Overview of Research Program
Injustice and inequality are pervasive in society, challenging the wellbeing of individuals and communities. In response, some individuals and groups work to promote social justice. Social justice is a multifaceted construct encompassing attitudes and behaviors designed to promote systemic change, human rights, and the reduction of inequality. Yet it remains unclear why individuals and groups work for social justice, especially because many do not. In one branch of my research, I examine how religion may help facilitate or be a barrier to social justice attitudes and behavior. In another branch, I examine how beliefs about systems of power and privilege shape social justice attitudes and behavior. Given the pervasive injustice facing society and the need for individual and collective action to reduce inequality, this research is timely and important.
My religious research starts with the observation that individuals can use religious beliefs or act as part of larger religious communities to promote peace and justice – or to pursue ends antithetic to religious values. My research program focuses on this dual nature of religion to investigate how religion, spirituality, and participation in religious settings (i.e., places where people gather to pursue the sacred) promote or constrain social justice attitudes and behavior. Understanding how settings shape attitudes and behavior is an enduring question within my field of community psychology. Religious settings provide a rich context to pursue this research as they have distinct group-based beliefs, norms that guide acceptable belief and behavior, leaders, programs and activities, and networks of relationships that create community (Todd, 2017). My work focuses on these types of contextual factors as potential mechanisms within religious settings that shape attitudes and behaviors related to social justice. Given the prominence of religious settings in the U.S. and their potential to galvanize social justice efforts, this research is timely and important.
In a related line of research, we examine beliefs about systems of power and privilege. In particular, we examine how awareness of privilege, colorblind racial ideology, and attitudes about the acceptability of racial microaggressions link to racial and social justice attitudes and behavior. This work mainly focuses on dominant group members (people who are White and/or Christian in the U.S.) to shift the focus from those who are marginalized to those who benefit from systems of racial and Christian privilege. Also, I am launching new research focused on sexual and gender minority (SGM) religion and spirituality, with a focus on understanding how to create religious settings that are open and affirming to SGMs. Across this work we use creative methodological design and sophisticated quantitative and qualitative analysis to reveal the ways that religion and beliefs about systems of power and privilege shape social justice attitudes and behavior.
Religious Settings
In my research, we study religious settings as mediating structures for social justice. Mediating structures are settings that connect individuals to society. My work addresses a long-standing call in our field to examine religious settings. For example, we were some of the first to examine interfaith groups (e.g., Todd, Boeh, et al., 2017) and campus ministry groups (Todd, McConnell, et al., 2017) as types of religious settings that may foster social justice engagement. I also examine religious congregations as mediating structures for social justice, where we published a series of papers examining key questions, including: (1) what individual beliefs and congregational characteristics predict individual social justice participation? (Todd & Allen, 2011), (2) how do congregational leadership, norms, and friendships predict individual social justice engagement through or outside of one’s congregation? (Houston & Todd, 2013), (3) how is religion intertwined with social justice development for Christians? (Todd & Rufa, 2013), (4) what types of programs and activities to congregations offer that may foster social justice? (Todd & Houston, 2013), (5) what predicts the presence of congregational programs focused on survivors of intimate partner violence? (Houston-Kolnik & Todd, 2016), and (6) what are barriers and facilitators for religious leaders and congregations to support survivors of intimate partner violence? (Houston-Kolnik, Todd, Greeson, 2019). Together, this body of research advances the field by showing how religious setting help to mediate social justice engagement, and that this engagement is a product of the interplay between characteristics of individuals and their religious settings.
As a religious setting, congregations are inherently relational. Yet to date research rarely uses methods amenable to examining the relational nature of congregations. Thus, we used whole social network analysis with one congregation to test hypotheses about relational activity, popularity, and homophily for friendship and spiritual support relational links (Todd, Blevins, et al., 2020). We showed that relational patterns were linked to participation in congregational activities, occupying a leadership role, and a sense of community. To our knowledge this is one of the first studies using whole network analysis with a congregation and advances research not only on congregations, but more broadly on relationships within social settings.
Privilege
In another area of research, we examine how privileged group membership and awareness of privilege shape racial and social justice attitudes and behaviors. In one branch of this work, I focus on White individuals as the dominant racial group in the United States to understand processes related to being White (Todd & Abrams, 2011) and emotional responses to racism and racial privilege (e.g., McConnell & Todd, 2015; McConnell & Todd, submitted). We also examine White privilege awareness among White students, finding that awareness was associated with social justice interest (Todd et al., 2014); that religion may inhibit or facilitate White privilege awareness depending on the religious belief examined (Todd et al., 2015); and that White privilege awareness predicted openness to diversity for women but not men in a sample of Christian students (Ellison, Todd, et al., 2019). We also demonstrated that the racial composition and economic factors of the hometown where one grew up (defined by zip-code) were predictors of White privilege awareness for White students (Blevins & Todd, 2022). This study was one of the first to examine both individual- and community-level predictors of White privilege awareness, and also one of the first to explicitly examine economic predictors (e.g., we found that greater income inequality, but not median level of income in a zip-code, predicted White privilege awareness). These findings show the need to consider community-level context when examining awareness of White privilege.
In another branch of this work, we examine other types of privilege, such as Christian privilege. In one study (Todd, Yi, et al., 2020), we wanted to explain the link between Christian conservatism and opposition to a host of SGM rights (same-sex marriage, employment discrimination laws, laws impacting transgender people). We posited that individual’s attitudes about Christian privilege and Christian dominance would help to explain this link. Indeed, our analyses showed that unawareness of Christian privilege, and supporting the idea that Christians should be the dominant group in power in the U.S., helped to explain the link between Christian conservatism and opposition to SGM rights. This was one of the first papers to empirically test these links, providing evidence of the need to consider attitudes about power in our research.
In another study, we examined how intersecting group memberships of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion related to an awareness of White, male, and Christian privilege in a sample of 2,321 students (Todd, et al., in press). This study provides insight into the question of how multiple facets of group membership work in concert to shape awareness of privilege (i.e., multiple main effects, interactive). We demonstrated that students from marginalized groups reported greater awareness of all types of privilege compared to dominant groups, and that an interaction among group memberships only occurred between race/ethnicity and religion for awareness of White and male privilege. Together, these findings help to clarify that multiple group memberships tended to contribute to awareness of privilege as multiple main effects rather than as multiplicative, and showed the importance of including religion as a group membership. Overall, understanding what facilitates and inhibits awareness of multiple types of privilege is a key question that has implications for diversity education and building solidarity across groups to confront inequality.
Colorblind Racial Ideology
Our research also focuses on links between colorblind racial ideology – described by Neville and colleagues (2013) as the ways race and racism are denied and minimized – and social justice attitudes and behavior. In recent work we have made two key contributions to this literature. First, as described by Neville et al. (2013), there are two distinct types of colorblind racial ideology, one type that denies race by focusing on similarity (i.e., color evasion), and another type that denies racism and institutional racism (i.e., power evasion). This distinction is often not made in the literature, which leads to confusion when studies about “colorblindness” find different patterns of results. Thus, our team provided empirical evidence to psychometrically support this distinction (Mekawi, Todd, et al., 2020), showing that color and power evasion differentially predicted a host of race-related outcomes. We also conducted a meta-analysis that demonstrated color and power evasion differentially predicted a host of outcomes related to racial and social justice (Yi, Neville, Todd, & Mekawi, 2022). Across these studies we consistently showed that power evasion is associated with attitudes and behaviors antithetical to racial justice, whereas color evasion is not associated with these outcomes. Overall, our research demonstrates the need to differentiate color and power evasion, and holds promise to shape the direction of colorblindness research. Also, our team demonstrated that power evasion is negatively associated with actions to address prejudice (Yi, Todd, & Mekawi, 2020), predicted more negative expectations and reactions to required campus diversity education (Yi, Todd, et al., 2022), was negatively associated with teaching outcome expectations with immigrants (Cadenas et al., 2020), and that power evasion explained associations between internalized model minority myth and anti-Blackness in a sample of Asian American students (Yi & Todd, 2021). Overall, our research provides conceptual clarity for the field, along with evidence of the pernicious role of power evasion in perpetuating racial inequality.
Acceptability of Racial Microaggressions
To date, the majority of racial microaggressions literature has focused on the important question of how racial microaggressions impact People of Color. Yet less is known about factors that contribute to the commission of racial microaggressions by White people. To address this gap, we developed the new Acceptability of Racial Microaggressions scale (Mewaki & Todd, 2018), which asks people to rate how acceptable it is for White people to say different types of racial microaggression to People of Color (i.e., Victim Blaming, Exoticizing, Power Evasion, Color Evasion). We found different levels of acceptability depending on the type of racial microaggression, and strong associations between acceptability and ratings of likelihood of personal commission. We also conducted an experimental study to test how watching educational videos about racial microaggressions may reduce acceptability (Mekawi, Todd, et al., 2021). We found that watching videos reduced acceptability for all types of racial microaggressions, and we discovered that an increase in perspective taking – rather than White guilt – helped to explain this reduction. Finally, we contributed to a special issue on racial microaggressions in Perspectives on Psychological Science where we first addressed key definitional challenges, and then proposed a new dimensional taxonomy for racial microaggressions research (Mekawi & Todd, 2021). Our body of work contributes to the racial microaggression literature by providing a new framework and scale for examining acceptability of racial microaggressions, as well as provides a conceptual foundation that may guide the future of racial microaggressions research in the field of psychology.
Future Directions
Building on my previous research focused on religious settings and SGM rights, I am launching a new line of research focused on SGM religion, spirituality, and wellbeing under the broader umbrella of SGM health equity. In particular, I am interested in the connection between religion and SGM health disparities. I conceptualize religion at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., an individual’s religious or non-religious beliefs and participation, local religious settings such as congregations, and the larger religious environment that is present in one’s geographic space). In my research I will investigate the intricacies of how religion shows up and matters in the lives and health of SGM people and communities, and in particular will examine SGM people and communities in relation to their larger ecological contexts.
In a new project focused on religious congregations, I received grant support from the Louisville Institute to examine the process of how some congregations become open and affirming to SGMs. Focusing on congregations is important as these are local religious settings that hold potential to be affirming and provide places of community for SGMs; yet many congregations are not supportive or could further strengthen their efforts. Thus, in this ethnographic project I am conducting observation and interviews with religious members, congregational leaders, and religious leaders involved in national coalitions that support open and affirming congregations with the purpose of shedding light on the dynamic process of becoming open and affirming. My hope is that this work will reveal ways that I can collaborate and support these processes as a social scientist, while also contributing to scholarship more broadly on social settings.
I also am developing strategies to assess religious environment through indicators beyond self-report (e.g., the presence of conservative religious beliefs, people, and congregations in one’s geographic space; the presence of religious freedom laws that enable discrimination based on SGM status). In a current project we are examining state-level indicators of religious environment and health indicators gathered by the U.S. Census to test how facets of religious environment predict and may moderate sexual and gender minority health disparities (i.e., in states with more conservative religious environments, will SGM health disparities be exacerbated?). In future mixed methods work, I also will develop self-report measures to assess perceptions of religious environment (i.e., individual perceptions of how religion “shows up” in one’s peer group, family, work, and geographic location). Overall, in this work I will connect between different levels of analysis to understand how religion may functions as a source of structural stigma and stress which may contribute to SGM health disparities. This work adds to the SGM minority stress and structural stigma literatures by elucidating and empirically testing how religious-based stigma and religious environment are part of the minority stress model. Overall, this research integrates my interests in religion and SGM wellbeing in the larger pursuit of justice.
Summary
In the face of continued injustice and inequality, it is important to understand why individuals and groups work for social justice. My research examines religion and attitudes related to systems of power and privilege, showing nuance in how each facilitates as well as constrains individual and group social justice engagement. Using multiple methods, my research shows the need to understand religious beliefs and settings as well as the ways attitudes about systems and structures shape social justice attitudes and behaviors. My emerging work builds on these strengths with a particular focus on the intersection of religious settings and SGM religion and spirituality. Overall, I hope this research will inform efforts to engage people in social justice efforts, and ultimately will help us move toward greater justice and wellbeing for individuals and communities.