Abstract
The Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale (DRIS) is a classical multidimensional psychometric instrument formulated by sociologists Snell Putney and Russell Middleton in 1961. Designed to dissect individual religious orientation beyond monolithic conceptions of piety, the DRIS delineates four distinct cognitive and motivational facets of religious ideology: Orthodoxy (doctrinal adherence to traditional theological tenets, including the afterlife, the devil, and divine teleology), Fanaticism (the zealous drive to proselytize, convert, and impose religious viewpoints on others), Importance (the central salience and subjective relevance of religious philosophy in guiding daily life and personal identity), and Ambivalence (the conscious awareness of holding contradictory, torn, or conflicting internal attitudes regarding religious faith). The complete instrument comprises 19 self-report items—six items each for the Orthodoxy, Fanaticism, and Importance subscales, and a single marker item capturing subjective Ambivalence—evaluated on a 7-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), with a theoretical neutral point at 4 (no response / neutral).
Psychometrically, the DRIS has served as a foundational template in the sociology and psychology of religion, establishing empirical distinctions between doctrinal belief, behavioral proselytism, and psychological salience. Empirical investigations, such as those conducted by Putney and Middleton (1961), Cygnar, Jacobson, and Noel (1977), and Seyfarth et al. (1984), indicate meaningful intercorrelations among the primary positive dimensions, alongside negative associations with ambivalence. Reliability estimates across diverse cohorts demonstrate modest to high internal consistency, with split-half coefficients reaching .77 on targeted subscales. The instrument remains an influential structural model for measuring ideological religious commitment, sectarian evangelism, and internal ideological conflict across adolescent, collegiate, and adult populations.
Keywords
Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale, DRIS, religious orthodoxy, religious fanaticism, religious salience, religious ambivalence, religious proselytism, psychometrics, sociology of religion, ideological commitment
Authors
The Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale was developed by Snell Putney and Russell Middleton. At the time of the instrument’s initial development and empirical publication in 1961, both authors were affiliated with the Department of Sociology at the Florida State University and San Jose State College, contributing extensively to sociological inquiry into social stratification, conformity, ideological deviation, and religious behavior.
Snell Putney, Ph.D., was an influential American sociologist whose work focused on social psychology, alienation, and cultural dynamics, authoring seminal texts including The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society. Russell Middleton, Ph.D., served as a prominent professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, publishing landmark studies on racial prejudice, political ideology, social inequality, and institutional religiosity across major journals including the American Sociological Review and Social Forces.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale is to provide an empirical, multidimensional assessment of religious belief systems, overcoming the psychometric limitations of treating religious commitment as a single, undifferentiated continuum. Historically, sociological and psychological surveys evaluated religiosity primarily through external institutional behaviors, such as church attendance, financial giving, or denominational affiliation. Putney and Middleton designed the DRIS to capture the complex, internal cognitive organization of religious ideology, isolating specific ideological stances from the subjective importance that an individual assigns to those beliefs.
In empirical research, the DRIS enables investigators to untangle conflicting sociological phenomena. For instance, individuals may adhere rigidly to dogmatic doctrines (high Orthodoxy) without necessarily experiencing a burning compulsion to reform the beliefs of others (low Fanaticism). Conversely, individuals may experience intense religious zealotry fueled by social identity without demonstrating rigorous alignment with standard theological canons. By separating Orthodoxy, Fanaticism, Importance, and Ambivalence, the scale equips researchers to examine how specific facets of religious cognitive systems interact with diverse psychological and sociological variables, including authoritarianism, social distance, ethnic prejudice, political radicalism, and pro-social helping behavior.
In clinical and counseling psychology, the DRIS offers utility for exploring religious distress, cognitive dissonance, and spiritual struggles. The isolated Ambivalence dimension specifically captures the psychological strain experienced when individuals recognize internal contradictions between faith and skepticism. Furthermore, the Fanaticism and Importance dimensions offer diagnostic clarity when evaluating the degree to which ideological belief structures may impair interpersonal functioning or generate conflict within pluralistic family and community environments.
Psychological Construct
The Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale operationalizes religiosity as a multifaceted cognitive-affective system. Rather than classifying individuals simply as “religious” or “non-religious,” the scale conceptualizes religious ideology across four distinct psychological domains:
1. Orthodoxy
The Orthodoxy dimension assesses the degree of an individual’s intellectual acceptance of traditional, supernatural theological tenets common to Western monotheistic traditions, particularly Christianity. This construct measures belief in an afterlife, the reality of a literal physical hell, the existence of a personified malevolent entity (the devil), divine teleology (the belief that every living thing and person has a divine purpose), and the efficacy of prayer beyond mere psychological coping. Items tap doctrinal literalism without invoking specific sectarian names (e.g., Jesus Christ or the Trinity), allowing the subscale to assess adherence to a supernatural worldview characterized by cosmic reward, retribution, and transcendent divine intervention.
2. Fanaticism
The Fanaticism dimension gauges ideological intolerance, sectarian dogmatism, and the perceived moral duty to intervene in the belief systems of other people. In psychological terms, fanaticism represents the externalization and behavioral militancy of an ideology. High scorers maintain that world problems are directly exacerbated by erroneous religious perspectives, reject ideological relativism (the notion that any belief is acceptable as long as it brings personal happiness), and believe they possess an absolute moral imperative to convert, enlighten, or correct others, even when doing so provokes social friction. This construct serves as an early operationalization of religious fundamentalism and intrusive evangelism.
3. Importance (Religious Salience)
The Importance dimension reflects the subjective salience, psychological centrality, and identity-defining weight of religious ideas within an individual’s overall cognitive architecture. Rooted in self-concept theory, this construct measures the degree to which religion functions as the master organizing principle of the individual’s philosophy of life, moral compass, and self-definition. A respondent scoring high in Importance considers religion to be omnipresent in their conscious thought, exerting a decisive influence across non-religious life domains, including occupational choices, political views, and interpersonal ethics.
4. Ambivalence
The Ambivalence dimension captures the meta-cognitive awareness of internal ideological conflict, hesitation, and cognitive dissonance regarding religious belief. Operationalized through an explicit self-acknowledgment of simultaneously harboring both belief and disbelief, this construct reflects the psychological tension inherent in navigating existential doubt. It provides a direct index of an individual’s recognition of internal contradiction, serving as a critical moderating variable between ideological adherence and psychological well-being.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical foundations of the Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale are rooted in the mid-twentieth-century transition from unidimensional to multidimensional models of religious commitment. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, sociologists of religion recognized that global indices of religiosity obscured profound qualitative differences in how individuals organize faith. The DRIS emerged concurrently with the multidimensional theoretical models proposed by Charles Glock (1962), who conceptualized religiosity into ideological, ritualistic, experiential, intellectual, and consequential dimensions.
Putney and Middleton anchored their instrument within cognitive consistency and cognitive dissonance theory, prominently advanced by Leon Festinger. Festinger postulated that holding conflicting cognitions generates psychological discomfort, driving individuals to implement dissonance-reduction strategies—such as dogmatic reaffirmation, social proselytizing, or compartmentalization. The DRIS operationalized this tension by positing that high ideological salience coupled with doctrinal orthodoxy could either suppress perceived ambivalence or channel cognitive dissonance into missionary zeal (fanaticism), as converting others validates one’s own contested cognitive schema.
Additionally, the scale intersects with Gordon Allport’s emerging distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations. While Allport’s intrinsic orientation emphasized living one’s religion as a master motive and extrinsic orientation emphasized using religion for social status, Putney and Middleton demonstrated that ideological orthodoxy and ideological salience (importance) could operate independently of fanaticism. By providing distinct metrics for cognitive content (Orthodoxy), behavioral intensity (Fanaticism), subjective integration (Importance), and subjective tension (Ambivalence), the DRIS provided a rigorous empirical architecture that bridged sociological survey methodology with psychological theories of ideological dogmatism and identity formation.
Validity
Construct, convergent, and discriminant validity for the Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale have been documented across numerous sociodemographic and empirical psychometric investigations since its inception.
Construct and Internal Intercorrelations
In the original validation study by Putney and Middleton (1961), the instrument was administered to a cross-regional sample of 1,200 university students across the southeastern and northeastern United States. After excluding non-Christian respondents to maintain ideological homogeneity, analyses of the remaining 1,126 participants revealed robust structural relationships using Yule’s Q as a non-parametric measure of association. The findings demonstrated that Orthodoxy, Fanaticism, and Importance were strongly and positively intercorrelated, forming a coherent ideological triad. Conversely, Ambivalence correlated negatively with all three positive dimensions, confirming the theoretical proposition that individuals with highly integrated doctrinal beliefs and ideological salience experience lower conscious ambiguity regarding their faith.
Convergent and Criterion Validity
The convergent validity of the DRIS was systematically evaluated by Cygnar, Jacobson, and Noel (1977) within an adolescent sample of Catholic high school students. The authors correlated the DRIS dimensions with the established five-dimensional religiosity scales developed by Faulkner and DeJong (1966), which encompass ritual, ideology, knowledge, experience, and consequence dimensions. The DRIS subscales demonstrated moderate to strong positive correlations with the Faulkner and DeJong ritual, ideology, intellectual, and experiential scales, with correlation coefficients ranging between r = .32 and r = .52 (p < .001). This confirmed that the DRIS effectively measures central features of institutional and personal religiosity.
Importantly, the DRIS demonstrated strong discriminant validity against Faulkner and DeJong’s Consequence Scale, which measures the secular ethical outcomes of faith in daily decisions. Correlations between the DRIS scales and the Consequence Scale were consistently negligible to low (ranging from r = .04 to .16), confirming that the DRIS isolates cognitive and ideological orientation rather than general ethical behavior.
Predictive Validity and Attitudinal Correlates
In a targeted psychometric investigation by Seyfarth et al. (1984), the Fanaticism subscale was examined in relation to active proselytizing attitudes among 124 undergraduate students. The researchers compared the DRIS Fanaticism scale against an independently constructed Attitude Toward Evangelism Scale (measuring affinity for listening to evangelists, defending conversion efforts, and rejecting privacy infringements caused by religious solicitation). The Fanaticism subscale demonstrated a criterion validity coefficient of r = .76 (p < .001), indicating remarkable predictive power regarding public evangelical orientation.
Further empirical applications, including studies by Benson et al. (1980) on spontaneous and non-spontaneous altruistic behavior, and Pargament et al. (1990) on religious coping mechanisms during negative life events, have validated the DRIS as a robust predictor of personal coping, social distance, and interpersonal altruism.
Reliability
Empirical evaluations of the reliability of the Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale reflect both the historical era of its construction—utilizing classical Likert item-selection procedures emphasizing discriminatory power—and subsequent psychometric reassessments across diverse populations.
In the psychometric study reported by Cygnar, Jacobson, and Noel (1977), the internal consistency of the multi-item subscales was evaluated among a sample of Catholic adolescents. Following exploratory factor analyses to ensure unidimensionality within subscale structures, factor scores yielded internal consistency coefficients of:
- Orthodoxy Scale: Reliability coefficient = .50
- Fanaticism Scale: Reliability coefficient = .49
- Importance Scale: Reliability coefficient = .60
While these coefficients are modest by contemporary psychometric standards (which typically favor Cronbach’s alpha ≥ .70), they must be interpreted in light of the concise six-item length of each subscale, sample homogeneity, and the factor-scoring methodology applied by Cygnar et al. When evaluated under split-half reliability procedures in more ideologically diverse cohorts, the scales demonstrate substantially higher consistency. Specifically, Seyfarth et al. (1984) evaluated the 6-item Fanaticism Scale among 124 university students (mean age = 20.7 years; 55% male) and obtained a Spearman-Brown split-half reliability coefficient of r = .77, indicating acceptable internal consistency for short attitudinal measures.
The single-item Ambivalence Scale cannot be evaluated via standard internal consistency measures (such as alpha or split-half formulas) due to its single-indicator format. Its reliability rests upon single-item test-retest stability and face validity, representing a limitation typical of mid-century sociological single-item markers.
Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the DRIS has been examined through classical exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to determine whether the 19 items resolve into the four theoretically postulated constructs. Early psychometric procedures used by Putney and Middleton relied on classical Likert item-analysis to maximize inter-item correlation within scales and discriminatory power across contrasting ideological groups.
Subsequent factorial examinations, notably by Cygnar, Jacobson, and Noel (1977), subjected the items of the Orthodoxy, Fanaticism, and Importance subscales to principal component analyses. Their findings supported distinct first-factor saturation for each subscale, confirming that the items within each domain clustered along their hypothesized theoretical axes:
- Orthodoxy: Items assessing traditional supernaturalism (the devil, hell, soul salvation, life after death, divine teleology) loaded strongly onto a primary general orthodoxy factor, with factor loadings ranging from .48 to .76. The negatively phrased item regarding the purely psychological benefit of prayer exhibited slightly lower loadings but maintained adequate structural coherence.
- Fanaticism: Items emphasizing conversion duties, global religious correction, and intolerance of alternative beliefs loaded onto an evangelical zeal factor (.45 to .72), while reverse-scored items emphasizing cognitive tolerance (“there is no point in arguing,” “it doesn’t matter what an individual believes”) loaded inversely on the same dimension.
- Importance: Items measuring subjective cognitive salience and behavioral guidance demonstrated high loadings (.52 to .81) on an ideological centrality dimension, clearly separating self-identity relevance from dogmatic content.
Later investigations within the multidimensional religiosity literature confirmed that while Orthodoxy, Fanaticism, and Importance share common variance reflecting a higher-order general religious commitment factor, a three-factor oblique model (or four-factor model when including Ambivalence) consistently provides superior empirical fit over a single general factor model. Contemporary structural equation modeling (CFA) standards suggest that the scale’s construct validity is maximized when subscales are modeled as correlated first-order latent variables rather than collapsed into an omnibus aggregate score.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Instrument Name: Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale (DRIS)
- Authors: Snell Putney & Russell Middleton (1961)
- Target Population: Adolescents, college students, and adult populations within monotheistic or culturally Western religious backgrounds
- Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire; paper-and-pencil or digital administration; individual or group format
- Total Number of Items: 19 items
- Orthodoxy Subscale: 6 items (Items 1–6)
- Fanaticism Subscale: 6 items (Items 7–12)
- Importance Subscale: 6 items (Items 13–18)
- Ambivalence Subscale: 1 item (Item 19)
- Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale scored as follows:
- 7 = Strongly agree
- 6 = Moderately agree
- 5 = Slightly agree
- 4 = No response / Neutral
- 3 = Slightly disagree
- 2 = Moderately disagree
- 1 = Strongly disagree
- Scoring and Directionality:
- Negatively keyed items must be reversed prior to computation (i.e., 7 becomes 1, 6 becomes 2, 5 becomes 3, 4 remains 4, 3 becomes 5, 2 becomes 6, and 1 becomes 7).
- Reversed Items: Orthodoxy Item 6; Fanaticism Items 9 and 10; Importance Item 17.
- Individual subscale scores are computed by summing the responses of the items constituting each scale. For the 6-item subscales, total raw scores range from 6 to 42. Higher scores indicate greater orthodoxy, fanaticism, and subjective importance.
- The single-item Ambivalence scale yields a direct score from 1 to 7.
- Categorization / Classification: In empirical studies, Putney and Middleton categorized participants into “High” versus “Low” groups using theoretical midpoint splits. For 6-item scales with ranges from 6 to 42, a score of 24 served as the theoretical cutoff point; scores > 24 indicated high ideological endorsement, whereas scores ≤ 24 indicated low endorsement. Modern psychometric research recommends utilizing continuous scores in parametric statistical models.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Dimensions of Religious Ideology Scale was originally published in 1961 in the peer-reviewed sociological journal Social Forces (University of North Carolina Press). Under standard academic fair-use doctrines and historical copyright conventions for classic scholarly instruments published prior to 1964 without independent copyright renewal, the instrument is widely accessible for academic, clinical, and non-commercial educational research purposes without licensing fees.
Researchers intending to administer the scale in formal investigations or commercial settings should properly cite the foundational manuscript by Putney and Middleton (1961) and verify any institutional or publisher copyright requirements. No specialized psychometric certification or fee is required to administer or score the DRIS.
References
Benson, P. L., Dehority, J., Garman, L., Hanson, E., Hochschwender, M., Lebold, C., Rohr, R., & Sullivan, J. (1980). Intrapersonal correlates of nonspontaneous helping behavior. The Journal of Social Psychology, 110(1), 87–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1980.9924225
Cygnar, T. E., Jacobson, C. K., & Noel, D. L. (1977). Religiosity and prejudice: An interdimensional analysis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 16(2), 183–191. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385748
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(S-4), 98–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/003440862057S407
Pargament, K. I., Ensing, D. S., Falgout, K., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Van Haitsma, K., & Warren, R. (1990). God help me: (I): Religious coping efforts as predictors of the outcomes to significant negative life events. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18(6), 793–824. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00938065
Putney, S., & Middleton, R. (1961). Dimensions and correlates of religious ideologies. Social Forces, 39(4), 285–290. https://doi.org/10.2307/2573424
Seyfarth, L. H., Larsen, K. S., Lamont, K., Haasch, C., Hale, T., & Haskin, D. (1984). Attitude toward evangelism: Scale development and validity. The Journal of Social Psychology, 123(1), 55–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1984.9924515