New Zealanders trust Buddhists the most and evangelical Christians the least according to the findings of a new survey conducted a month after the Christchurch shootings in March.
The online survey of 1,000 New Zealanders, carried out for researchers at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, asked them how much they trusted people belonging to different religious groups in New Zealand. The result shows 35 per cent had “complete” or “lots” of trust in Buddhists – who, according to the most recent Census in 2013 consist of just 58,000 people out of a population of 3.9 million – while just 15 per cent said they had little or no trust in them.
Jews, Hindus and atheists or agnostics were also scored well in terms of trust while results for Protestants – the largest religious grouping in the country consisting of about 900,000 people – showed 28.7 per cent of people had complete or lots of trust and 9.8 per cent didn’t trust them at all and those for Catholics showed 25.7 per cent had complete or lots of trust in them and 7.7 per cent didn’t trust them at all.
The results for evangelical Christians, who make up just 15,000 people, showed just 20.3 per cent had complete or lots of trust in them with 37.5 per cent indicating they had little or no trust at all in them.
Some 27.3 per cent of respondants said they had complete or lots of trust in Muslims with 22.8 per cent saying they had little or no trust in them.
In an article published by The Conversation, Simon Chapple, director of the institute, said while the results showed “no evidence…of local anti-Semitism or Islamophobia in the form of a trust deficit displayed towards Jews or Muslims compared to mainstream Christian denominations”, there was “some evidence of moderate disproportional social prejudice towards non-mainstream Evangelical Christians, with nearly four in ten of the population distrusting them”.
He wrote that while the findings “suggest that New Zealanders’ patterns of trust in minority non-Christian religious groups are generally similar to mainstream Christian denominations”, the conclusion “does not demonstrate that hate towards minority religious groups does not exist in New Zealand”.
“Media reporting both before and after the Christchurch shootings clearly indicates that it does,” he wrote, adding that while it was possible those who report distrust in non-Christian religious minorities harboured more extreme views than those reporting distrust towards larger mainstream religious groups or towards evangelicals, this possibility had not been tested.
