Reforming reformists? The impact of societal religiosity on the religious divide in gender conservatism.

In most of the Western world, the once dominant doctrines of Christianity are slowly losing their authority. However, despite this general process of institutional secularisation, many citizens in European countries still consider religion to play an important role in their lives. While the direct effects of individual religiosity on a whole array of attitudes and behaviours have been long established, the contextual effects are less clear. This thesis aims to further develop understanding of the interplay between societal and individual religiosity by investigating their effects on gender attitudes, and the moderating effect that societal religiosity has on the association between individual religiosity and gender attitudes. On the basis of the moral communities thesis, self-determination theory, and cultural threat theory, several mutually exclusive predictions are formulated and tested. Drawing on data from 40 European countries collected for the European Values Survey waves 3, 4 and 5, multilevel regression analysis was conducted to show that while societal religiosity positively affects the traditional gender attitudes of all individuals, the effect is the strongest for the least religious individuals. This implies that when societal religiosity is the lowest, the attitudinal gap between religious and secular individuals is the largest. Combined with recent developments in the political landscape of western countries, this finding, alongside with similar findings in the field, has some important implications for the development of human rights.