Religious Moral Communities or Secular Tolerance? Individual-, National-, and Regional-Level Explanations for Restrictive Refugee Policy Preferences in Europe

Religious communities can encourage generosity toward strangers. In these communities, such norms are high among religious individuals and nonadherents. It remains unclear how these norms inform policy. Recent refugee crises provide critical tests of how charitable values translate into political preferences. As Europe experiences turmoil over the acceptance and integration of Muslim refugees, I ask how religion affects preferences regarding refugee admissions. I find that marginalized religious groups among new immigrants offer the highest levels of support for admitting refugees. Catholics are more restrictive than religious nones regarding policy preferences, while there are mixed results comparing nones to other Christian denominations. However, for Catholics and most other Christians, generous policy preferences increase with higher rates of religious service attendance. Respondents offer more generous policy preferences in regions with higher rates of Protestant and Catholic affiliation and in nations with higher Protestant affiliation. Restrictive preferences increase with regional and national percent unaffiliated.