Michele Margolis - Sensitive Snowflakes? Understanding perceived discrimination against Christians

White evangelical Christians consider themselves to be one of the most discriminated against and marginalized groups in the United States. Using this surprising empirical finding at a jumping off point, this paper attempts to understand why White evangelical Christians report feeling discriminated against at such high rates. The results from a large-scale survey experiment reveal that White evangelicals are sensitive toward slights aimed at a co-religionist but do not perceive the same slight as discriminatory when it is aimed at a member of a religious out-group. Moreover, this pattern is specific to White evangelicals: White non-evangelical Christians are equally likely to perceive discrimination regardless of whether the target of the discrimination is a fellow Christian or not. These results highlight, in a general sense, that group membership can shape how people view the world and interpret events and, more specifically, that White evangelicals are interpret events through religion-tinted glasses.