strongly oppose the culture of welcoming war refugees.