The New Testament vs. The Quran: Americans’ Beliefs About the Content of Muslim and Christian Holy Texts

Abstract

The stereotypes and biases that people have about various religions may not be applied to just the individuals who belong to those religions, but to the belief systems themselves. We hypothesized that non-Muslim and Muslim Americans would demonstrate biased estimates about the language content of the Quran and New Testament holding positive views towards their relative ingroup and negative views towards the outgroup text. We used two samples (N1 = 163, N2 = 204) of Americans and the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count Software (LIWC) to test our hypotheses. We determined the differences between the texts across language categories. Participants then rated the categories in terms of their relative frequency across the texts. We compared these ratings to the actual differences between the texts. As hypothesized, participants perceived the ingroup text as positive and the outgroup text as negative. We discuss whether biased beliefs about religious teachings may be separate from but aligned with biases against believers and further contribute to religious stereotypes.