"The wheat beneath the chaff" : discriminating religiousness by means of the post-critical belief scale

Abstract

This study forms part of an investigation into the religious beliefs and attitudes among students at the University of Malta, the majority Roman Catholic, initiated by the University Chaplaincy. It consists of a survey meant to assess their adherence to basic tenets of Christian faith and morals. In the course of this on-line survey, the shorter version (18 items) of the Post-Critical Belief Scale (Duriez et al, 2005) was also administered to the 421 participants, males and females, mean age 21 (SD=4). Of these, only 380 cases which had all the item answered were accepted. This instrument, based on Wulff’s theory (1991, 1997), suggests a variety of approaches to religion that can be located in a two-dimensional space along the bipolar dimensions, Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs. Symbolic. It envisages four groups, Restorative Interpretation, Literal Affirmation, External Critique, and Relativism. In the analysis of the results of the survey, an exploratory factor analysis suggested the presence of two different groups which however needed to be identified. After considering several variables from the survey section, Church Attendance proved to be the strongest one that differentiated between the two. This led to the creation of two groups, those who attend Church more or less regularly, and those who rarely do so, or never at all. The former group was seen to correlate strongly with the items related to basic tenets of faith as compiled by the survey. The second part of the study consisted in the analysis of the PCBS scores. Following a procedure previously conducted by Fontaine (2003) of multi-dimensional scaling and principal component analysis, two factors were extracted which rotated towards the target as proposed by Wulff. The rotated two dimensional solutions had substantial congruence with the bipolar model, and with Tucker's Phi in excess of 0.85. The18 items also separated neatly into their respective quadrants, just like that of Fontaine (2003, 511). Using the two subgroups for further contrasts, t-tests revealed that those who went to church regularly scored significantly higher on the Restorative Interpretation (t = 5.29), whereas the others scored significantly higher on External Critique (t = -9.39) and on Relativism (t = -4.18). No significant difference was noted on Literal Affirmation. While the survey was able to identify a particular group showing a stronger consistency between belief and practice, the PCBS contrasts were able to posit this group in the Restorative Interpretation quadrant. This represents a position in which the existence of the religious realm is inclusive of transcendence while retaining the symbolic meaning of the religious language. The results have shown that the PCBS could be validly replicated with a different population and that it also enjoys a degree of discriminant validity. The conclusions, moreover, shed some more light on the character of the subjects falling under the Restorative Interpretation quadrant which, according to Wulff (1991, 1997), has largely been neglected in empirical research.