Article

Punishment & Society

2016, Vol. 18(2) 151–176
Hell to pay: Religion and ! The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
punitive ideology among sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1462474516635886

the American public pun.sagepub.com

Joseph O Baker
East Tennessee State University, USA

Alexis L Booth
East Tennessee State University, USA

Abstract
Historically, religious frameworks—particularly conceptions of evil—have been tied to
attitudes about criminal behavior and its corresponding punishment, yet views of tran-
scendent evil have not been explored in the empirical literature on religion and punitive
ideology. We examine whether and how different aspects of religiosity shape punitive
attitudes, using a national sample of Americans. For both general punitiveness and views
of capital punishment, belief in the existence and power of transcendent religious evil
(e.g. Satan and hell) is strongly associated with greater punitiveness, while higher levels
of religious practice (service attendance, prayer, and reading sacred scriptures) reduces
punitiveness. The effects of other aspects of religiosity on punitiveness such as
self-identified fundamentalism, scriptural literalism, and images of God are rendered
spurious by accounting for perceptions of evil. We discuss these findings in light of
cultural and comparative approaches to penology, arguing for the inclusion of concep-
tions of the ‘‘transgressive’’ sacred in studies of, and theories about, penal populism.

Keywords
evil, penal populism, public opinion, punitive attitudes, religion, United States

Besides being less likely to regard death as an utterly cataclysmic punishment, the
Christian is also more likely to regard punishment in general as deserved. The doctrine
of free will—the ability of man to resist temptations to evil, which God will not permit
beyond man’s capacity to resist—is central to the Christian doctrine of salvation and

Corresponding author:
Joseph O Baker, Department of Sociology and Anthropology East Tennessee State University, Box 70644,
Johnson City, TN 37614, USA.
Email: bakerjo@etsu.edu

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

152 Punishment & Society 18(2)

damnation, heaven and hell . . .. All this, as I say, is most un-European, and helps
explain why our people are more inclined to understand, as St. Paul did, that gov-
ernment carries the sword as ‘‘the minister of God,’’ to ‘‘execute wrath’’ upon the
evildoer. (Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, 2002: 19–20, emphasis in original)

Sin and expiation, crime and punishment

The roles played by religion generally and perceptions of transcendent, religious
evil specifically as a basis for framing criminal behavior and its appropriate pun-
ishment can be traced prior to the emergence of formal criminology (Garland,
1990). Medieval European attitudes toward crime and punishment were rooted
in religious beliefs regarding evil (Snell, [1911] 1978). During the early modern
period (16th–18th century), deviance was frequently understood and punished as
an act of the devil (Dillinger, 2004; Pfohl, 1985). Connections between religious
evil, deviance and punishment were dramatically and explicitly manifest in the
witch-hunts of Western Europe and the American colonies during this period
(Ben-Yehuda, 1980; Erikson, 1966). The religious nature of ‘‘evil’’ is historically
intertwined with speculations on the etiology of criminal behavior to such an extent
that many popular textbooks label the forerunning ideology of modern crimin-
ology as the ‘‘demonic perspective’’ (cf. Cullen and Agnew, 2006; Einstadter and
Henry, 1995; Lilly et al., 2007; Vold et al., 2002). As for the criminal justice system
in the United States, both the ‘‘Philadelphia’’ and ‘‘Auburn’’ prison systems were
built upon underlying assumptions about the nature of religious evil and punish-
ment (Barnes, 1930). Although modern criminal justice systems purport to work
from a position of ‘‘rationality’’ (but see Garland, 1990: 178–192; MacIntyre, 1988;
Savelsberg, 1992), the view that individuals commit crime because they are evil
remains common among the public, and also often among judicial decision-
makers, as evinced in the epigraph (Cullen and Agnew, 2006: 18).
Punitive attitudes toward the breaking of communal norms are motivated by
moral feelings (Hartnagel and Templeton, 2012; Johnson, 2009), and messages
about evil denoting ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ foster retributive sentiments for breaches
of moral boundaries (Durkheim, [1893] 1984, [1912] 1995).1 In essence, the funda-
mental violation in acts of crime or deviance is moral (Ben-Yehuda, 1985: 17). The
connection between retributive attitudes and perceptions of evil is neither archaic,
nor an antiquated perspective for understanding public attitudes toward crime and
punishment. Further, reconstructed functional-turned-cultural theories of punish-
ment stress that matters of evil and its banishment still undergird strategies of
punishment, regardless of cool rhetorics of rationality that may be layered on
top (Rosati, 2008: 137).
Recently, some cultural and theoretical approaches to penology have begun to
reincorporate considerations of religion with a focus on symbolic expressions of
evil. A focus on the ‘‘transgressive’’ or ‘‘impure’’ sacred as outlined by Durkheim,
and particularly by his followers (see esp. Hertz, [1909] 1960), provides the

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 153

conceptual tools for examining how crime and punishment are derived ‘‘from an
originally religious context, as secular heir of sin and expiation’’ (Rosati, 2008: 141;
on the transgressive sacred in Durkheimian thought, see Pickering and Rosati,
2008; Riley, 2002, 2005; Rosati, 2005). Durkheim’s pupil Robert Hertz ([1922]
1994) directly addressed the nature of sin and expiation as communal social pro-
cesses. His work is insightful on this count, but we employ a notable extension of
sin and expiation as intimately related to crime and punishment. Hertz ([1922]
1994: 104) himself noted this affinity in saying, ‘‘Crime appears to have a very
close relationship with sin,’’ but also took pains to distinguish ‘‘sin’’ from related
concepts, for the purpose of producing a formal definition. Hertz notes that sin and
crime share family resemblances by virtue of being transgressions of idealized
moral orders; where they differ is in the respective community that is offended,
with sin a violation of sacred religious order and crime a behavioral violation of
civil order. Hertz ([1922] 1994: 107) argues that in order for expiation to achieve the
desired outcome of perceived justice, punishment must be administered on behalf
of the offended community, for ‘‘if the penalty does not take the form of a jurid-
ically administered punishment, the crime is not avenged.’’ Hertz’s distinction
between sin and crime is justified, so far as it goes, in societies with institutional
differentiation between church and state, and hence civil law and religious orders;
but, pace Hertz, we emphasize the similarities between the need for ritual expiation
on behalf of the moral order of the offended community in both instances. In effect,
this vantage emphasizes the continuing importance of the sacred—albeit in forms
of transgression, evil, and ritualized expiation—for understanding culturally
embedded expressions of punishment.
Parallel to this theoretical reorientation, there has also been a renewed emphasis
on the role religion can play in both the formation and institutional expression of
systems of punishment. Using a comparative approach, Savelsberg (1994b)
outlined a comprehensive theoretical model designed to account for variation in
punitive regimes across time, cultures, and institutions. While incorporating the
long-standing foci of criminology such as group conflict, labor market conditions,
levels of victimization, and functionalist concerns about the need for social control,
this model also emphasizes the roles played by social knowledge, institutional
arrangements, and culture (Savelsberg, 1999: 47). By incorporating culture to
better understand historical trajectories, the role of religion in institution building
(Gorski, 1993; Sørensen, 1997), as well as for shaping contemporary expressions
of punitive views (e.g. McConnell et al., 2001) and regimes becomes apparent
(see Savelsberg, 1994a).
For understanding the importance of religion in accounting for differential pun-
ishment regimes, its role in structuring perceived knowledge about criminality and
evil is paramount. To be clear, by this we mean how religion shapes public views
about crime and what should be done about it; in other words, knowledge in the
sociological rather than the formal or academic sense (e.g. Stark, [1958] 1991).
Cultural schemata about criminality accompany and act back on systems of pun-
ishment, such that harshly punitive regimes ideologically frame criminals as evil,

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

154 Punishment & Society 18(2)

placing authorities in a position of antipathy, and as the bearers of retribution

(Melossi, 2000). Lest we lose sight of the original insight posited by Durkheim, it is
important to reiterate that ‘‘For all the problems that symbolic evil and pollution
pose bureaucratic authorities and concerned residents, it can have its compensa-
tions, even financial ones’’ (Smith, 2008: 90).
Here, we use the concept to transcendent religious evil to refer to beliefs about
the existence of evil supernatural deities, entities, or places. Malevolent influences
that transcend, but often intersect with mundane reality are of particular interest to
penology because of the capacity of such representations to dehumanize
and ‘‘other’’ those who are socially or cognitively associated with them.
As Alexander (2001, 2003) and Smith (2008) have noted, a more thorough and
systematic accounting of evil from the perspective of culture is necessary for under-
standing not only social exclusion, but also its relational counterpoint of inclusion.
Justifications for punishment and violence often reference notions of transcendent
evil—at least as far as public, populist penology is concerned—and often also with
regard to officials’ political rhetoric.
In the US, public figures, explicitly religious and otherwise, frequently make
attributions to evil in framing social problems, disasters, and conflicts. Ronald
Reagan famously used a speech at the National Association of Evangelicals in
1983 to urge constituents against disarmament by introducing a rhetoric that
labeled the Soviet Union as the ‘‘evil empire’’ (see Goodnight, 1986):

So I urge you, to speak out against those who would place the United States in a
position of military and moral inferiority. Y’know, I’ve always believed that old
Screwtape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the church. So in your discus-
sions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the
temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at
fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to
simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding, and thereby remove yourself from
the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.2

Similarly, discourse analysts have noted George W Bush’s Manichaean rhetorical

use of evil in constructing a ‘‘war on terrorism’’ script in relation to 11 September
and the ensuing foreign military conflicts (Chang and Mehan, 2006, 2008;
Liberman, 2006). Through use of a religious mode of representation dichotomizing
actors as good or evil based on the values of American civil religion, the former
President rallied domestic support for military action in Iraq (Anker, 2005; Gunn,
2004; Simons, 2007; Spielvogel, 2005). Generally speaking, attributions to the devil
or Satan for inexplicable tragedy and personal struggle remain salient in both
public and private discourse among Americans (see Lupfer et al., 1992, 1996).
Further, the US is an outlier relative to other Western countries in terms of
population levels of belief in transcendent religious evil. A 1968 Gallup poll con-
ducted in Western countries showed that the American public had much
higher levels of belief in hell (65%) and the Devil (60%) than other locations

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 155

(Sigelman, 1977). When the General Social Survey (GSS) asked a question about
belief in the Devil in 1991, 65% of respondents said they absolutely or probably
believed. When the first wave of the Baylor Religion Survey (BRS) replicated the
question in 2005 there had been an increase in belief, such that approximately 58%
of the American public ‘‘absolutely’’ believed in Satan, and another 17%
‘‘probably’’ believed in his existence (Baker, 2008). According to Wave 6 of the
World Values Survey (2010–2014), 72% of Americans believe in hell, a population-
level of belief much higher than comparable post-industrial countries such as
Australia (34%), Denmark (9%), France (18%), Germany (20%), Great Britain
(28%), Italy (42%), Japan (33%), the Netherlands (12%), New Zealand (36%),
Spain (36%), and Sweden (15%).3
With regard to religion and punitive attitudes, we examine which aspects of
religiosity significantly predict variation in punitive attitudes. More specifically,
we assess how religious affiliation, practice, fundamentalism, images of God, and
beliefs about transcendent religious evil associate with punitive ideology. We are
particularly interested in the influence of views about transcendent evil on puni-
tiveness. Transcendent evil provides an ideal symbol of social pollution, invoking
the need for righteous retributive punishment (Alexander and Smith, 1993: 157).
Indeed, the notion of religious conceptions such as hell is quite explicitly inter-
twined with social schemas of just desserts and retributive justice for transgressions
of divine law. Using this theoretical backdrop, we bring attention to the role of
perceptions of transcendent religious evil for better understanding punitive ideol-
ogies among mass publics, using the United States as an example. In doing so we
seek to connect literatures on culture and punishment with empirical studies of
religion and public punitiveness.

Research on punitive attitudes and religion

A growing body of literature has approached the study of punitive attitudes from
the perspective of religiosity. Empirically, religious and punitive ideologies have
been linked primarily through religious affiliation, identity, or specific beliefs.

Religious affiliation and punitiveness

Studies of the relationship between denominational affiliation and punitive atti-
tudes have primarily focused on whether Protestant fundamentalism and conser-
vative Catholicism influence support for capital punishment as a consequence of
their respective doctrines. Several studies find support for the proposition that
members of fundamentalist denominations are more punitive than those of other
religious traditions (Stack, 2003; Unnever and Cullen, 2006; Unnever et al., 2005);
however, the relative strength of this relationship is unclear. This variation is
largely due to the characteristics of samples, and especially by how ‘‘fundamental-
ism’’ is operationalized. When disaggregated by race, fundamentalism appears to
facilitate greater punitiveness among whites, but is either inconsequential or

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

156 Punishment & Society 18(2)

decreases support among African Americans (Britt, 1998; Young, 1992; Young and
Thompson, 1995). Geographic location also appears to be a confounding factor for
the relationship between fundamentalism and punitive attitudes, as evidenced by
variation in the results of research focusing on Southern residents (Borg, 1997;
Evans and Adams, 2003), or examining residents of a particular state or muni-
cipality (e.g. Grasmick et al., 1993b; Leiber and Woodrick, 1997; Sandys and
McGarrell, 1997).
Examining decision-makers within the criminal justice system rather than the
public at large, Myers (1988) found that a fundamentalist religious orientation
among judges led to more frequent sentencing of African Americans and less ser-
ious offenders. Adding an important extension to individual level assessments, a
series of studies by Jacobs and Carmichael (2001, 2004; Jacobs et al., 2005) have
shown that higher rates of population level religious fundamentalism in the US
correlate with higher rates of incarceration and capital punishment.
To a lesser extent, scholars have considered the influence of the Catholic faith on
punitiveness, under the rubric of the ‘‘consistent life ethic.’’ This Catholic doctrine
promotes policies related to the sanctity of human life through, among many
issues, combined opposition to abortion and capital punishment. This ideology is
more often held among Catholics who attend mass frequently (Bjarnason and
Welch, 2004; Perl and McClintock, 2001) and hold the Church hierarchy in high
regard (Mulligan, 2006).

Religious beliefs and punitiveness

A ‘‘literal’’ interpretation of the Bible is perhaps the most widely studied of reli-
gious beliefs thought to influence punitiveness. Several studies have attempted to
account for conservative Christian beliefs through the use of this measure, though
results have yielded mixed conclusions (cf. Applegate et al., 2000; Britt, 1998;
Leiber and Woodrick, 1997; Young and Thompson, 1995). The most consistent
support for the relationship between a literal interpretation of the Bible and puni-
tive attitudes is collected in a series of studies by Grasmick et al. (1992, 1993a,
1993b, 1994). Using a multi-item composite measure of literalism, they found that
literalism increased punitiveness among a sample of Oklahoma City residents.
Research using the GSS has generally been less supportive of the link between
literalism and support for the death penalty (Unnever et al., 2006; Young, 1992);
however, literalism does appear to increase a preference for harsher local courts
(Unnever et al., 2005).
Other studies have focused on the impact of God imagery for attitudes toward
punishment. An individual’s image of God is assumed to be related to views about
how the causes and consequences of situations and behaviors should be
approached (Cullen et al., 1985; Gorsuch and Smith, 1983). Previous research
has reported that individuals holding a more punitive image of God tend to
be more punitive themselves (Applegate et al., 2000; Bader et al., 2010;
Evans and Adams, 2003; Grasmick et al., 1993a; Young and Thompson, 1995).

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 157

Highlighting the values of forgiveness, compassion, and grace, there is also

evidence that holding a gracious image of God is associated with less support
for both the death penalty and harsher local courts (Unnever et al., 2006).

Perceptions of evil and punitiveness

Satan is an essential component of the Christian machinery; yet, even if he is an

impure being, he is not a profane being. The anti-god is a god—lower and subordin-
ate, it is true, yet invested with broad powers; he is even the object of rites, at the very
least negative ones (Durkheim, [1912] 1995: 423).

In contrast to God imagery, we are interested in how perceptions of transcendent

religious evil are related to punitive attitudes. Pagels (1995) traces how fluctuation
in the prevalence and popularity of belief in Satan corresponds historically to
periods of widespread Christian intolerance. Although scholarship on perceptions
of evil tends to fall within the purview of religious studies more than the social
sciences, a handful of studies in criminology have included a measure of belief in
Satan in indices intended to gauge biblical literalism. In each of these cases, the
composite measure was positively associated with punitiveness. Using a simple
measure of belief in Satan (‘‘Do you believe that there is a devil?’’), Leiber and
Woodrick (1997) found a direct positive association between biblical literalism and
support for the death penalty and a stricter juvenile court, while other researchers
found that ‘‘literalism’’ (including religious evil) had a positive but indirect effect on
punitiveness, mediated by retributiveness (Grasmick et al., 1992) and dispositional
attribution (Grasmick and McGill, 1994). These results point to a potential empir-
ical connection between belief in religious evil and punitiveness.
In a more direct test of the Satan-intolerance hypothesis, Wilson and Huff
(2001) found that belief in an active Satan was related to intolerance of homosex-
uals and racial minorities (cf. Wilson et al., 2007). Likewise, a case-study of a moral
reform movement aimed at pornography found that activists linked belief in a
‘‘living Satan’’ with intolerance of feared outgroups. Among the group of activists
studied, 98% believed in ‘‘an active personal ‘transcendent’ force of evil directly
involved in pornography’’ (Swatos, 1988: 80). The picketing of stores carrying
erotic materials was a symbolic demonstration against the embodiment of evil; a
stand against the agency of Satan. Similarly, a study of premillienialists found that
Satan was viewed as an active force which required confrontation, and political
positioning and activism became a means of ‘‘doing battle’’ with an imminent
threat (Wilcox et al., 1991).
Recent work in both media studies and social psychology also points toward
cognitive and cultural links between perceptions of religious evil and punitive
ideology. For instance, popular media portrays prisons as dark, gloomy places,
with criminals as ‘‘evil monsters’’ who deserve punishment. Punitive ideologies
reflect intertextual, image-driven preferences or schemata that allow for the

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

158 Punishment & Society 18(2)

judgment of criminals. In particular, media portrayals of the war on drugs and the
war on terrorism have heavily employed criminal stereotyping (Jewkes, 2014).
Meanwhile, research on religious priming has demonstrated that belief in punitive
or evil supernatural agents initiates feelings of being watched. In this light, belief in
supernatural punishment is seen as prosocial, rewarding those who do good and
punishing those who do not (Norenzayan, 2013); however, this feeling also makes
individuals feel responsible for the punishment of others (McKay et al., 2011).
In conjunction with fear of supernatural evil, affect and emotion link religion to
punitiveness (Atran and Norenzayan, 2004). Punitive ideology is emotionally
costly, but also remains very common, a paradox that can be explained using
the concept of pollution (Posner, 1980). From the perspective of evolutionary
theory, supernatural evil is seen as a manifestation of emotions towards unex-
plained events, especially in relation to fear. The punishment for wrongdoing
must at least match the amount of fear instilled in the individual who heard,
read, witnessed, or knows about the crime. In essence, the practical costs or benefits
of retaliating against a wrongdoer are less important than the perception that
retribution is necessary to restore moral order.

Data and methods

To assess how religion influences punitive attitudes, we analyze data from Wave II of
the BRS, a random, national sample of 1,648 American adults administered by the
Gallup Organization in 2007. The BRS contains a combination of fixed and rotating
topic modules on various attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, with the majority of
content uniquely focused on religion, allowing us to explore whether and how dif-
ferent aspects of religiosity are connected to punitiveness. Data collection used a
mixed-mode design, where potential respondents were called and asked if they would
be willing to participate in the study, then mailed a survey. A total of 3,500 potential
respondents were successfully contacted by phone. Of all, 2,460 agreed to be mailed
questionnaires. The contact-to-completion rate was 47% (1648/3500), and the
response rate was 67% for the mailed survey portion (1648/2460). Detailed infor-
mation regarding survey design and administration is available in Bader et al. (2007)
and Froese and Bader (2010: 167–170). All forthcoming analyses include a weight
created by Gallup based on information from the Census Bureau that adjusts for
distributions related to gender, race, region of the country, age, and education.4

Dependent variables
We examine two questions assessing punitive sentiments. The first of these asks
about support for capital punishment through level of agreement with the state-
ment ‘‘To what extent do you agree or disagree that the federal government should
abolish the death penalty?’’5 Answer choices are on a agree/disagree Likert scale.
Respondents who disagreed were coded as 1, while respondents who agreed or were
undecided were coded as 0, so that higher values reflect greater punitiveness.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 159

Included in the same battery of questions as the previous item, respondents indi-
cated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed that the government should
‘‘punish criminals more harshly.’’ Respondents who agreed were coded as 1, while
those who disagreed or were undecided were coded as 0.6

Independent variables
Religious belief, behavior, and identity. For our primary independent variable, we con-
structed an index of belief in transcendent religious evil. This measure is comprised
of the following three items: belief in the existence of Satan (from [1] ‘‘absolutely
not’’ to [4] ‘‘absolutely’’); belief in the existence of hell (from [1] ‘‘absolutely not’’ to
[4] ‘‘absolutely’’); and belief that most evil in the world is caused by Satan (from [1]
‘‘strongly disagree’’ to [5] ‘‘strongly agree’’). A principal components factor ana-
lysis indicated the presence of a single component, with all measures loading above
.85 and an Eigenvalue over 2.5. Subsequent reliability analysis demonstrated high
internal consistency (Cronbach’s ¼ .88).
To measure religious tradition, we followed the ‘‘RELTRAD’’ classification
scheme of American religion, which divides respondents into seven religious trad-
itions based on denominational history and theology: black Protestant, evangelical
Protestant, mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, other religion, and no religious
affiliation (Steensland et al., 2000). Evangelical Protestants are omitted as the ref-
erence category in multivariable analyses.7 We created a composite measure of
religious practice that includes three behaviors: frequency of service attendance,
prayer, and reading of religious scriptures. Answers to these three items do not
share the same response categories, so each was mean standardized before sum-
ming to create a composite measure of personal religiosity (Cronbach’s ¼ .82).
Self-identification as a fundamentalist was measured by asking respondents how
well they thought the term described their religious identity, with answer choices
ranging from (1) not at all to (4) very well. We also include a measure of stance
toward the Bible ranging from (1) the Bible is a ‘‘book of history and legends’’ to
(4) the Bible ‘‘should be taken literally, word-for-word on all subjects.’’
The BRS contains over 20 items about the disposition and nature of God.
Holding a punitive image of God was measured based on respondents’ levels of
agreement with an index of the items describing God as: (1) angered by human
sins, (2) angered by the respondent’s sins, (3) punishing, (4) severe, (5) wrathful,
and (6) as punishing sinners with terrible woes (Cronbach’s ¼ .85). For consonance
with previous work, we use six items for ‘‘loving God’’ which most closely corres-
pond with those used by Unnever and co-authors (2005, 2006). These items include
the belief that God is (1) concerned with the respondent’s personal well-being, (2) dir-
ectly involved in the respondent’s personal affairs, and could be described as
(3) forgiving, (4) friendly, (5) ever-present, and (6) loving (Cronbach’s ¼ .92).
Collectively, the wide array of religion metrics allows us to better isolate mechanisms
linking religion to punitive ideology, as well as ensuring that findings for a particular
measure are not merely a reflection of an unaccounted for aspect of religiosity.8

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

160 Punishment & Society 18(2)

Sociodemographic controls. We also control for sociodemographic characteristics that

have been shown as potentially affecting punitive attitudes (see Payne et al., 2004).
Race is coded as a series of three dichotomous variables—Black, White, and ‘‘other
races’’—with white as the omitted reference category in multivariate analyses.
Gender (women ¼ 1) and region (south ¼ 1) are each represented by binary vari-
ables. Education is a seven-point scale of attainment level ranging from ‘‘8th grade
or less’’ to ‘‘postgraduate work/degree.’’ Similarly, annual family income consists
of seven ordered categories ranging from ‘‘$10,000 or less’’ per year to ‘‘$150,001 or
more.’’ Age is measured in years ranging from 18 to 96. Finally, a question about
political stance places respondents along a seven category spectrum between
‘‘extremely conservative’’ and ‘‘extremely liberal,’’ with higher values correspond-
ing to increased liberalism.

Analytic strategy
We first provide results examining the bivariate relationship between the religious
measures and each of the punitive attitudes examined. This is done with contingency
tables and independent samples t tests. Subsequent analyses use binary logistic
regression to predict punitive attitudes, while controlling for the variables detailed
above. Six models are presented, three per dependent variable. In each instance, the
first equation is the baseline model, including only sociodemographic controls and
political leaning. In the second, we include measures of religion used by previous
studies. The final models add our key variable of belief in transcendent religious evil.
We present variance-based fully standardized coefficients for all models, calcu-
lated using the formula and steps available in Menard (2010). This provides coef-
ficients analogous to standardized coefficients in ordinary least squares (OLS)
regression analysis, where the interpretation is that ‘‘a one standard deviation
increase in X is associated with a [coefficient] standard deviation difference or
change in logit(Y)’’ (Menard, 2011: 1417). All measures other than the religious
evil index were mean centered before being entered into the regression models, so
that the constant is a meaningful number in the first two models (logged predicted
probability at the mean of all predictors), and allowing for ease of computation of
the predicted probabilities by level of belief in religious evil in the final models. We
then present graphically the predicted probabilities for punitiveness across the
range of the religious evil index. To triangulate and supplement our findings
using BRS data, the appendix presents additional analyses using the cumulative
data file of the GSS.

Results
Bivariate analyses
Table 1 shows significant racial differences in support for the death penalty,
with Whites (78%) more supportive than African Americans (62%) or those

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 161

Table 1. Contingency tables for punitive ideology and categorical predictors (row
percentages)

Support death Want harsher

penalty 2 punishment 2

Gender .22 .35

Men 76.4 69.6
Women 75.4 71.0
Region 10.82*** 5.80*
Southerner 81.0 74.3
Non-Southerner 73.5 68.4
Race 15.73*** .01
White 77.5 70.3
Black 62.1 70.4
Other race 72.2 70.7
Religious tradition 73.74*** 87.07***
Black Prot. 72.2 74.0
Catholic 73.5 76.5
Evangelical 87.6 78.9
Jewish 70.0 46.7
Mainline Prot. 74.4 70.3
No religion 58.6 49.4
Other religion 69.8 51.6
Source: 2007 Baylor Religion Survey.
***p  .001 and *p  .05 (two-tailed tests).

who self-identify as races or ethnicities other than White or Black (72%).

Interestingly, there are no differences by race for desiring general harsher punish-
ment of criminals. Southerners are more likely to support the death penalty (81%)
and want harsher punishment of criminals (74%) than non-southerners (74% and
68%, respectively). For religious tradition, evangelicals have the highest levels of
support for both the death penalty (88%) and harsher punishment in general
(79%). The non-religious have the lowest levels of support for the death penalty
(59%), while Jewish respondents had the lowest level of desiring harsher punish-
ment (47%), followed closely by the non-religious (49%).9 An interesting pattern
emerges for general punitiveness, such that members of all Christian traditions are
more punitive on average than those in non-Christian traditions.
In Table 2, the ordinal and interval predictors with the largest t scores
for predicting support for the death penalty were political identity (t ¼ 12.9), the
religious evil index (t ¼ 7.6), self-identification as a fundamentalist (t ¼ 7.0), and
biblical literalism (t ¼ 6.5). For predicting wanting harsher punishment of

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

162 Punishment & Society 18(2)

Table 2. Means for ordinal and interval predictors by answers on punitive ideology questions

Death penalty Harsher punishment

Yes No t Yes No t

Education 4.22 4.63 4.272 4.10 4.81 8.002

Income 4.33 4.25 .778 4.30 4.35 .605
Age 47.06 47.51 .454 47.93 45.26 2.966
Political identity 3.32 4.56 12.944 3.25 4.51 14.352
Religiosity .05 .18 1.501 .19 .48 4.700
Fundamentalist 2.15 1.64 6.997 2.18 1.70 7.016
Literalism 2.69 2.24 6.549 2.76 2.15 9.836
Angry God 12.54 11.00 4.624 12.58 11.23 4.584
Loving God 25.52 24.04 3.517 25.97 23.23 7.318
Religious evil 9.60 8.00 7.585 9.83 7.73 11.315
Source: 2007 Baylor Religion Survey.
Absolute value of t statistics reported.
Equal variances across variables not assumed for t tests.

criminals, the predictors with the largest t scores were political identity (t ¼ 14.4),
the religious evil index (t ¼ 11.3), biblical literalism (t ¼ 9.8), and education level
(t ¼ 8.0). Notably, all religion measures have a positive relationship to support for the
death penalty and desiring harsher criminal punishment in a bivariate context.

Binary logistic regressions

Table 3 presents results from the binary logistic models. Regarding support for the
death penalty in Model 1, African Americans ( ¼ .117; p  .001), those with
higher levels of education ( ¼ .134; p  .01), older Americans ( ¼ .124;
p  .01), and political liberals ( ¼ .513; p  .001) all have lower levels of support
for the death penalty. Southerners have higher levels of support for the death
penalty than non-southerners ( ¼ .129; p  .01). In Model 2, each of these vari-
ables other than political identity is reduced to statistical non-significance, indicat-
ing that the influence of sociodemographics on death penalty attitudes is primarily
indirect, mediated through religiosity. Among the religion variables, mainline prot-
estants ( ¼ .276; p  .001), Catholics ( ¼ .270; p  .001), members of ‘‘other’’
religions ( ¼ .133; p  .05), and the religiously nonaffiliated ( ¼ .302; p  .001)
all had significantly lower levels of support for the death penalty than evangelicals.
The angry God index had a significant, positive relationship to punitiveness
( ¼ .163; p  .05), while level of religious practice had a significant negative rela-
tionship with punitiveness ( ¼ .422; p  .001), net of other religious controls.10
In the final model, the religious evil index has a significant, positive relationship
to support for the death penalty ( ¼ .307; p  .01), while the punitive God measure

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 163

Table 3. Binary logistic regressions of punitive ideology (fully standardized coefficients)

Death penalty Harsher criminal punishment

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Sociodemographic
Female .009 .046 .045 .099* .077 .069
Blacka .117*** .093 .126 .064* .065 .023
Other racea .016 .019 .033 .074 .092 .096
Southerner .129** .109 .093 .015 .077 .018
Education .134** .071 .058 .261*** .217*** .218***
Income .052 .075 .060 .087 .059 .102
Age .124** .059 .071 .105* .141** .193***
Political ID .513*** .576*** .542*** .538*** .495*** .473***
RELTRADb
Black Protestant .026 .021 .002 .013
Mainline .276*** .265*** .051 .038
Catholic .270*** .256** .041 .011
Jewish .039 .012 .062 .029
Other religion .133* .124* .098 .092
No religion .302*** .303*** .092 .080
Religion
Religiosity .422*** .466*** .228** .334***
Fundamentalist .148 .115 .016 .016
Literalism .175 .088 .108 .026
Punitive God .163* .117 .068 .030
Loving God .022 .116 .150* .025
Religious evil .307** .494***
Model stats
Constant 1.348 1.514 .253 1.013 1.076 1.017
Nagelkerke R2 .188 .249 .259 .223 .251 .282
2 log 1438.115 962.708 935.398 1552.447 1102.397 1055.871
likelihood
N 1475 1088 1067 1470 1085 1048
Source: 2007 Baylor Religion Survey.
***p  .001, **p  .01, *p  .05 (two-tailed tests).
a
White is reference category.
b
Evangelical is reference category.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

164 Punishment & Society 18(2)

was rendered non-significant. In Model 3, the strongest predictors of support for

the death penalty, in order of strength were: conservative political identity, low
religiosity, high belief in religious evil, and the difference between evangelicals and
the religiously nonaffiliated.
Regarding attitudes toward criminal punishment, in Model 1, women ( ¼ .099;
p  .05) and African Americans ( ¼ .064; p  .05) surprisingly had slightly higher
levels of support for harsher punishment than men and whites, net of sociodemo-
graphic controls. Older Americans ( ¼ .105; p  .05) also had higher levels of
punitiveness. Those with higher levels of education ( ¼ .261; p  .001) and pol-
itical liberals ( ¼ .538; p  .001) had significantly lower levels of punitiveness. In
Model 2, none of the religion measures other than levels of religious practice
( ¼ .228; p  .01) and the loving God index ( ¼ .150; p  .05) significantly
predicted desiring harsher punishment. Notably, the loving God measure was sig-
nificant in the opposite of the expected direction. In Model 3, the effect of the
loving God measure is attenuated to nearly 0, suggesting that loving God was
acting as a proxy for belief in religious evil until the index was added to the
model. The religious evil index ( ¼ .494; p  .001) was strongly related to desiring
harsher punishment of criminals.11 In the final model, the strongest predictors of
punitiveness, in order of strength were: greater belief in transcendent religious evil,
conservative political identity, low religiosity, and low educational attainment.
Figure 1 graphically displays the predicted probabilities of supporting the death
penalty and wanting harsher punishment of criminals across the full range of the
religious evil index, holding all other controls constant at their respective means. At
the lowest levels of belief in religious evil, the probability of wanting harsher pun-
ishment of criminals is .42, and the probability of supporting the death penalty is .66.
At the highest levels of belief in religious evil, the predicted probabilities are .87 for
wanting harsher punishment of criminals and .88 for supporting the death penalty.

Discussion

When we demand the repression of crime it is not because we are seeking a personal
vengeance, but rather vengeance for something sacred which we vaguely feel is
more or less outside and above us . . .. This is why penal law is not only of essentially
religious origin, but continues always to bear a certain stamp of religiosity. This
is because the acts that it punishes always appear as attacks upon something which
is transcendent, whether this is a being or a concept . . .. We are therefore wrong
to impugn this quasi-religious characteristic of expiation, making it some kind
of unnecessary, parasitical trait. On the contrary, it is an integrating element in pun-
ishment. (Durkheim, [1893] 1984: 56–57)

Beliefs about transcendent religious evil are an important consideration for under-
standing punitive ideology. For both measures of punitiveness examined, an index
of beliefs about the existence and influence of supernatural evil yielded strong

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 165

Figure 1. Probability of holding punitive ideology by level of belief in religious evil.

relationships. This point is contrasted by the findings regarding religious practice.

Personal religious practice and perceptions of evil displayed countervailing effects
on punitive attitudes. While belief in religious evil increases punitiveness, religious
practice demonstrably decreases support for punitive practices, but only once other
factors such as conservative theology are accounted for.12 We echo other scholars’
conclusions that the multifaceted nature of religion and religiosity has the potential
to yield divergent effects on punitiveness.
In addition, we advocate redirecting focus toward negative symbols of religion
as a potentially insightful point of entry into empirical studies of religion and
punishment. Further, our analyses indicate that views of religious evil and levels
of religious practice—rather than scriptural literalism, fundamentalism, or images
of God—are the most important aspects of religion for predicting punitiveness.
As such, empirical assessments using biblical literalism, self-identification as a fun-
damentalist, or images of God without controlling for views of religious evil are
essentially picking up on the unaccounted for variance of beliefs about transcend-
ent religious evil. Having better specified the aspects of religiosity that relate to
punitiveness, a fuller integration of how religiosity and punitiveness connect to
other socio-cognitive attributes known to influence punitive attitudes, such as per-
ceptions of racial threat and crime victimization, remains for future research.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

166 Punishment & Society 18(2)

In the broader picture of how views of evil relate to regimes of punishment,

Americans are simultaneously ‘‘exceptionally’’ religious (Norris and Inglehart,
2011) and punitive (Western, 2006) relative to other Western countries. During a
period of unprecedented penal expansion over the last 40 years, public support for
harsher punishment of criminals has remained remarkably high (Travis, 2002). The
intersection between religion, perceptions of evil, and strategies for combating
communal indiscretions presents an avenue for better understanding institutional
retributiveness, especially in the United States, where public opinion has strong
bearing on judicial composition and policy (Tonry, 2009).
Applying his theoretical model of punishment to the American case, Savelsberg
(1994b) noted that the high frequency of public opinion polling in the US helped feed
increasingly punitive ‘‘knowledge’’ about crime to the public, which impacted levels
of punishment more than in other Western countries due to institutional conditions
such as constituency-oriented politicians and a judicial system highly influenced by
public opinion (also see Brace and Boyea, 2008). Combined with the legacy and
ongoing struggle of racial conflict in the US, this combination of factors produced
a vast increase in imprisonment. Given the strong influence of public ‘‘knowledge’’
on punitive outcomes in the US, a change in public opinion is needed to halt the
machinery of mass incarceration. There has recently been a slight decline in support
for harsher courts that corresponds with a plateauing of the incarceration rate (Clear
and Frost, 2014: 1–16), as well as an increase in religious nonaffiliation among the
public; however, on the whole the American public remains highly punitive.13
Penal populism in general warrants greater inclusion in the discussion of America’s
prison boom, as ‘‘knowledge about crime and punishment is part of more general
belief systems that are neither clear-cut nor self-contained. Instead they are associated
with forms of law and social structure’’ (Savelsberg, 1994b: 925). As such, the strong
connection between higher levels of particular religious orientations—including views
of transcendent evil—are an important consideration in the ongoing narrative of the
culturally embedded influences on mass incarceration and the persistence of the death
penalty in the United States (see Garland, 2010: 250–253; Melossi, 2001). As theorists
have long noted, deviance and its control are questions that center on the moral
boundaries of a community. Accordingly, attitudes toward crime, criminality, and
punitiveness are housed within broader moral frameworks. Although most theoret-
ical perspectives in criminology, as well as within the criminal justice system, have (at
least overtly) moved beyond the ‘‘demonic perspective,’’ such views remain salient
among the public and sometimes even among political decision-makers, and are
therefore of import to understanding cultural regimes of punishment.

Acknowledgments
Wave II of the Baylor Religion Survey was funded by a grant from the Templeton founda-
tion. Dataset and modeling syntax for purposes of replication are available from the first
author by request. An early version of this study was presented at the 2008 Southwestern
Social Science Association meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. Thanks to Ashley Palmer for help
researching the empirical literature about religiosity and punitiveness.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 167

Notes
1. Although Durkheim’s definition of religion is famously functional (i.e. based on
community and ritual solidarity) rather than substantive (i.e. based on the super-
natural), representations of evil nonetheless remain an integral part of his conception
of religion by virtue of signifying the social boundaries of purity and pollution
(Durkheim, [1912] 1995: 415–417). We depart from Durkheim’s theory in the
sense that we are assessing monotheistic traditions, where there is greater duality
of representations of good and evil than in totemism or polytheism, with less transfer
of symbols between categories of sacred and polluted, especially in the direction
moving from ‘‘impure’’ to ‘‘pure’’ sacred; however, we share the view that the
categories are necessarily interdependent and that desecrations can rapidly transition
the pure sacred into the impure. In essence, we work from an understanding of
religion that not only views social boundaries and solidarity as a fundamental func-
tion of religion, but also emphasizes that conceptions of the supernatural, both good
and evil, warrant extensive consideration for their capacity to dramatize and signify
the boundaries religion creates and reinforces.
2. Quotation is based on our transcription of the speech rather than the printed version.
Full text and video of the speech is available at: http://millercenter.org/president/
speeches/speech-3409. ‘‘Screwtape’’ is a demonic character in C.S. Lewis’ The
Screwtape Letters.
3. Estimates for Denmark, France, Great Britain, and Italy are taken from the 1999
European Values Survey (Bréchon, 2009), as they were not included in Wave 6 of the
WVS. Supplemental analyses showed a strong correlation between population-levels
of belief in hell and imprisonment rates in post-industrial countries (r ¼ .62). This
correlation is actually stronger for linear analyses after removing the United States,
which is an outlier on both metrics (r ¼ .74). A more extensive assessment of popula-
tion-level belief in religious evil and imprisonment rates awaits elaboration.
4. Sociodemographic results of the 2007 BRS compare favorably to data available in
the 2008 GSS and 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the Census
Bureau. Tabled results of these comparisons and all other footnoted supplemental
analyses are available upon request from the first author.
5. The phrasing of this question potentially confuses issues of capital punishment and a
position on the interplay between federal or state rights with regard to systems of
punishment. The GSS question modeled in the Appendix is a less ambiguous metric
of support for or opposition to capital punishment.
6. We assessed multiple alternative strategies to measuring and modeling the BRS
metrics for capital punishment and general punitiveness, including 1) binary logistic
models with the undecided respondents excluded rather than combined with the non-
punitive category; 2) cumulative logistic models with three categories of disagree,
undecided, and agree; and 3) ordinary least squares models predicting the full five
category variables. We calculated standardized coefficients for all models. The rank
order of predictors was the same for the death penalty outcome regardless of measure-
ment and model. For the general punishment outcome, the rank order of political
identity and the index of religious evil switch places for the OLS and cumulative

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

168 Punishment & Society 18(2)

logistic models. In the binary logistic model excluding ‘‘undecided’’ respondents, the
religious evil index remained the strongest predictor. It seems political identity is a
better predictor across gradations of the Likert scale for generalized punishment,
while religious evil is a more efficient predictor of binary punitive/non-punitive
outcomes.
7. We conducted supplemental analyses without the religious tradition variable that
tested for an interaction between race and the religious evil index. Because African
Americans have higher levels of belief in transcendent religious evil (Baker, 2008),
but lower levels of punitiveness, we hypothesized there might be an important
moderating effect of race on the religious evil and punitiveness relationship.
There is not a significant interaction for predicting general punitiveness; however,
there was a significant interaction for predicting support for the death penalty, such
that the religious evil index did not significantly correlate with greater support for
capital punishment among African Americans ( ¼ .026), while there was a strong
relationship between belief in religious evil and support for capital punishment
among whites ( ¼ .132).
8. The high number of inter-correlated religion measures introduces the possibility of
multicollinearity. In an OLS model parallel to Model 3 predicting support for the
death penalty, we assessed Variance Inflation Factors for the religion variables. The
variable with the highest variance inflation factor (VIF) score was the religious evil
index (2.8), followed by loving God index (2.4), biblical literalism (2.4), religiosity
(2.0), self-identification as fundamentalist (1.3), and the angry God index (1.1).
Since the variable most affected by collinearity is our variable of interest, the
statistical tests are effectively biased against our primary hypothesis.
9. Further analyses show that atheists have the lowest levels of punitiveness among
the non-religious compared to agnostics and nonaffiliated believers (see Baker and
Smith, 2009), as well as among all specific religious traditions. Unfortunately many
atheists end up missing in the regression analyses because they skipped the image of
God questions, which were effectively unanswerable for theistic disbelievers. Still it
deserves note that atheists are less punitive than other types of Americans, even
though this is obscured in the multivariate models.
10. Supplemental analyses that included the religiosity index and only one other reli-
gious control in multivariate models—rotating the religion measures one at a
time—showed that the religious evil index resulted in the largest increase in the
absolute value of the negative coefficient for the religious practice index. In other
words, the suppressor effect from a single religiosity measure picking up the coun-
tervailing influences of different aspects of religion is best revealed by the religious
evil index.
11. We also tested alternate measurement strategies for the religious evil index by
adding biblical literalism to the measure, as well as adding biblical literalism and
self-identification as a fundamentalist, and a final alternate index that included
belief in demons and demon possession. These alternate measurement strategies
did not improve the predictive power of the model. The religious evil index pre-
sented here was the best predictor.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 169

12. After removing other religious controls to reduce multicollinearity, a model including
an interaction effect for religiosity and belief in religious evil was significant for
predicting support for the death penalty, such that the negative effects of religiosity
on punitiveness are attenuated for those with higher levels of belief in religious evil; or,
interpreted the other way, the positive effect of belief in religious evil on punitiveness
is attenuated for those with higher levels of religious practice. In short, the highest
levels of support for the death penalty occur among those with high levels of belief in
religious evil, but low levels of religious practice. The interaction term was non-sig-
nificant in a similar model predicting desire for harsher punishment of criminals.
13. The percentage of respondents to the GSS answering that local courts were ‘‘not harsh
enough’’ remained above 80% between 1973 and 1996, then stayed above 70%
between 1998 and 2004. The percentage has continued to fall, with the lowest propor-
tion occurring in the most recent (2014) wave, where 63% of respondents reported that
local courts should be harsher. The year 2014 also had the highest percentage saying
that courts were ‘‘too harsh’’ (16%), although this sentiment remained relatively rare.
14. Using the 2008 wave, the only one to include measures for both belief in hell and
punishment of sinners, the belief in hell measure was significant for predicting
support for capital punishment, and the punish sinners measure was significant
for both outcomes. There were negligible differences in results using only the
1988 wave compared to the 2006–2010 waves for the punishment of sinners
metric, in spite of the relatively long gap between surveys.

References
Alexander JC (2001) Toward a sociology of evil. In: Lara MP (ed.) Rethinking Evil:
Contemporary Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 153–172.
Alexander JC (2003) The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Alexander JC and Smith P (1993) The discourse of American civil society: A new
proposal for cultural studies. Theory and Society 22: 151–207.
Anker E (2005) Villains, victims and heroes: Melodrama, media and September 11.
Journal of Communication 55: 22–37.
Applegate BK, Cullen FT, Fisher BS, et al. (2000) Forgiveness and fundamentalism:
Reconsidering the relationship between correctional attitudes and religion.
Criminology 38: 719–754.
Atran S and Norenzayan A (2004) Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counter intu-
ition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27:
713–770.
Bader CD, Desmond SA, Mencken FC, et al. (2010) Divine justice: The relationship
between images of God and attitudes toward criminal punishment. Criminal Justice
Review 35: 90–106.
Bader CD, Froese PD and Mencken FC (2007) American piety 2005: Content, meth-
ods, and selected results from the Baylor Religion Survey. Journal for the Scientific
Study of Religion 46: 447–463.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

170 Punishment & Society 18(2)

Baker JO (2008) Who believes in religious evil? An investigation of sociological

patterns of belief in Satan, hell, and demons. Review of Religious Research 50:
206–220.
Baker JO and Smith BG (2009) None too simple: Examining issues of religious non-
belief and nonbelonging in the United States. Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 48: 719–733.
Barnes HE (1930) The Story of Punishment: A Record of Man’s Inhumanity to Man.
Boston: The Stratford Company.
Ben-Yehuda N (1980) The European witch craze of the 14th and 17th centuries: A
sociologist’s perspective. American Journal of Sociology 86: 1–31.
Ben-Yehuda N (1985) Deviance and Moral Boundaries. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Bjarnason T and Welch MR (2004) Father knows best: Parishes, priests, and American
catholic parishioners’ attitudes toward capital punishment. Journal for the Scientific
Study of Religion 43: 103–118.
Borg MJ (1997) The southern subculture of punitiveness? Regional variation in support
for capital punishment. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 34: 25–46.
Brace P and Boyea PD (2008) State public opinion, the death penalty, and the practice
of electing judges. American Journal of Political Science 52: 360–372.
Bréchon P (2009) The measurement of religious beliefs in ISSP and EVS surveys.
In: Haller M, Jowell R and Smith TW (eds) The International Social Survey
Programme, 1984–2009: Charting the Globe. London: Routledge, pp. 337–354.
Britt CL (1998) Race, religion, and support for the death penalty: A research note.
Justice Quarterly 15: 175–191.
Chang GC and Mehan HB (2006) Discourse in a religious mode: The Bush adminis-
tration’s discourse in the war on terrorism and its challenges. Pragmatics 16: 1–23.
Chang GC and Mehan HB (2008) Why we must attack Iraq: Bush’s reasoning practices
and argumentation system. Discourse & Society 19: 453–482.
Clear TR and Frost NA (2014) The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Fall of Mass
Incarceration in America. New York: NYU Press.
Cullen FT and Agnew R (2006) Criminological Theory: Past to Present, 3rd ed.
New York, NY: Oxford.
Cullen FT, Clarkn GA, Cullen JB, et al. (1985) Attribution, salience, and attitudes
toward criminal sanctioning. Criminal Justice and Behavior 12: 305–331.
Dillinger J (2004) Terrorists and witches: Popular ideas of evil in the early modern
period. Journal of European Ideas 30: 167–182.
Durkheim E ([1893] 1984) The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by Halls WD.
New York, NY: Free Press.
Durkheim E ([1912] 1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Fields
KE. New York, NY: Free Press.
Einstadter W and Henry S (1995) Criminological Theory. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt
Brace.
Erikson KT (1966) Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. Boston,
MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 171

Evans DT and Adams M (2003) Salvation or damnation? Religion and correctional

ideology. American Journal of Criminal Justice 28: 15–35.
Froese P and Bader CD (2010) America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God and
What that Says about Us. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Garland D (1990) Punishment and Modern Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Garland D (2010) Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Goodnight GT (1986) Ronald Reagan’s re-formulation of the rhetoric of war: Analysis
of the ‘zero option,’ ‘evil empire,’ and ‘star wars’ addresses. Quarterly Journal of
Speech 72: 390–414.
Gorski PS (1993) The Protestant Ethic revisited: Disciplinary revolution in Holland and
Prussia. American Journal of Sociology 99: 265–316.
Gorsuch RL and Smith CS (1983) Attributions of responsibility to God: An interaction
of religious beliefs and outcomes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22:
340–352.
Grasmick HG, Bursik RJ Jr and Blackwell BS (1993a) Religious beliefs and public
support for the death penalty for juveniles and adults. Journal of Crime and Justice
16: 59–86.
Grasmick HG, Cochran JK, Bursik RJ Jr, et al. (1993b) Religion, punitive justice, and
support for the death penalty. Justice Quarterly 10: 289–314.
Grasmick HG, Davenport E, Chamlin MB, et al. (1992) Protestant fundamentalism
and the retributive doctrine of punishment. Criminology 30: 21–45.
Grasmick HG and McGill AL (1994) Religion, attributional style, and punitiveness
toward juvenile offenders. Criminology 32: 23–46.
Gunn J (2004) The rhetoric of exorcism: George W. Bush and the return of political
demonology. Western Journal of Communication 68: 1–23.
Hartnagel TF and Templeton LJ (2012) Emotions about crime and attitudes to pun-
ishment. Punishment & Society 14: 452–474.
Hertz R ([1909] 1960) The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious
Polarity. Translated by Needham R and Needham C. Glencoe: Free Press.
Hertz R ([1922] 1994) Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies. Translated and edited by
Parkin R. Oxford: British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology.
Jacobs D and Carmichael JT (2001) The politics of punishment across time and space:
A pooled time-series analysis of imprisonment rates. Social Forces 80: 61–89.
Jacobs D and Carmichael JT (2004) Ideology, social threat, and the death sentence:
Capital sentences across time and space. Social Forces 83: 249–278.
Jacobs D, Carmichael JT and Kent SL (2005) Vigilantism, current racial threat, and
death sentences. American Sociological Review 70: 656–677.
Jewkes Y (2014) Punishment in black and white: Penal ‘‘hell-holes,’’ popular media,
and mass incarceration. Atlantic Journal of Communication 22: 42–60.
Johnson D (2009) Anger about crime and support for punitive criminal justice policies.
Punishment & Society 11: 51–66.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

172 Punishment & Society 18(2)

Leiber MJ and Woodrick AC (1997) Religious beliefs, attributional styles,

and adherence to correctional orientations. Criminal Justice and Behavior 24:
495–502.
Liberman P (2006) An eye for an eye: Public support for war against evildoers.
International Organization 60: 687–722.
Lilly JR, Cullen FT and Ball RA (2007) Criminological Theory: Context and
Consequences, 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lupfer MB, Brock KF and DePaola SJ (1992) The use of secular and religious attri-
butions to explain everyday behavior. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31:
486–503.
Lupfer MB, Tolliver D and Jackson M (1996) Explaining life-altering occurrences: A
test of the God-of-the-gaps hypothesis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
35: 379–391.
McConnell WM, Cochran RF Jr and Carmella AC (eds) (2001) Christian Perspectives
on Legal Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
MacIntyre A (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press.
McKay R, Efferson C, Whitehouse H, et al. (2011) Wrath of God: Religious primes and
punishment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278: 1858–1863.
Melossi D (2000) Changing representations of the criminal. British Journal of
Criminology 40: 296–320.
Melossi D (2001) The cultural embeddednesss of social control: Reflections on the
comparison of Italian and North-American cultures concerning punishment.
Theoretical Criminology 5: 403–424.
Menard S (2010) Logistic Regression: From Introductory to Advanced Concepts and
Applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Menard S (2011) Standards for standardized logistic regression coefficients. Social
Forces 89: 1409–1428.
Mulligan K (2006) Pope John Paul II and Catholic opinion toward the death penalty
and abortion. Social Science Quarterly 87: 739–753.
Myers MA (1988) Social background and sentencing behavior of judges. Criminology
26: 649–675.
Norenzayan A (2013) Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Norris P and Inglehart RE (2011) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide,
2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pagels E (1995) The Origins of Satan. New York, NY: Random House.
Payne BK, Gainey RR, Triplett RA, et al. (2004) What drives punitive beliefs?
Demographic characteristics and justifications for sentencing. Journal of Criminal
Justice 32: 195–206.
Perl PS and McClintock JS (2001) The Catholic ‘consistent life ethic’ and attitudes
toward capital punishment and welfare reform. Sociology of Religion 62: 275–299.
Pfohl SJ (1985) Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History.
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 173

Pickering WSF and Rosati M (eds) (2008) Suffering and Evil: The Durkheimian Legacy.
New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
Posner RA (1980) Retribution and related concepts of punishment. The Journal of
Legal Studies 9: 71–92.
Riley AT (2002) Durkheim contra Bergson? The hidden roots of postmodern theory
and the postmodern ‘return’ of the sacred. Sociological Perspectives 45: 243–265.
Riley AT (2005) ‘Renegade Durkheimianism’ and the transgressive left sacred.
In: Alexander JC and Smith P (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 274–304.
Rosati M (2005) The evil that men suffer: Evil and suffering from a Durkheimian
perspective. Durkheimian Studies 11: 67–85.
Rosati M (2008) Suffering and evil in the Elementary Forms. In: Pickering WSF and
Rosati M (eds) Suffering and Evil: The Durkheimian Legacy. New York, NY:
Berghahn Books, pp. 49–62.
Sandys M and McGarrell EF (1997) Beyond the Bible Belt: The influence (or lack
thereof) of religion on attitudes toward the death penalty. Journal of Crime and
Justice 20: 179–190.
Savelsberg JJ (1992) The law that does not fit: Sentencing guidelines as a neoclassical
reaction to the dilemmas of substantivized law. American Journal of Sociology 97:
1346–1381.
Savelsberg JJ (1994a) Religion, historical contingencies, and institutional conditions of
criminal punishment: The German case and beyond. Law & Social Inquiry 29: 373–401.
Savelsberg JJ (1994b) Knowledge, domination, and criminal punishment. American
Journal of Sociology 99: 911–943.
Savelsberg JJ (1999) Knowledge, domination, and criminal punishment revisited.
Punishment & Society 1: 45–70.
Scalia A (2002) God’s justice and ours. First Things 123: 17–22.
Sigelman L (1977) Review of the polls: Multi-nation surveys of religious beliefs. Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion 16: 289–294.
Simons HW (2007) From post-9/11 melodrama to quagmire in Iraq: A rhetorical his-
tory. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10: 183–194.
Smith P (2008) Punishment and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Snell FJ ([1911] 1978) The Customs of Old England. Norwood, MA: Norwood Editions.
Sørensen A (1997) On kings, pietism and rent-seeking in Scandinavian welfare states.
Acta Sociologica 41: 363–375.
Spielvogel C (2005) ‘‘You know where I stand’’: Moral framing of the War on
Terrorism and the Iraq War in the 2004 presidential campaign. Rhetoric & Public
Affairs 8: 549–570.
Stack S (2003) Authoritarianism and support for the death penalty: A multivariate
analysis. Sociological Inquiry 66: 267–284.
Stark W ([1958] 1991) The Sociology of Knowledge: Toward a Deeper Understanding of
the History of Ideas. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Steensland B, Park JZ, Regnerus MD, et al. (2000) The measure of American religion:
Toward improving the state of the art. Social Forces 79: 291–318.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

174 Punishment & Society 18(2)

Swatos WH (1988) Picketing Satan enfleshed at a 7-Eleven: A research note. Review of

Religious Research 30: 73–82.
Tonry M (2009) Explanations of American punishment policies: A national history.
Punishment & Society 11: 377–394.
Travis J (2002) Invisible punishment: An instrument of social exclusion. In: Mauer M
and Chesney M (eds) Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Imprisonment. New York, NY: Free Press, pp. 15–36.
Unnever JD and Cullen FT (2006) Christian fundamentalism and support for capital
punishment. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 43: 169–197.
Unnever JD, Cullen FT and Applegate BK (2005) Turning the other cheek: Reassessing
the impact of religion on punitive ideology. Justice Quarterly 22: 304–339.
Unnever JD, Cullen FT and Bartkowski JP (2006) Images of God and public support
for capital punishment: Does a close relationship with a loving God matter?
Criminology 44: 835–866.
Vold GB, Bernard TJ and Snipes JB (2002) Theoretical Criminology, 5th ed. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Western B (2006) Punishment and Inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Wilcox C, Linzey S and Jelen TG (1991) Reluctant warriors: Premillennialism and
politics in the moral majority. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30:
245–258.
Wilson KM, Acord JL and Bernas RS (2007) Intolerance toward others and
belief in an active Satan. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion 17:
39–48.
Wilson KM and Huff JL (2001) Scaling Satan. Journal of Psychology 135: 292–300.
Young RL (1992) Religious orientation, race, and support for the death penalty.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31: 76–87.
Young RL and Thompson C (1995) Religious fundamentalism, punitiveness, and fire-
arms ownership. Journal of Crime and Justice 18: 81–98.

Joseph O Baker is an associate professor in the department of sociology and

anthropology at East Tennessee State University, and a senior research associate
for the Association of Religion Data Archives. His research focuses on the socio-
logical aspects of religiosity, secularity, ‘‘paranormalism,’’ public views of science,
and penology and law. He has published over twenty peer-reviewed articles in more
than a dozen journals on a wide range of topics, including group-level congrega-
tional dynamics, sexual education policies in the U.S., public acceptance of evolu-
tion, social control theory, and Westboro Baptist Church. He is an editorial board
member for the journal Sociology of Religion and author of Paranormal America
(2010) and American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems
(2015), both published by NYU Press. He is currently working on a book outlining
and testing a comprehensive theory of deviance management strategies.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

Baker and Booth 175

Alexis L Booth recently graduated with a B.S. (with honors) in clinical psychology.
Her research interests focus on forensic psychology and law. Specifically, she is
interested in psychopathology and mental illness within offender populations, risk
assessments and the corresponding treatment methods employed for such condi-
tions, and evidence based practices for offender rehabilitation and the reduction of
recidivism rates.

Appendix
We conducted supplemental analyses with the cumulative dataset of the GSS. In
these models, belief in hell (only asked on the 1991, 1998, and 2008 waves) was a
significant predictor of attitudes about capital punishment, but not harsher local
courts, where biblical literalism remained the best metric of punitive theology.
Because this measure of belief in transcendent evil is highly limited, we instead
present here the results of analyses that examined whether respondents’ beliefs
about ‘‘punishing sinners’’ translated into more punitive attitudes toward crim-
inals. This provides a direct test of the idea that theological punitiveness acts as
a cultural and cognitive mechanism linking religious and punitive ideologies.
Table A1 shows the results of a binary logistic regression model predicting
support for the death penalty, with answers of (0) no and (1) yes, and a cumulative
logistic regression predicting whether respondents thought that ‘‘courts in the area’’

Table A1. Binary and cumulative logistic regressions of punitive ideology (fully standardized
coefficients)

Death penaltyb Harsher local courtsc

Sociodemographic
Gender .059*** .056***
Blacka .165*** .128***
Other racea .088*** .085***
Southerner .024 .009
Education .001 .028
Income .062*** .013
Age .028 .008
Political identity .198*** .079***
Mother’s education .019 .010
Father’s education .014 .053***
Hours worked .019 .052***
Children .031 .054**
(continued)

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016

176 Punishment & Society 18(2)

Table A1. Continued

Death penaltyb Harsher local courtsc

Religion
Attendance .135*** .011
Fundamentalist .077*** .027
Literalism .010 .044*
Punish sinners .109*** .136***
Model stats
Constant .956 .865
Constant 2 – .503
Nagelkerke R2 .158 .081
2 log likelihood 5182.211 6911.576
N 4794 4755
Source: 1988 and 2006–2010 waves of the General Social Survey
***p  .001, **p  .01, *p  .05 (two-tailed tests).
a
White is reference category.
b
Binary logistic regression.
c
Cumulative logistic regression.

dealt with criminals (0) ‘‘too harshly,’’ (1) ‘‘about right,’’ or (2) ‘‘not harshly
enough.’’ We included controls for gender, race, region, education, income level,
age, political identity, parents’ education levels, hours worked per week, having
children, self-identification as a fundamentalist, frequency of religious service
attendance, and views of the Bible. The predictor of interest was a question that
asked for level of agreement with the statement that ‘‘Those who violate God’s
rules must be punished.’’ Answers were coded from (1) strongly disagree to
(4) strongly agree. This measure was only included in the 1988 and 2006–2010
waves, so those are the survey years analyzed.14
Fully standardized coefficients are presented (again, see Menard, 2011).
Mirroring the results from the BRS, opinion about punishing violators of divine
law was a strong predictor of support for capital punishment, ranking fourth
in strength of influence ( ¼ .109; p  .001), behind political identity ( ¼ .198;
p  .001), the difference between White and Black Americans ( ¼ .165; p  .001),
and the negative effect of religious service attendance ( ¼ .135; p  .001). For the
generalized harsher courts outcome, attitude about punishing sinners was the
strongest predictor ( ¼ .136; p  .001), with the difference between White and
Black respondents second strongest ( ¼ .128; p  .001). Overall, theological
view of punishment is a strong predictor of attitudes toward criminal punishment,
and serves as a primary link between religion and punitive ideology.

Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at City University Library on March 21, 2016