Seeing Is Believing

Abstract

An extensive literature demonstrates that religion is a key determinant of Americans’ social and political attitudes. This literature, however, has neglected an important measure of everyday religious practice, preference, and socialization: religious media consumption. We take a key social issue where attitudes have been shown to be largely shaped by religion—same-sex relationships—as an example to determine whether religious media consumption predicts social attitudes net of the measures typically included in the literature on religion and attitudes: affiliation, practice, and literalism. We draw on data from three national surveys, each of which contains different measures of religious media consumption and attitudes toward various same-sex relationships: the 1998 General Social Survey, 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, and 2012 Portraits of American Life Study. Both multivariate and propensity score matching analyses demonstrate that religious media consumption independently predicts lower support for same-sex relationships in all three surveys. We propose that religious media consumption is a key measure of religious practice, preference, and socialization that shapes Americans’ views toward social issues through both direct messages and by fortifying subcultural boundaries.