Marie Eisenstein
assistant professor of political science

Research often yields fascinating surprises. For Marie Eisenstein, assistant professor of political science at Indiana University Northwest, the surprise came as part of her study on the relationship between political tolerance and Christianity. Eisenstein assembled four focus groups, which met in 2006, to represent four segments of American Christianity: mainline Protestants; black Protestants; evangelical Protestants; and Catholics. Each group was made up of congregants from Lake County, Ind. churches.

Eisenstein was interested in determining whether either general Christian beliefs or more specific religiously informed viewpoints bear any relationship to political tolerance or lack of tolerance. Eisenstein found that there little difference in levels of political intolerance or tolerance between Christians or those who hold conservative views on social-moral issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage and secular citizens or those who hold more liberal social viewpoints. The results of her work form the basis of Eisenstein's first book, Religion and the Politics of Tolerance: How Christianity Builds Democracy (Baylor University Press, 2008).

Eisenstein explains that, for the purposes of her book, she defined the tolerance/intolerance attitude in terms of civil liberties, not specific issues. "From a political scientist's point of view, when we're studying political tolerance, we do not define it by issue-attitude position, such as 'Do you agree or disagree with abortion?' or 'Do you agree or disagree with stem-cell research?' Political tolerance is about willingness to extend civil liberties to those with whom you disagree. And the big three are speech, petition and assembly."

"Empirically speaking, there is nothing about holding particular issue attitudes that translates into tolerance or intolerance," Eisenstein says. "There was just no effect on it. On both sides, there is always somebody who is going to be intolerant, somebody who does not want to allow somebody else's freedom of speech because they don't agree with what that person is saying."

In short, she says, "nobody has a market on intolerance."

What Eisenstein discovered was that respect for the democratic ideal and belief in the notion of free access to the marketplace of ideas is just as strong among Christian citizens in America as it is among secular citizens.

"Across all four groups, none of them thought of the political marketplace as something that they want to stop others from coming into," Eisenstein says. "Like everybody else, they have been socialized to accept a certain set of American values about the free exchange of ideas in the political marketplace."

But Eisenstein's focus groups did give her insight into issues that do concern America's Christian citizenry. Chief among them, she says, is illegal immigration.

"When they had free time [in the focus groups] to bring up anything they wanted, they went right to illegal immigration," Eisenstein says. "It took me by surprise. I thought for sure it would be other hot-button social-moral issues."

Also unexpected, she says, was the broad consensus among the groups on the ills of illegal immigration. All four Christian groups expressed strong concern about illegal immigration.

The black Protestant group, she says, expressed anger over the oft-quoted conventional wisdom that illegal immigrants take the jobs that "other Americans don't want."

"They were hopping mad," Eisenstein says. "They made it quite clear that nobody came to their community and asked them about the jobs they 'don't want.' They said this was nonsense, that they want jobs and need jobs."

The Catholic group expressed concern about the added strain that illegal immigration places upon the Catholic charitable system. Mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants voiced concerns similar to those brought up by the other groups.

Eisenstein adds that her focus groups all expressed some dissatisfaction with how Christianity is portrayed in the news media and in popular culture. "Each group had some particular instance they were able to cite in which they felt they were being attacked at large within the mainstream media," she says.