DeJure and DeFacto Religious Discrimination

One of the advantages of blog writing is that at times I can follow up on past research. It becomes possible to address potential criticisms of my work without having to go through the entire process necessary for a peer review article. This is particularly useful when answering the potential issue does not require all of the statistical analysis and literature review normally expected for a research article.

The research in question comes from my book Compromising Scholarship. In this case, I am not responding to a direct attack on the findings of that book but rather an article that provides arguments that can be used to challenge those results. The basic finding of my book is that academics are willing to discriminate against religious and political conservatives when it comes to hiring those individuals for academic positions. Indeed, I found the willingness of academics to discriminate against religious conservatives to be significantly higher than their willingness to discriminate against political conservatives. I have pointed out in a previous blog, that the implication of this work is that religious discrimination is acceptable in academia as long as the “right” group faces discrimination.

Recently a Huffpo article seem to reinforce these problems. Professor Conn argues that Christian colleges should not be accredited because they do not engage in an open search for truth. He argues that there is not sufficient skepticism due to their religious foundations. On that point, I would challenge Dr. Conn, given the political nature of the protest to Regnerus’s findings, to provide evidence that traditional college and universities are open to all potential research answers. It seems that most nonreligious colleges and universities are as adverse to research with politically incorrect findings as Christian colleges are to findings that violate their theistic assumptions of reality. Conn uses as part of his argument the fact that religious schools have theological requirements for hiring. He finishes the article with stating that if faculty are fired for failing a “theological/ideological litmus tests” then they should not be able to call themselves a college or university.

This offers a potential challenge to my previous findings. Perhaps the tendency to be willing to discriminate against conservative Protestants is matched by the willingness of professors at Christian colleges to discriminate against non-Christians. Many of these Christian colleges have policies that allow them to religiously discriminate. Indeed one may argue that because of the overt nature of such policies that non-Christians face more occupational discrimination than Christians within academia. Such a charge is mitigated a bit by the fact that the number of Christian colleges and universities are relatively small in number, but it is worth considering if discrimination is potentially more prominent among Christians on religious campuses than non-Christians on secular campuses.

Conn’s argument is about the potential firing of non-Christian professors on Christian campuses. While the data from my book cannot test the willingness of academics to fire those with what they see as “unacceptable” ideologies, I can see the willingness of academics to hire those individuals. It is not unrealistic to assume that people we are less willing to hire would also be individuals that we are more willing to fire. In my research I asked academics whether they would be more or less willing to hire someone if they found out certain information about that person. I asked them to rate on a 1 to 7 whether knowing this information makes them more or less willing to hire them. Lower scores indicated less willingness to hire that individual. A 4 was scored if the information did not matter at all.

In my original finding the group that academics were less willing to hire was fundamentalists and evangelicals were the second most rejected group. As it is true in the actual academic culture, relatively few respondents worked on religious campuses. So my original findings consisted mostly of academics on non-religious campuses rejecting evangelicals and fundamentalists. Given Conn’s argument, I now question whether the rejection of fundamentalists and evangelicals by academics on non-religious campuses is less than the rejection of atheists on Christian campuses, who I would envision as the more extreme out-group to Christians. If part of the reason why Christian colleges should be not be accredited is because they have ideological barriers, then it should be the case that professors on non-religious campuses are more “fair-minded” in their response to religious out-groups.

When I looked at my results, I found that academics at religious schools were a little less likely to hire someone if they found out that person was an atheist (m = 3.684 on the 1 to 7 scale). But academics at non-religious schools were even more hesitant to hire fundamentalists (m = 3.09) and evangelicals (m = 3.352). Both means are statistically different from the atheist score at p