Page 255 - Cultures and Organizations

228 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

One certainty of these cultures is that God wants nobody to be prosecuted
for holding a given belief.
For centuries the Roman Catholic church maintained an Inquisition,
which sent many people with deviant ideas to their deaths and banned or
burned books; some books are banned by the Roman Catholic church even
today. In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death in
1989, banned the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and invited
all believers to kill the author and his publishers. It is somewhat amazing
that many people in Christian countries were so shocked by this action, in
view of their own countries’ histories of religious intolerance. With some
exceptions, and Khomeini’s action is one of them, Islam in history has been
more tolerant of other religions than has Roman Catholic Christianity. The
medieval Crusades, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, were a prod-
uct of Christian, not of Muslim, intolerance. In the Muslim Turkish Empire,
People of the Book (that is, Jews and Christians) were tolerated and could
exercise their religions, as long as they paid a special tax. On the other hand,
even Protestant Christians, generally considered to be more broad-minded,
have made victims of religious intolerance, such as Michael Servetus, who
was burned to death by John Calvin’s followers in Geneva in 1553. Prot-
estant nations have also in past centuries burned supposed witches. In the

early twenty-first century, fundamentalist Christian preachers denounced
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as a work of the devil.

Confession of sins fits the strong uncertainty- avoidance culture pat-
tern. If a rule cannot be kept, confession is a way to preserve the rule and
put the blame on the individual. The Roman Catholic practice of confession
is relatively mild and discreet; militant communism in the Soviet Union
in the days of Stalin made it a public show. In weak uncertainty- avoidance
cultures, there will be more of a tendency to change a rule if it is evident
that it cannot be respected.

Eastern religions are less concerned about Truth. The assumption that
there is one Truth that a person can possess is absent in their thinking.
There is more to this view than uncertainty acceptance, and we will dis-
cuss it further in Chapter 7.
Across all countries with a Christian majority, there is a strong cor-
relation between the percentage of Catholics in the population (as opposed
to Protestants) and the country’s UAI. A second correlation is with mas-
culinity, implying that where Catholicism prevails, masculine values tend
to prevail as well—for instance, in refusing to admit women to leadership