Mitigating Conflicts between Law and Religion by Affirming Identity: Evidence from the Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel

In the United States, Canada, England, Belgium, and Israel, governments and religious communities face an intensifying challenge of integrating basic secular education into conservative religious classrooms. This paper reports a mixed-method research that combines fieldwork and lab-in-the-field experiments to investigate the roots of this conflict and test a novel intervention: affirmation through framing. Reframing government policy to affirm religious autonomy and recognize the importance of religious education substantially increased support in the curriculum, particularly among the group most likely to reject it—conservative parents, cutting their objection to the curriculum in half. Internal variation within religious population is discussed. The results suggest a broad role for affirmation in mitigating identity threat and expand affirmation’s potential impact to a new set of social problems. The results also offer practical insights to policymakers wishing to pave a path forward in conflicts that often seem intractable.

* This paper is part of a panel titled:

Between the holy and the profane: Comparative perspectives on education, law, and religion in the ultra-Orthodox community