| Summary: | The aim of this paper is to investigate whether religion has a positive or negative impact on tolerance towards people with different ethnic backgrounds and people with different sexual orientation, or if this is a product of other phenomena in society like general trust, left-right placement, gender and so on. The main intention is to explore if, and in that case to what extent, religious people in Europe tend to be more or less xenophobic or homophobic than their unreligious, or secularized, counterparts. To live up to this aim, the study is based on regression analyses which utilize data from the European Social Survey. The findings show that religious people generally tend to be more intolerant towards immigrants and homosexuals than nonreligious people, but that this effect also differs between countries. For example, whereas the negative effect can be found in most European contries, the correlation is reversed in countries like Sweden and Czech Republic, meaning that a higher level of religiosity makes people more tolerant towards these particular contexts.
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