It is a widespread speculation that religion is often at the heart of intolerance, conflict and war. To investigate this speculation, we break “religion” down into more specific religion-related psychological attitudes and tendencies. We examine two potential pathways towards intolerance: religious devotion, the tendency to have faith in the supernatural or the divine, and religious exclusivity–the coalitional tendency to privilege one’s religion as the one true way. Studies with participants from various national backgrounds investigated how Christians differed from Buddhists on several measures of religious intolerance, including support for religious violence and “sacrificial scapegoating,” or blaming religious others while expressing a willingness to die for one’s God or beliefs. Religious exclusivity is consistently and strongly related to intolerance. However, religious devotion appears to have a complex relationship with intolerance; it is related to various forms of intolerance, but does not contribute to it, and in fact may even diminish intolerance. While Christians are on average more devoted, more exclusivist, and more intolerant than Buddhists, it is not religious devotion that accounts for greater Christian intolerance, but rather religious exclusivity. Religious exclusivity, however, appears difficult to disentangle from devotion to the divine no matter what religion one believes in.
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