Does Deference to Religious Authority Predict Support for Political Violence?

Authors

John W. Compton, Chapman UniversityFollow
Ann Gordon, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-2-2026

Abstract

Does deference to religious authority undermine support for democratic norms, including those forbidding the use of violence for political ends? Scholars have struggled to answer this question, in part, we believe, because they have typically employed proxies for religious deference (e.g. Biblical literalism, worship attendance, and self-reported religiosity) instead of measuring it directly. We develop a new measure of deference to religious authority in politics (DRAP), using the 2024 Chapman Survey of American Fears. We find that (1) DRAP is strongly correlated with support for political violence; (2) other common measures of religiosity (e.g. Biblical literalism and self-reported religiosity) are generally uncorrelated with support for political violence once the effects of our new measure are taken into account; and (3) the positive relationship between DRAP and support for political violence is more pronounced among respondents with low levels of religious participation.

Comments

This article was originally published in Politics and Religion in 2026. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175504832610025X

Recommended Citation

Compton, John W., and Ann Gordon. 2026. “Does Deference to Religious Authority Predict Support for Political Violence?” Politics and Religion: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175504832610025X.

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.