Drawing the Line: An Experimental Study on Tolerance and the Limits of Religious Expression in the Netherlands

In the abstract, the freedom of religious expression is supported by vast majorities of the population of secular societies such as the Netherlands. Yet, in practice, some religious expressions might clash with other societal values that are supported highly as well, such as gender and sexual equality, secularist principles, and/or communitarian values. These value violations can lead to moral concerns that overturn this commitment to religious freedom, leading people to be intolerant towards these expressions instead. With religious diversity increasingly a topic of debate in Western European societies, it becomes important to study where the public draws this boundary. While existing experimental research has highlighted a range of attributes of a religious expression that influence tolerance decisions, they have been scattered over a range of studies, making it unclear which factor ultimately affects people's tolerance decisions and, more importantly, if these principles are applied consistently among religious majority (Christian) and minority (Muslim) groups. This study aims to address these issues through a survey experiment embedded in the LISS-panel infrastructure in the Netherlands. First, 2000 respondents are randomly assigned to see only Christian speakers or only Muslim speakers. We then present respondents with a series of instances of religious speakers with this background speaking to an audience and ask respondents to judge if they should be allowed to speak or not. We experimentally manipulate different dimensions of value violations by varying speaker background, setting, and message content across expressions, allowing us to separately estimate the impact of each attribute on decisions to tolerate religious expressions. In a secondary analysis, we inductively code the open answers where respondents motivate their decision (not to) tolerate a specific expression. This allows us to identify the most prominent moral considerations that guide people’s tolerance decisions, and whether these themes are consistent when judging religious expressions of Christian speakers and Muslim speakers. Our experiment provided the following results. First, religious expressions with a conservative view on gender and sexual equality, or those who expressed an unwillingness to recognize other views as valid, were least likely to be tolerated. Additionally, expressions in a public context or those expressed by a person in an authority position (religious leader or teacher) were also tolerated significantly less. Yet, holding the background, setting, and message of the religious expression constant, we still see that the same religious expression is tolerated significantly less when expressed by a Muslim speaker compared to a Christian speaker, pointing to a general bias towards Muslims. An inductive analysis of the open answers reveals that mentions of freedom of religion and freedom of expression appeared significantly less often among Muslim religious expressions compared to Christian religious expressions. This suggests that considerations of religious freedom play a less dominant role when judging Muslim religious expressions.