Preaching conservative ideas: The speech-act theory of value conflict

Abstract

This is a study of how opposing cultural values influence support for minorities’ civil liberties. We build on a rich body of work, which establishes that culturally liberal Europeans are more likely to value diversity and favor minority rights than are cultural conservatives. Our contribution is to bring attention to how a second dimension of value conflict upends this established pattern. If a religious minority, in this case Muslims, wants to use their religious freedom to call on Muslims to adhere to conservative Islamic values – to preach them – support for their civil liberties plunges. We report substantively large and remarkably consistent results from seven classical tolerance experiments conducted in three European countries. In each trial, we observe the tendency of non-Muslims to deny Muslims their right to freedom of religion. We consistently observe that culturally liberal citizens join cultural conservatives in turning against Muslims’ right to hold a public rally when Muslims intend to exercise their right to freedom of expression to preach (the speech-act dimension) culturally conservative ideas in Islam ( the substantive dimension ). Preaching is a performative utterance, an instance of when saying something is doing something. What is being done, in addition to what is being said, is to call for compliance. This study finds that conflicts with religiously grounded values in contemporary European liberal democracies often have an additional order of intensity, because stating religious beliefs in the form of performative utterances is an integral part of religious practice.