Conservative and Liberal Values in Relation to Religiosity

The conservative versus the liberal conflict currently seems to be prevalent in Western societies. This chapter tests the association between conservative and liberal worldviews and basic human values: conservation values (CONS) versus values we term “liberal attitude values” (LA). We explore their association to each other, to religiosity, and to social policy attitudes. We first explore these associations in the full Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG) sample, and then focus on three samples from countries that have recently experienced a liberal-conservative political polarization: Poland, Israel (Jewish sample), and the United States. The contribution of the YARG data is in the ability to present a more nuanced view of this dimension, with an emphasis on its relation to religiosity. Our intention is to unpack the conservative and the liberal worldviews in order to explore the elements that each of them promotes and to identify variance within national contexts, shifting the liberal-conservative dichotomy to a culturally-nuanced spectrum.