Drawing the Line: An Experimental Study on Tolerance and the Limits of Religious Expression in the Netherlands

The accommodation of religion is increasingly a topic of debate, and it becomes increasingly important to study where the public draws the boundary of tolerable and intolerable religious expressions. We argue that religious expressions are least likely to be tolerated when they clash with liberal norms that are supported strongly among the majority. In our paper, we test for three different ways in which religious expressions can cause value clashes: 1) conservative beliefs on moral issues (e.g., gender equality, LGBTQ+ equality and reproductive rights), 2) an unwillingness to tolerate alternative views, and 3) an interference with public neutrality. Moreover, we test whether these value clashes affect tolerance equally depending on whether it’s expressed by a representative of the more established majority religion (Christian) or by a more contested minority religion (Muslim). We test for this using a survey experiment embedded in the LISS-panel infrastructure in the Netherlands. First, 1986 respondents are randomly assigned to see only Christian speakers or only Muslim speakers and ask respondents to judge if they should be allowed to speak or not. We experimentally manipulate the different value clashes by varying speaker background, setting, and message content across expressions, allowing us to separately estimate the impact of each value clash on tolerance. Moreover, we perform an inductive content analysis the motivations that write for their tolerance, allowing us to identify the most prominent moral considerations to rate these profiles. We show that religious expressions with conservative morals views, or a lack of openness to alternative views, were least likely to be tolerated. Moreover, those expressed in a public context or by authority figures (religious leaders or teachers) were tolerated less as well. Yet, even when controlling for these factors, Muslim speakers were still tolerated less compared to Christian speakers. An inductive analysis of the open answers reveals that mentions of freedom of religion and freedom of expression appeared significantly less often among Muslim religious expressions compared to Christian religious expressions. Overall, we show that different value clashes independently shape tolerance towards religious expressions, but that the boundary of tolerance is still substantially higher for Christian speakers compared to Muslim speakers.