Their Brothers' Keepers? Orthodox Religionists, Modernists, and Economic Justice in Europe

Through analyses of national surveys of 21 European countries and Israel, the authors test the conventional wisdom in Europe that modernists are to the left of the religiously orthodox on economic justice concerns. Modernists are more individualistic than the orthodox in seeing individuals, not a deity, as responsible for their fates and as the ultimate moral arbiters. The authors hypothesize that modernists are also economically individualistic in believing that the poor or jobless, not the community or state, should solve their own problems. The authors find that on economic concerns, modernists are far more likely to be to the right of the orthodox than to the left.