The Religious Foundations of Welfare, Social Inclusion, and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes in Europe

This paper unites disparate literature to test the influence of religious belonging and behavior characteristics along with secular welfare boundaries on anti-immigrant attitudes. We suggest that welfare states varied in their religious foundations during the transition from religious-based solidarity to modern state-based solidarity and formulate a novel analytical framework to hypothesize effects across individuals and welfare regime types. Using eight waves of the European Social Survey (2002-16), we find that religious effects are strongest in welfare states with the most religious foundations, the Southern European welfare states, and weak in the universalist welfare states, which lacked historical state-church tensions. Other welfare types show a mix of religious effects, with some challenging expectations. Furthermore, Christian majority membership is often associated with heightened anti-immigrant attitudes, most consistently in contrast to the non-Christian minority. For welfare-based forms of inclusion, we find consistent institutional trust effects and two competing logics for secular boundaries: a propensity for welfare chauvinism and a culture of inclusion.