  Emotions play important epistemological and cognitive roles in our lives,
revealing our values and guiding our actions. Previous work has shown that LLMs
display biases in emotion attribution along gender lines. However, unlike
gender, which says little about our values, religion, as a socio-cultural
system, prescribes a set of beliefs and values for its followers. Religions,
therefore, cultivate certain emotions. Moreover, these rules are explicitly
laid out and interpreted by religious leaders. Using emotion attribution, we
explore how different religions are represented in LLMs. We find that: Major
religions in the US and European countries are represented with more nuance,
displaying a more shaded model of their beliefs. Eastern religions like
Hinduism and Buddhism are strongly stereotyped. Judaism and Islam are
stigmatized -- the models' refusal skyrocket. We ascribe these to cultural bias
in LLMs and the scarcity of NLP literature on religion. In the rare instances
where religion is discussed, it is often in the context of toxic language,
perpetuating the perception of these religions as inherently toxic. This
finding underscores the urgent need to address and rectify these biases. Our
research underscores the crucial role emotions play in our lives and how our
values influence them.
