Explaining Religious Cleavages in Foreign Policy Attitudes

Scholars have established that a variety of factors shape foreign policy attitudes, including national interests, partisanship, ideology, gender, education, and race. Even though few deny the influence of religious groups in American politics today, religion’s relevance to foreign policy is less well understood. In this paper, we synthesize interdisciplinary streams of literature to craft a general theory of how religion influences public opinion about foreign policy. We argue that people use what they know about their religious tradition’s values as a heuristic device when trying to make sense of complex international events and situations. People tend to have limited information about what happens outside of the borders of their country, so might plausibly rely on broad worldviews rooted in religious values when deciding what they think about international affairs and foreign policy. If religious values shape adherents’ basic assumptions about human nature, "foreigners," and the world in general, it is natural to assume that such values also play an important role in shaping attitudes about how one’s country should interact with other countries. We contend that the extent to which people see the world as a threatening place—and thus the type of internationalism they prefer—depends, at least in part, on the influence of religious background.