Religious Cosmologies, Individualism and Politics in Italy

Through analyses of a national survey of Italians (N = 983) conducted in 1990, we study the effect of moral cosmology on political attitudes. We argue that modernists are more theologically individualistic than the religiously orthodox in that they see individuals themselves, not a deity, as being responsible for their fates and as being the ultimate moral arbiters. We hypothesize that modernists, as theological individualists, are culturally individualistic in supporting personal freedom on issues of abortion, sexuality, religious education, and gender roles, and are also economically individualistic in believing that the poor or jobless, not the community or state, should solve their own problems. We find strong support for these hypotheses: Italian modernists are culturally to the left but economically to the right of their orthodox counterparts.