Obnoxious speech and trusting the Other

Update: After watching the videos of what went down at the cultural festival I seem to have unwittingly slandered the Act 17 missionaries. They behaved well and were obviously unjustly arrested. Their YouTube site is testimony to the reality though that they’re pretty shallow and obnoxious in some contexts, but that’s frankly not atypical for this sort of evangelical Christian from where I stand. I apologize for engaging in stereotyping in this case, because my expectations were out of line with what I saw on the tapes (though their attempt at apologia is stereotypically laughable, and the goonish response of some of the Muslim youth to Act 17’s antics unfortunately predictable).

Ed Brayton points to a resolution of a case of aggressive and seemingly obnoxious Christian missionaries being arrested for “public disturbance”. Ed observes:

Those four Christian missionaries I wrote about who were arrested for disorderly conduct and breach of the peace while preaching at the Dearborn International Arab Festival in June were acquitted by a jury on Friday. That’s the right result, but frankly the charges should have been dismissed by the judge in the first place.

Nabeel Qureshi of Virginia, Negeen Mayel of California and Paul Rezkalla and David Wood, both of New York, were acquitted of breach of peace, 19th District Court officials in Dearborn said after the verdict. Mayel was found guilty of failure to obey a police officer’s order.

[my emphasis – R]

That last result is still a bit disturbing because the order she was given was an unlawful one. The officer had no legitimate reason to give her the order to stop videotaping what was going on and therefore she should not be held liable for violating that order.

Unfortunately, the mayor of the town continues to be confused about the legal realities….

I’ve only followed the case casually. From what I can gather it seems that these preachers were sort you find around college campuses, or sometimes in downtown areas of big cities. Going by stereotypes of how objectionable Middle Eastern Muslims tend to find proselytization by Christians in their own countries I assume that this sort of behavior would result in a public disturbance, because this sort of preaching tends to be “in your face” and confrontational. The politician is behaving in the craven manner politicians are wont to behave. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights. And I say we in particular to the readers of this weblog, we tend to be irreligious and unloved by the public. If for example I simply stood on a street corner in some small American towns and kept shouting “there is no God” in a monotone voice I suspect I’d attract attention, hostility, and perhaps threaten public disturbance. But all I’d be doing was stating my simple belief.

In any case, enough commentary. How about if the shoe was on the other foot? In the last iteration of the GSS, in 2008, they had a question: SPKMSLM: Now consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not? Here are the results by demographic:

Can I get some hallelujahs for the Bill of Rights and elites who will defend them? If you’re curious why “moderates” and “Independents” are as intolerant, or more so, than conservatives and Republicans, I think it’s because they’re generally stupid, and stupid people in particular are suspicious of deviations in speech and thought. Ideologues tend to be brighter. There is more than a dimes worth of difference.

Now that we’ve established that Americans are probably hypocrites, I recall that The Future of Religion reported that excepting Seventh Day Adventists the more fundamentalist a person was the more likely they were to support banning missionaries from non-Christian religions in the USA. In other words, preaching for me but not for thee. How does trust of other religious correlate with religiosity? Let’s look at it internationally. The WVS has a question about how important religion is in your life, very important, rather important, not very important, and not at all important. I constructed an index of religiosity by recoding these responses into numbers and multiplying by weights. So, 50%*3 + 25%*2 + 10%*1 + 15%* 0 = 2.1. 3 would be 100% who say that religion is very important, 0 would 100% not important at all. There is also a question about trusting people of “another religion.” The answers were trust completely, trust a little, not trust very much, and not trust at all. I constructed an index of trust of other religions in the same manner. On the X axis I placed religiosity, and on the Y axis trust of other religions. Here’s the scatterplot with r-squared:

There’s really no relation here. Only 10% of Y can be explained by variation in X. But, rescaling a bit we can generate quadrants of values. I now label the nations as well:

As you can see Muslim nations can be trusting or not trusting of other religions. One of the main issues with international perceptions of Islam is that we take Middle Eastern Islam as the normative Islam, and Middle Eastern Muslims tend to be among the most religiously intolerant people in the world, along with Chinese, and well as assorted group from the Orthodox Christian world. In contrast, as you can see with Mali and Burkina Faso, African Muslims are more tolerant of pluralism. As I have noted before, Senegal is more than 90% Muslim, but the “father of the nation” was a Roman Catholic. In contrast, Boutros (the equivalent of Peter) Boutros-Ghali’s political career always had an implicit glass-ceiling because he was a Coptic Christian, even though Christians are about the same percentage of the population in Egypt. Now, if Egyptian religious liberals would have the same heft and authority when they said “but in Senegal Muslims do….” or “in Indonesia they practice Islam….” as when Pakistani or Indonesian religious conservatives did when they stated “in Arabia….”, we’d be in a better place. But as it is, I do think it is a little misleading to state that “only 20% of the world’s Muslims are Arab.” That 20% “counts” more than the 30% which is South Asian.

Here’s the raw data….