Communism as Religion

Scales developed to measure communist fundamentalism and the intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest orientations within communism were administered in 1989 to 137 Communist Party members in the Soviet Union along with measures of discriminatory attitudes toward Jews, Christians, women, homosexual persons, and political dissi- dents. Communist fundamentalism and the extrinsic orientation predicted discrimi- natory attitudes, and quest predicted lower attitudes of discrimination. The comparability of these results with those found in studies of American Christians suggest the existence of universal, genotypic relations of fundamentalism and the religious orientations with prejudice, of which both American Christianity and communism are but two phenotypic examples. Specific genotypic laws are proposed.