Spiritual Appeals Underperform Civic Appeals In Depolarizing Christian Partisans

Authors:

Abstract: Christian partisans in the United States demonstrate high levels of affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes, but how to depolarize this group remains poorly understood. Social identity theory suggests that spiritually framed depolarization appeals from a religious messenger may be more effective than secular appeals. We test this claim in a pre-registered survey experiment, where American Christian partisans (N=3,066) were randomly assigned to watch one of three videos highlighting common ground with outparty individuals. The control was a civic appeal, where the speaker identified as American and urged participants to reflect on shared American values. In the “spiritual unity” appeal, the speaker identified as a Christian pastor and urged participants to follow the example of Jesus in bridging political division. In the “spiritual opponent” appeal, the pastor further highlighted how individuals, regardless of political party, are on the same side against spiritual forces seeking to sow division. Neither spiritual appeal outperformed the civic appeal on reducing affective polarization, and both spiritual appeals modestly increased outparty dehumanization. The spiritual opponent appeal also increased support for anti-democratic attitudes and Christian Nationalism. We do not find heterogeneous effects for participants identifying as White, Evangelical, or Republican. These findings suggest that spiritual appeals may not be more effective than secular ones at depolarizing Christians.

Track: POLI

Keywords: morality, polarization, religion, intervention, Christian Nationalism