Religious perceptions of crime and implications for punitiveness
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Author | Christopher H Seto,Iman Said |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520960038 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Religious perceptions of
crime and implications
for punitiveness
Christopher H Seto and Iman Said
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Abstract
This study tests the role of crime perceptions in mediating the relationship between
religiosity and punitive attitudes about criminal justice. Specifically, we estimate the
effects of (a) religious affiliation and (b) fundamentalism on punitiveness and assess
mediation by dispositional attribution of crime, perceived rising crime rates, perceived
immigrant crime, and fear of violent victimization. Data are from the 2014 wave of the
Chapman Survey on American Fears, a nationally representative sample of adults in the
United States (N ¼1,573). We estimated religious effects on punitiveness using ordi-
nary least squares regression and assessed mediation by crime perceptions with the
Karlson-Holm-Breen (KHB) method. Punitiveness was positively associated with
Mainline Protestant affiliation (vs. non-religious), Catholic affiliation (vs. non-
religious), and fundamentalism (fundamentalism also largely accounted for heightened
punitiveness among Evangelical Protestants). Perceptions of crime accounted for about
60% of the effects of religious affiliation on punitiveness and nearly 100% of the effect of
fundamentalism. Perceptions of crime as caused by evil or moral failure, belief in rising
crime rates, and perceptions of immigrant crime were important to explaining religious
effects on punitiveness, while fear of violence was relatively unimportant. These findings
illuminate the perceptual mechanisms underlying religious effects on criminal justice
attitudes.
Keywords
attribution, crime perceptions, fear, punitiveness, religion
Corresponding author:
Christopher H Seto, Department of Sociology and Criminology,The Pennsylvania State University, University
Park, PA, US.
Email: chs37@psu.edu
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520960038
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
2022, Vol. 24(1) 46–68
Punitive attitudes about criminal justice are an important dimension of public
opinion linked to the severity of criminal justice policies (Frost, 2010; Pickett,
2019). Consequently, a body of criminological research seeks to understand the
demographic and structural predictors of these attitudes (Applegate et al., 2002;
Payne et al., 2004; Scarborough et al., 2010). One area of this literature that
deserves greater empirical attention is the influence of religiosity on punitiveness,
both because of the ubiquity of religion in the United States (US) and the impor-
tance of religion to informing beliefs, attitudes, and opinions.
The US has long been characterized by high levels of religious affiliation; about
75% of adults in the US identify with some organized religion (Pew Research
Center, 2015). While some research has established a strong association between
religiosity and punitiveness (e.g. Baker and Booth, 2016; Durkheim,1984[1893];
Yelderman and Miller, 2017), relatively few studies have explored the psychosocial
mechanisms underlying this relationship. Specifically, further research is needed to
understand how religion influences perceptions of crime causation, prevalence, and
threat, as well as how these perceptions drive punitiveness. Additionally, few stud-
ies have estimated religious effects on punitiveness using a nationally representa-
tive sample or tested how mechanisms vary across religious traditions. These gaps
in the literature represent important opportunities to broaden our understanding
of religion’s influence on punitiveness in modern US society.
We address these questions by estimating the effects of religious affiliation and
fundamentalism on punitive attitudes and assessing the extent to which these
effects are mediated by perceptions of crime. Specifically, we test if (a) perceptions
of crime as a result of evil or moral failure, (b) the belief that crime is rising, (c)
perceived immigrant crime, and (d) fear of crime mediate the religion-punitiveness
relationship. By incorporating multiple measures of how crime is perceived by the
religious, we extend prior empirical research on this topic which has tended to
focus on explicitly religious beliefs such as images of God (Applegate et al., 2000;
Baker and Whitehead, 2020; Unnever et al., 2005), or beliefs about supernatural
evil (Baker, 2008; Baker and Booth, 2016) in explaining heightened punitiveness
among religious people.
Data are from the 2014 Chapman University Survey on American Fears
(CSAF), a yearly, representative, cross-sectional survey of non-institutionalized
adults in the US. We chose the 2014 survey because it included multiple questions
about crime perceptions not asked in subsequent waves, as well as several ques-
tions about punitiveness and religion. These multiple measures allowed for the
construction of scales to capture many of the relevant constructs, avoiding the
single-item measure problem that plagues much extant research in this area
(Sprott, 1999).
Religion and punitiveness
Punitiveness, here used to describe support for capital punishment, harsher court
systems, and more serious punishments for criminals, is in many ways a mainstay
47
Seto and Said
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