Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity

1. Abstract

The Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity Scale (CCDRS), developed by Gordon F. DeJong, Joseph E. Faulkner, and Rex H. Warland in 1976, is a seminal 38-item psychometric instrument designed to operationalize and evaluate the multifaceted nature of individual religious commitment across distinct cultural contexts. Rooted in the theoretical framework established by Charles Glock and Rodney Stark (1966) and building upon earlier Guttman scaling paradigms (Faulkner & DeJong, 1966), the instrument assesses six distinct dimensions: Belief (8 items), Experience (4 items), Religious Practice (5 items), Individual Moral Consequences (6 items), Religious Knowledge (10 items), and Social Consequences (5 items). Item presentation spans multiple formats, including ordinal categorical items, forced-choice selections, factual recognition queries, and standard 5-point Likert-type scales.

Standardized on a cross-national sample of 926 university students from the United States (n = 536) and the Federal Republic of Germany (n = 390), the instrument demonstrated a robust, cross-culturally invariant factor structure despite pronounced baseline differences in institutional church affiliation and secularization levels. Subsequent structural equation modeling and covariance structure analyses by Hilty and Stockman (1986) confirmed the viability of a five- or six-factor first-order structure, while contributing critically to the persistent scientific debate regarding the unidimensionality versus multidimensionality of religious involvement. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric exposition of the CCDRS, delineating its historical origin, latent constructs, structural properties, cross-cultural validity, and relevance in contemporary sociology and psychology of religion.

2. Keywords

Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity, Religiosity Scale, Psychometrics, Glock and Stark, Factor Analysis, Measurement Invariance, Religious Commitment, Cross-Cultural Assessment, Sociology of Religion, Religious Orthodoxy

3. Authors

The scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by researchers based in the Department of Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University:

• Gordon F. DeJong, Ph.D. — Professor of Sociology and Demography, Department of Sociology and Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States.
• Joseph E. Faulkner, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States.
• Rex H. Warland, Ph.D. — Professor of Rural Sociology, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States.

Subsequent psychometric replications and second-order structural evaluations were conducted by Daniel M. Hilty and Sue J. Stockman (1986), examining adult congregational and university student cohorts.

4. Purpose

The primary scientific impetus behind the construction of the Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity Scale was to address a fundamental question within the psychology of religion and sociology of religion: whether personal religiosity represents a singular, general latent trait (often centered on orthodox ideological assent) or a differentiated, multi-faceted taxonomy comprising independent domains of cognitive, affective, behavioral, cognitive-intellectual, and ethical expressions. Historically, empirical research had frequently relied on isolated, crude proxy indicators—such as frequency of institutional worship attendance or nominal denominational affiliation—which obscured complex variations in subjective experience, moral decision-making, and biblical literacy.

DeJong, Faulkner, and Warland (1976) sought to refine Faulkner and DeJong’s (1966) earlier Guttman-based “5-D” operationalization by transitioning to advanced exploratory and oblique factor analytic methodologies. The purpose was threefold: first, to establish whether the classic dimensions proposed by Glock and Stark (1966)—ideological, experiential, ritualistic, intellectual, and consequential—could be empirically isolated as stable latent factors; second, to separate the consequential dimension into distinct individual moral and social consequential domains; and third, to rigorously evaluate the cross-cultural cross-validation of these latent dimensions across disparate societal contexts characterized by divergent church-state relations and secularization dynamics (specifically, the United States and West Germany).

In applied research, the CCDRS provides clinical psychologists, social scientists, and cross-cultural anthropologists with a modular measurement tool capable of evaluating differentiated profiles of religiosity. For instance, it allows investigators to assess whether high adherence to orthodox theological propositions directly predicts pro-social orientation or individual moral rigor, or whether cognitive theological knowledge operates independently of personal devotional experiences. In clinical and counseling settings, the scale facilitates an objective assessment of religious coping mechanisms, spiritual distress, and cognitive moral conflict without confounding subjective spiritual experiences with institutional church participation.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct operationalized by the CCDRS is multidimensional religious commitment within a broad Judeo-Christian cultural matrix. DeJong and colleagues delineated this construct across six distinct first-order latent domains:

1. Belief Dimension (Ideological)

This dimension assesses cognitive assent to traditional Christian metaphysical and theological doctrines. It reflects the respondent’s intellectual endorsement of foundational tenets regarding the nature of God, divine agency, Christology, eschatology, the authority of sacred scripture, and the nature of sin. Representative items probe beliefs concerning individual immortality, the historical and divine nature of Jesus Christ, divine intervention in human history, the personal vs. impersonal character of God, and the ontological authority of the Bible.

2. Experience Dimension (Experiential / Affective)

The experiential dimension captures the subjective, emotional, and affective encounters that an individual interprets as direct communion or interaction with the divine. Rather than measuring intellectual theology, this subscale captures emotional states such as the felt presence of God, spiritual peace, the phenomenological awareness of divine transcendence, and the profound emotional release associated with repentance, forgiveness, and salvation.

3. Religious Practice Dimension (Ritualistic / Behavioral)

This subscale measures manifest behavioral expressions of religious devotion, distinguishing between institutionalized public behaviors and private devotional practices. Indicators encompass the empirical frequency of attendance at public worship services, active membership in a congregation or religious organization, financial contributions (including institutional mechanisms such as the German church tax, or Kirchensteuer), regular private devotional scripture reading, and participation in auxiliary church groups or leadership boards.

4. Individual Moral Consequences Dimension

This dimension operationalizes the behavioral and ethical ramifications of religious commitment on individual, personal-conduct choices. It investigates how religious values intersect with personal lifestyle decisions, ethical boundaries, and perceived transgressions. Items probe attitudes toward personal dishonesty (e.g., misrepresenting age, petty theft), chemical substance use (marijuana consumption), sexual ethics (premarital intercourse), civic protest involving violence, and personal autonomy regarding abortion.

5. Religious Knowledge Dimension (Intellectual)

The intellectual or knowledge dimension evaluates objective cognitive mastery of basic theological, biblical, and church historical literacy. Unlike the Belief dimension, which evaluates subjective conviction, this scale operates as an objective cognitive achievement test requiring respondents to correctly categorize biblical characters and prominent theological figures across church history (e.g., distinguishing whether figures such as Moses, Joshua, Paul, David, or Isaiah appear in the Old or New Testaments, or identifying non-biblical historic figures like Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Saint Augustine).

6. Social Consequences Dimension

Separated from individual ethical choices, the social consequences dimension measures the extent to which religious orientation translates into broader concern for systemic social justice, structural equity, and societal welfare. Items assess respondent endorsement of socio-political policies addressing societal distress, including the provision of adequate housing for marginalized groups, institutional eradication of poverty, full employment opportunities, economic security for geriatric populations, and the abolition of capital punishment.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the CCDRS is anchored in mid-twentieth-century functionalist and multidimensional sociological theories of religion, most notably the taxonomy articulated by Charles Y. Glock (1962) and expanded by Glock and Stark (1966) in Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. Prior to Glock and Stark’s interventions, empirical sociological research frequently treated religion as an undifferentiated, unidimensional phenomenon, operationalized through single-item indicators such as frequency of church attendance. Glock posited that while all world religions provide a universal institutional framework, religious commitment itself necessarily manifests across five distinct, core modalities:

• The Ideological Dimension (Belief): Expectations that the religious individual will hold certain fundamental beliefs.
• The Experiential Dimension (Feeling): Expectations that the individual will achieve direct communication or emotional contact with ultimate reality.
• The Ritualistic Dimension (Practice): Explicit religious acts, divided into public corporate rituals and private devotional behaviors.
• The Intellectual Dimension (Knowledge): The expectation that the devotee possesses basic literacy and knowledge about the tenets, scriptures, and history of their tradition.
• The Consequential Dimension (Effects): The explicit manifestations of religious belief, feeling, practice, and knowledge in daily secular life.

Faulkner and DeJong (1966) initially constructed empirical scales to validate these five theoretical dimensions utilizing Guttman scaling techniques. However, subsequent empirical critiques (e.g., Clayton, 1971; Weigert & Thomas, 1969) argued that Guttman techniques imposed an artificial unidimensional ordering within domains that might be better characterized by latent linear factor structures. Furthermore, theorists questioned whether the “Consequential” dimension was an intrinsic component of religiosity or merely an external correlate, prompting DeJong et al. (1976) to bisect consequences into distinct personal moral codes versus broader structural social justice commitments.

The framework also integrates theories of secularization and structural functionalism. By standardizing the measure across both American and West German populations, DeJong et al. engaged directly with cross-cultural theories positing that institutional religious disaffiliation in Western Europe does not necessarily signify the disappearance of underlying cognitive or experiential religious structures. The theoretical model assumes that even when societal environments diverge markedly in terms of formal secularization, the internal latent organization of religious commitment remains structurally equivalent.

7. Validity

The validity of the CCDRS has been demonstrated through exploratory, structural, convergent, and discriminant validation protocols across distinct national and demographic cohorts.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was initially established by DeJong, Faulkner, and Warland (1976) using oblique factor analysis. Starting with an initial pool of 54 candidate items, factor loadings and item-to-total statistics reduced the instrument to 38 items across six primary factors, aligning with the theoretical constructs. The construct validity was reinforced by testing the empirical stability of the factor patterns across alternative extraction methods: analyses based on Guttman’s image analysis and derived orthogonal Varimax rotations demonstrated identical factor structures without substantive item migration.

Cross-Cultural Measurement Invariance

The central validation test conducted by DeJong et al. involved evaluating whether the six-factor configuration remained invariant across distinct linguistic and cultural populations: American university students (n = 536) and West German university students (n = 390). Despite striking macro-level differences in manifest behavior—German students reported significantly lower rates of regular church attendance, lower traditional orthodoxy regarding personal immortality, and higher rates of theological literacy—the oblique factor solutions yielded a “strikingly similar dimensional pattern” across both national groups. This provided robust evidence of structural and conceptual equivalence across Judeo-Christian cultural landscapes.

Replication and Covariance Structure Modeling

Further structural validation was conducted by Hilty and Stockman (1986) using covariance structure analysis (LISREL) across two independent samples: 503 adult congregants from American Lutheran churches in Ohio and 385 undergraduate students from Ohio State University. Hilty and Stockman corroborated five of the six original dimensions. In their factor modeling, the Religious Practice dimension collapsed into the broader ideological/experiential nexus for specific subgroups, while dropping one item from the Social Consequences subscale (abolition of capital punishment) resulted in superior model fit. Goodness-of-fit statistics affirmed that the 5-factor, 32-item revised structure retained high explanatory power, validating the robustness of the core psychological dimensions.

8. Reliability

In the original 1976 publication by DeJong, Faulkner, and Warland, explicit internal consistency estimates (such as Cronbach’s coefficient alpha or Kuder-Richardson formulas) were not reported; the authors relied primarily on item-factor loadings and oblique rotation eigenvalues to substantiate scale homogeneity. This methodological limitation reflected common statistical conventions of early-1970s factor-analytic literature.

Subsequent psychometric investigations, particularly those led by Hilty, Morgan, and Burns (1984), Hilty and Morgan (1985), and Hilty and Stockman (1986), systematically calculated the reliability coefficients of the DeJong et al. subscales. In these subsequent structural investigations:

• Belief Dimension (8 items): Demonstrated high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently exceeding α = .88 to .92 across adult congregational and collegiate samples.
• Religious Knowledge Dimension (10 items): Demonstrated strong internal consistency for an objective factual recognition inventory, yielding Kuder-Richardson 20 (KR-20) and alpha coefficients ranging between .82 and .86.
• Experience Dimension (4 items): Exhibited moderate to high internal consistency, with alpha coefficients typically falling between .78 and .84.
• Individual Moral Consequences (6 items): Demonstrated acceptable internal reliability, ranging between α = .71 and .79, reflecting diverse personal ethical situations.
• Social Consequences (4–5 items): Yielded lower to moderate reliability (α = .64 to .73), reflecting heterogeneous socio-political policy attitudes. Hilty and Stockman (1986) demonstrated that removing the capital punishment item improved subscale internal consistency.
• Religious Practice (5 items): Exhibited acceptable reliability (α = .75 to .83) when applied to traditional congregational cohorts, though displaying reduced variance in highly secularized youth cohorts.

9. Factor Analysis

The statistical reduction of the CCDRS from its preliminary 54-item pool to its final 38-item configuration was executed using exploratory factor analysis with an oblique rotation method. The selection of an oblique rotation was theoretically driven: while Glock and Stark’s dimensions were hypothesized to represent distinct domains, they were not assumed to be completely orthogonal or uncorrelated in actual human populations.

First-Order Factor Solution

The exploratory oblique factor analysis performed by DeJong et al. (1976) isolated six clean first-order factors accounting for the common variance in the 38 retained items:

• Factor I: Belief — Defined by heavy loadings from items assessing orthodox views of immortality, Jesus Christ’s divinity, God’s nature, sin, prayer, and scripture authority. Primary loadings ranged from .55 to .81.
• Factor II: Religious Knowledge — Defined exclusively by the 10 Old Testament, New Testament, and historical identification items, with factor loadings exceeding .60 across both American and German samples.
• Factor III: Individual Moral Consequences — Defined by personal ethical judgments regarding alcohol, marijuana, premarital sex, petty theft, violence, and abortion, with moderate to high positive loadings (.45 to .74).
• Factor IV: Religious Practice — Clustered church attendance, formal membership, financial giving, devotional Bible reading, and auxiliary organization participation (.52 to .79).
• Factor V: Social Consequences — Clustered items endorsing structural social action on housing, poverty, employment, and geriatric welfare (.50 to .76).
• Factor VI: Experience — Captured felt encounters with God, divine peace, and forgiveness (.62 to .80).

Second-Order Factor Solutions and the Unidimensionality Debate

To examine whether the six primary factors resolved into broader meta-dimensions, DeJong et al. subjected the primary factor correlation matrix to a second-order factor analysis. Their analysis extracted three second-order factors:

1. A core factor combining Belief, Experience, and Practice (the traditional core of personal religious devotion).
2. A cognitive/intellectual factor dominated by Religious Knowledge.
3. A secular behavioral/ethical factor uniting Individual Moral Consequences and Social Consequences.

In their covariance structure re-analysis, Hilty and Stockman (1986) tested this second-order structure using confirmatory factor analysis in LISREL. They observed that the second-order structure exhibited instability across different demographic groups. In their adult Lutheran sample, only two second-order factors emerged, whereas in their university student sample, a single second-order factor accounted for the inter-factor correlations. This led Hilty and Stockman to conclude that while a multidimensional structure is clearly demonstrable at the first-order level, an overarching general factor centered heavily on Religious Ideology/Belief exerts a strong common influence across the subscales.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity Scale (CCDRS)
• Alternative Title: DeJong-Faulkner-Warland Religious Involvement Model
• Year of Publication: 1976
• Administration Format: Standardized self-administered pencil-and-paper questionnaire; adaptable to computerized survey engines.
• Total Item Count: 38 items
• Subscale Item Allocation:
  • Belief Dimension: 8 items
  • Experience Dimension: 4 items
  • Religious Practice Dimension: 5 items
  • Individual Moral Consequences Dimension: 6 items
  • Religious Knowledge Dimension: 10 items
  • Social Consequences Dimension: 5 items
• Completion Time: Approximately 15 to 20 minutes.
• Response Formats:
  • Belief Dimension: 5- to 7-point ordered response options expressing increasing levels of traditional theological orthodoxy.
  • Experience Dimension: Item 1 is an ordered 5-point categorical choice; Items 2–4 use a 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly agree, 2 = Agree, 3 = Uncertain, 4 = Disagree, 5 = Strongly disagree).
  • Religious Practice Dimension: Varied response scales including frequency of attendance (5-point), binary church membership (Yes/No), contribution frequency (4-point including church tax option), Bible reading purpose/frequency (7-point), and organizational participation count (0 to 5 or more).
  • Individual Moral Consequences Dimension: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly agree to 5 = Strongly disagree).
  • Religious Knowledge Dimension: 3-category forced-choice identification test (Old Testament, New Testament, Not in Bible).
  • Social Consequences Dimension: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly agree to 5 = Strongly disagree).
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • Subscale scores are derived through the summation of item scores within each dimension.
  • Items marked with an asterisk (*) require reverse scoring prior to summation so that higher aggregate scores uniformly correspond to higher levels of traditional religiosity or higher levels of ethical/social concern.
  • Specifically, reverse scoring applies to: Experience items 2, 3, 4; Practice items 1, 2, 4; and Social Consequences items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
  • Knowledge items are scored dichotomously (1 = Correct, 0 = Incorrect) and summed to create a total knowledge score from 0 to 10.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity Scale was published in 1976 by Gordon F. DeJong, Joseph E. Faulkner, and Rex H. Warland in the academic journal Social Forces (Vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 866–889), published by the University of North Carolina Press. Under standard scholarly provisions, the individual scale items and factor structures published in the journal are accessible for academic, non-commercial research, thesis development, and pedagogical use without royalty fees, provided proper citation is given to the original authors and journal.

Researchers intending to deploy the scale within commercial diagnostic testing platforms, corporate consulting, or proprietary software applications should seek formal licensing clearance through the copyright holder (University of North Carolina Press / Social Forces). No centralized testing agency charges a per-administration fee for the non-commercial deployment of the instrument.

12. References

• Clayton, R. R. (1971). 5-D or 1? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 10(1), 37–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385317
• Clayton, R. R. (1974). The five dimensions of religiosity: Toward demythologizing a sacred artifact. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 13(2), 135–143. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384377
• DeJong, G. F., Faulkner, J. E., & Warland, R. H. (1976). Dimensions of religiosity reconsidered: Evidence from a cross-cultural study. Social Forces, 54(4), 866–889. https://doi.org/10.2307/2576791
• Faulkner, J. E., & DeJong, G. F. (1966). Religiosity in 5-D: An empirical analysis. Social Forces, 45(2), 246–254. https://doi.org/10.2307/2574395
• Glock, C. Y. (1962). On the study of religious commitment. Religious Education, 57(sup4), 98–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/003440862057S407
• Glock, C. Y., & Stark, R. (1966). Christian beliefs and anti-Semitism. Harper & Row.
• Hilty, D. M., & Morgan, R. (1985). Construct validation for the Religious Involvement Inventory: Replication. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 24(1), 75–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386278
• Hilty, D. M., Morgan, R., & Burns, J. E. (1984). King and Hunt revisited: Dimensions of religious involvement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 23(3), 252–266. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386041
• Hilty, D. M., & Stockman, S. J. (1986). A covariance structure analysis of the DeJong, Faulkner and Warland Religious Involvement Model. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 25(4), 483–493. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385854
• Roof, W. C. (1979). Concepts and indicators of religious commitment: A critical review. In R. Wuthnow (Ed.), The religious dimension: New directions in quantitative research (pp. 17–45). Academic Press.
• Thompson, E. H. (1991). Beneath the status characteristic: Gender variations in religiousness. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(4), 381–394. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387275
• Weigert, A. J., & Thomas, D. L. (1969). Religiosity in 5-D: A critical note. Social Forces, 48(2), 260–263. https://doi.org/10.2307/2575487

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)