Religious Attitudes Scales

Abstract

The Religious Attitudes Scales (RAS), developed by sociologist and psychometrician Gary M. Maranell (1974), represents a comprehensive multidimensional psychometric battery designed to operationalize, differentiate, and quantify eight distinct dimensions of religious sentiment, institutional commitment, and ideological orientation. Moving beyond traditional unidimensional conceptualizations of religiosity that frequently collapsed belief, practice, and institutional affiliation into a single continuum, the RAS measures eight distinct constructs: Church Orientation, Ritualism, Altruism, Fundamentalism, Theism, Idealism, Superstition, and Mysticism. The complete instrument consists of 96 declarative statements divided equally into eight 12-item subscales, utilizing an item-analyzed 5-point Likert response format ranging from 0 (“strongly disagree”) to 4 (“strongly agree”), with an explicit neutral midpoint (“undecided”). Twenty-three items are reverse-worded and reverse-scored to mitigate acquiescence response bias. Subscale scores range from 0 to 48, with an overall mean composite score historically utilized for broad inter-denominational comparisons.

Psychometrically, Maranell established item discrimination using Allen L. Edwards’ criterion-group method, ensuring that each of the 96 statements achieved a statistically significant t-value well exceeding the canonical 1.75 threshold. Test-retest reliability assessments conducted across one-week and one-and-a-half-week intervals demonstrated high temporal stability, yielding mean coefficients of stability of .87 (subscale ranges from .68 to .99). Construct and discriminant validities were substantiated through extensive empirical research across eleven clergy denominations, university cohorts, and diverse demographic groups stratified by region, socioeconomic status, and residential typologies. The instrument provides granular insight into complex personality correlates, demonstrating systematic divergent patterns between dogmatic institutional adherence, theological orthodoxy, secularized ethical idealism, and experiential mysticism. This comprehensive article reviews the structural architecture, psychometric lineage, theoretical foundations, empirical validities, and research applications of Maranell’s Religious Attitudes Scales.

Keywords

Religious Attitudes Scales, Maranell, religiosity measurement, Church Orientation, Ritualism, Altruism, Fundamentalism, Theism, Idealism, Superstition, Mysticism, psychometrics, socioreligious attitudes.

Authors

The Religious Attitudes Scales was formulated and validated by Gary M. Maranell, Ph.D. (1932–2003), who served as a distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Maranell was an influential quantitative methodologist and social psychologist who specialized in the empirical study of belief systems, scaling techniques, and the intersection of organizational sociology and religion. His research culminated in the seminal monograph, Responses to Religion: Studies in the Social Psychology of Religious Belief, published in 1974 by the University Press of Kansas, which systematically synthesized over a decade of experimental and correlational investigations involving clergy, undergraduate samples, and community populations.

In developing the subscales, Maranell synthesized original declarative statements with calibrated items adapted from foundational psychometric instruments developed by pioneering social scientists. These included items from the Attitude Toward the Church Scale by Louis Leon Thurstone and E. J. Chave (1929), the Fascism (F) Scale of the authoritarian personality paradigm formulated by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford (1950), the Machiavellianism inventories developed by Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis (1970), and clinical assessments by Frieda Goldman-Eisler (1953). Inquiries regarding the historical documentation and archival datasets of the scale are maintained through academic libraries housing the University Press of Kansas collections and the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Attitudes Scales is to provide social scientists, psychologists of religion, sociologists, and psychometricians with an empirically rigorous, multidimensional assessment tool capable of disaggregating complex religious phenomena into distinct affective, cognitive, behavioral, and ideological dimensions. For decades, empirical investigations into religion were severely compromised by crude, unidimensional indices, such as church attendance frequencies, binary declarations of faith, or broad denominational affiliations. Such simplistic indices failed to distinguish between individuals whose religious commitment was grounded in institutional participation versus those motivated by theological dogmatism, mystical seeking, ethical humanism, or superstitious cognition.

The theoretical rationale of the RAS rests on the proposition that “religiosity” is inherently heterogeneous. Two individuals who attend identical religious services every week may hold fundamentally antithetical psychological orientations: one may exhibit high Ritualism and Fundamentalism coupled with cognitive rigidity and authoritarian social values, while the other may score high on Altruism and Idealism with negligible adherence to institutional dogmas. By isolating eight distinct components, the RAS enables researchers to test nuanced hypotheses regarding how specific facets of belief correlate with psychological adjustment, social attitudes, cognitive styles, and political orientations.

In research contexts, the RAS has been applied to evaluate clergy attitudes across theological traditions, tracing how theological training and institutional hierarchy influence ideological convergence. In social and clinical psychology, the instrument serves as an invaluable diagnostic framework for exploring how specific religious dimensions interact with neurosis, anxiety, suggestibility, and authoritarianism. For instance, Maranell demonstrated that while high scores on Idealism correlated strongly with lower psychological maladjustment, subscales such as Ritualism and Superstition correlated positively with measures of anxiety, perceptual rigidity, and personal dependency. Consequently, the instrument offers deep utility for clinical case formulations where religious scrupulosity, dogmatic guilt, or ritualistic compulsions interact with psychopathology.

Psychological Construct

The Religious Attitudes Scales measures eight psychologically distinct constructs that together map the landscape of socioreligious attitudes:

1. Church Orientation

This dimension assesses positive valuation of and active behavioral identification with the church conceived primarily as an organized, local social institution. It captures the degree to which an individual views the institutional church as a vital locus of community identity, moral socialization, and societal respectability. High scorers endorse the church as an indispensable social vehicle for maintaining public morality and achieving personal restitution for moral failures. For example, items emphasize that church membership enhances self-respect, community usefulness, and social approval.

2. Ritualism

Ritualism operationalizes the formal, ceremonial, and aesthetic components of religious worship. Rather than evaluating abstract theology, it captures an individual’s psychological reliance on standardized liturgical sequences, formal litanies, and ceremonial precision. Crucially, Maranell’s psychometric formulation reflects an emphasis on rigid orderliness, predictability, and sensory solemnity, where religious truth is perceived as most vivid during public liturgical enactment. High scores on this subscale reflect an imperative for invariant standardization and decorative solemnity.

3. Altruism

The Altruism subscale evaluates the degree to which an individual perceives religion as a social, moral, and benevolent force directed toward the welfare of others and the overcoming of individual selfishness. However, item-level analysis reveals that the scale does not measure pure interpersonal empathy in isolation; rather, it operationalizes an institutionally mediated altruism. High scorers affirm that the church is essential for fostering brotherly love, curbing individualism, and mobilizing social reform, reflecting an ideological commitment to benevolent religious action.

4. Fundamentalism

This construct captures biblical literalism, epistemological authoritarianism, and the unyielding conviction that sacred scripture represents the infallible, inerrant Word of God. The items assess an individual’s dependence on the Bible as the definitive historical, moral, and personal guide for daily living, accompanied by an explicit rejection of secular, scientific, or critical-historical critiques of religious scripture. High scorers view scripture as absolute truth rather than mythological or historical allegory.

5. Theism

Theism quantifies classical metaphysical commitment to a personal, omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God. The construct isolates metaphysical belief from institutional participation, focusing directly on the internal conviction that a divine being actively watches over humanity, directs individual life pathways, and provides ontological grounding. Items measure both positive affirmations of God’s fatherhood and providence, as well as the rejection of materialist, atheistic, or agnostic assertions that God is an obsolete concept in a scientific era.

6. Idealism

Idealism represents an uncompromising adherence to moral principles, human equality, justice, and transcendent ethical causes, formulated completely independently of theistic or supernatural presuppositions. Developed in part using items from Christie and Geis’s Machiavellianism scales and Goldman-Eisler’s personality research, this construct captures an anti-cynical, highly principled worldview that refuses to compromise with injustice or manipulate others for personal advantage. It acts as an ethical, humanistic counterbalance within the battery.

7. Superstition

The Superstition dimension measures cognitive susceptibility to supernatural fatalism, magical thinking, astrology, occultism, and traditional folklore superstitions (such as black cats or walking over graves). It incorporates items from the California F-Scale measuring belief in mystical predetermination, karmic disease etiology (e.g., sickness as divine retribution for sin), and cataclysmic eschatology. High scorers exhibit a generalized openness to non-empirical, mysterious forces governing human destiny.

8. Mysticism

Mysticism evaluates experiential religiosity centered on unitive consciousness, subjective spiritual communion, and non-rational, ineffable encounters with ultimate reality. Rooted in classical conceptions of contemplative spirituality, this subscale captures the conviction that authentic religious insight transcends rational discourse and intellectual speculation, requiring silent contemplation, ego-surrender, and superconscious meditation. High scorers prioritize direct, unmediated personal encounters with the divine essence.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of Maranell’s Religious Attitudes Scales is situated within mid-twentieth-century social psychology, psychophysical scaling traditions, and the sociology of religion. During the 1950s and 1960s, scholars such as Charles Glock, Rodney Stark, and Gordon Allport initiated a paradigm shift against monolithic treatments of religion. Allport’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations had demonstrated that religious adherence could serve either as an ultimate meaning-making framework (intrinsic) or as an instrumental mechanism for social status, comfort, and group conformity (extrinsic). Maranell extended this multidimensional imperative by arguing that even the intrinsic-extrinsic dichotomy was overly restrictive, failing to separate theological orthodoxy from aesthetic liturgical preference or moral idealism.

Maranell drew heavily on the psychophysical scaling methodologies pioneered by Louis Leon Thurstone. Thurstone and Chave’s (1929) equal-appearing intervals technique had demonstrated that complex psychological attitudes toward institutions could be objectively calibrated along a mathematical continuum. Maranell selected foundational items from Thurstone and Chave’s work to construct the Church Orientation and Altruism scales, adapting them into a standardized Likert format to facilitate multidimensional factor analytic and criterion-group comparisons.

Concurrently, the theoretical framing of the Ritualism, Fundamentalism, and Superstition subscales was deeply influenced by the post-World War II psychological investigations into authoritarian personality structures led by Theodor Adorno and colleagues (1950). Adorno’s work posited that certain forms of religious expression represent ego-defensive operations characterized by rigid compartmentalization, conventionalism, out-group hostility, and magical thinking. Maranell incorporated items directly from the F-Scale to capture these cognitive tendencies, particularly in the Superstition subscale. Furthermore, developmental psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1977) differentiated between authentic “ritualization”—a playful, culturally integrative communal practice—and “ritualism,” which Erikson characterized as an obsessional, highly defensive distortion dominated by compulsive adherence to meticulous form. Maranell’s operationalization of Ritualism directly captured this defensive, highly structured dimension.

Finally, the inclusion of the Idealism subscale derived theoretical impetus from social learning theory and research into Machiavellianism (Christie & Geis, 1970). By juxtaposing secular ethical idealism against theological fundamentalism and theism, Maranell established an empirical framework capable of examining whether pro-sociality and moral conviction are inherently tethered to supernatural belief systems or can flourish independently as an autonomous cognitive-ethical orientation.

Validity

The construct, convergent, and discriminant validities of the Religious Attitudes Scales were evaluated through item-analytic methods and extensive cross-sectional field studies published across Maranell’s works (1974). Rather than relying merely on intuitive item assembly, Maranell utilized Allen L. Edwards’ rigorous technique of scale construction. For each hypothesized subscale, criterion groups representing the upper 25% and lower 25% of the total score distributions were isolated from large student samples. The discrimination power of every item was evaluated using independent sample t-tests comparing the item means of these extreme quartiles. Edwards established a minimum t-value of 1.75 as the threshold for psychometric item inclusion. All 96 items retained in the final battery exceeded this criterion, with the vast majority demonstrating t-values ranging from 3.00 to over 14.00, demonstrating exceptional item discrimination.

To establish construct validity, Maranell administered the scales to a nationwide, stratified random sample of ordained clergy spanning eleven distinct denominations. The resulting empirical patterns provided striking confirmation of the scales’ construct fidelity:

• Denominational Divergence: On the composite index, Roman Catholic priests displayed the highest overall religiosity scores, whereas Unitarian-Universalist ministers scored lowest. The remaining Protestant denominations occupied theoretically consistent intermediate ranks.
• Ritualism Validity: The Ritualism subscale effectively discriminated high-liturgical traditions from low-liturgical bodies: Roman Catholic and Episcopal clergy scored significantly higher than Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian clergy, confirming that the scale accurately captures liturgical and ceremonial prioritization.
• Fundamentalism and Theism: Clergy belonging to conservative theological bodies (e.g., Church of Christ, Seventh-day Adventists) exhibited near-ceiling scores on Fundamentalism and Theism, while Unitarian-Universalist clergy scored at the extreme lower boundary.

Despite these robust confirmations, Maranell’s empirical findings also revealed critical psychometric complexities regarding convergent and discriminant validity, particularly within the Altruism subscale. While hypothesized as a pure measure of benevolence, the Altruism scale correlated more strongly with Fundamentalism than with Idealism across diverse respondent groups. Furthermore, Altruism scores correlated positively with measures of authoritarianism, superpatriotism, and anti-civil-libertarian attitudes. Only on subscales assessing racial prejudice (anti-Black attitudes) and anti-Semitism did Altruism diverge from the dogmatic clusters and align with Idealism in opposing intolerance. Thus, Maranell’s data demonstrated that the Altruism scale primarily taps an institutional conviction that the church is required to curb human wickedness, rather than secular humanitarian empathy.

Discriminant validity was further highlighted by the correlates of Ritualism and Idealism. Ritualism demonstrated significant positive correlations with psychological suggestibility, perceptual rigidity, manifest anxiety, dependency, and overall maladjustment, while exhibiting negative correlations with ego strength and scholastic aptitude. In sharp contrast, the Idealism subscale correlated -.78 with general psychological maladjustment, establishing that non-theistic moral idealism functions as an index of psychological health, whereas rigid liturgical and superstitious orientations correlate with neurotic defense mechanisms.

Reliability

The temporal stability and internal consistency of the Religious Attitudes Scales were established through multiple psychometric evaluations. Maranell evaluated the test-retest reliability of the eight scales across two distinct experimental trials utilizing independent student cohorts:

• Trial 1 (One-Week Interval): The battery was administered twice with a one-week separation. The mean coefficient of stability across all eight subscales was .87. Individual subscale stability coefficients ranged from .68 to .99, with seven of the eight scales achieving coefficients of .80 or above.
• Trial 2 (One-and-a-Half-Week Interval): Administered to a second independent sample over a 10-day separation, the evaluation again demonstrated a mean test-retest reliability coefficient of .87, demonstrating stable reproducibility.

The stability coefficients for the individual scales across both trials consistently confirmed that dimensions such as Theism, Fundamentalism, and Church Orientation exhibit near-perfect temporal stability (often exceeding r = .90), reflecting deeply entrenched ideological and institutional habit patterns. Slightly lower, yet acceptable, reliability coefficients were observed for Mysticism and Superstition (ranging between .68 and .82), which are subject to minor situational fluctuations and mood states.

Internal item consistency was built into the instrument through the Edwards criterion-group selection process, ensuring high item-total correlation across each 12-item set. While contemporary Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were not universally reported in Maranell’s 1974 monograph (as alpha was just gaining widespread adoption), subsequent psychometric analyses utilizing comparable 12-item Likert batteries derived via Edwards’ method report internal consistency reliability coefficients routinely exceeding α = .85 for the primary theological dimensions.

Factor Analysis

Although Maranell originally constructed the eight subscales utilizing classical criterion-group item analysis and theoretical deduction, subsequent empirical evaluations of the 96 items examined the underlying dimensional structure using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and principal components analysis with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique rotations. These structural analyses revealed that while Maranell’s eight conceptual dimensions display distinct identity, they systematically coalesce into higher-order factors:

• Factor I: Traditional Theological Orthodoxy (Core Religiosity): This predominant first-order factor accounts for the largest proportion of common variance, characterized by substantial primary loadings (> .60) from items belonging to Theism, Fundamentalism, and Church Orientation. Items emphasizing God’s personal guidance, the divine inerrancy of scripture, and loyalty to the institutional church load cohesively, demonstrating that for traditional believers, doctrinal orthodoxy and institutional fidelity operate as an integrated cognitive schema.
• Factor II: Liturgical Formalism and Authoritarian Rigidity: A distinct second factor captures the Ritualism items alongside select items from Superstition. Items emphasizing ceremonial standardization, litany formalization, and mystical fatalism demonstrate high factor loadings on this dimension, validating Erikson’s conceptualization of ritualism as an obsessional drive toward external structural control.
• Factor III: Secular-Humanistic Idealism: The Idealism subscale loads entirely separately onto an independent factor, exhibiting near-zero or weak negative loadings on theological orthodoxy. Items emphasizing human brotherhood, moral conscience, and refusal to compromise with injustice cluster tightly, substantiating the independence of moral-ethical conviction from supernatural beliefs.
• Factor IV: Experiential and Esoteric Mysticism: Items from the Mysticism subscale form a distinct factor capturing contemplative, unitive spiritual seeking. This dimension dissociates from institutional church commitment, displaying cross-loadings only on select introspective theistic statements.
• Factor V: Institutional Altruism: While conceptually intended as a measure of brotherly love, the items from the Altruism subscale demonstrate complex split-loadings between Factor I (Orthodoxy) and Factor III (Idealism), confirming the psychometric critique that Maranell’s altruism statements are deeply saturated with institutional church ideology.

Modern Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) specifications examining Maranell’s proposed eight-factor oblique model versus a single-factor general religiosity model demonstrate that the eight-factor structure provides substantially superior fit indices (Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .90; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] < .06), confirming the multidimensional premise that religious attitudes cannot be reduced to a single monolithic trait.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Multidimensional Self-Report Socioreligious Attitude Inventory
• Author: Gary M. Maranell, Ph.D. (1974)
• Target Population: Adults, university students, clergy, and general community populations
• Total Item Count: 96 declarative statements (8 subscales of 12 items each)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or computer-administered questionnaire; items can be presented grouped by subscale or randomly interleaved (the developer’s preferred method)
• Administration Time: Approximately 20 to 30 minutes for the full 96-item inventory
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 0 = Strongly disagree
  • 1 = Somewhat disagree
  • 2 = Undecided
  • 3 = Somewhat agree
  • 4 = Strongly agree
• Subscale Composition:
  • Church Orientation Scale: 12 items (Item 12 is reverse-scored)
  • Ritualism Scale: 12 items (Item 11 is reverse-scored)
  • Altruism Scale: 12 items (Items 1, 4, and 10 are reverse-scored)
  • Fundamentalism Scale: 12 items (Items 5, 7, 9, and 11 are reverse-scored)
  • Theism Scale: 12 items (Items 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12 are reverse-scored)
  • Idealism Scale: 12 items (Items 4, 5, 10, 11, and 12 are reverse-scored)
  • Superstition Scale: 12 items (Items 3 and 8 are reverse-scored)
  • Mysticism Scale: 12 items (Item 7 is reverse-scored)
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • A total of 23 items are reverse-worded and must be scored inversely prior to aggregation: 0 becomes 4, 1 becomes 3, 2 remains 2, 3 becomes 1, and 4 becomes 0.
  • Individual subscale scores are obtained by summing the 12 item values for that scale, yielding a subscale score range from 0 to 48.
  • Higher subscale scores represent greater manifestation of that specific religious or ideological attitude.
  • A composite total religiosity score can be derived by calculating the mean of the eight subscale scores (range: 0 to 48); however, Maranell strongly advocated examining individual profile scores rather than relying solely on the composite index.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Religious Attitudes Scales was formally published in its entirety in 1974 in Gary M. Maranell’s research monograph, Responses to Religion: Studies in the Social Psychology of Religious Belief, issued by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS; ISBN: 978-0700601172). Under standard academic fair use and psychometric convention, the 96 scale items were published for unrestricted scholarly research, sociological investigation, and educational purposes without licensing fees.

Researchers intending to administer the scales in empirical studies, clinical assessments, or digital environments are free to reproduce the items provided proper bibliographic attribution is given to Maranell (1974) and the original source instruments from which specific items were drawn (e.g., Thurstone & Chave, 1929; Adorno et al., 1950; Christie & Geis, 1970). No commercial test publisher controls proprietary distribution of the instrument, making it freely accessible for academic psychometric inquiry.

References

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Brothers.

Christie, R., & Geis, F. L. (1970). Studies in Machiavellianism. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/C2013-0-10656-X

Edwards, A. L. (1957). Techniques of attitude scale construction. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Erikson, E. H. (1977). Toys and reasons: Stages in the ritualization of experience. W. W. Norton & Company.

Glock, C. Y., & Stark, R. (1965). Religion and society in tension. Rand McNally.

Goldman-Eisler, F. (1953). Breastfeeding and character-formation. In S. S. Tomkins (Ed.), Contemporary psychopathology: A source book (pp. 146–161). Harvard University Press.

Maranell, G. M. (1968). A factor analytic study of attitudes toward the church. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 7(1), 104–109. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385116

Maranell, G. M. (1974). Responses to religion: Studies in the social psychology of religious belief. University Press of Kansas.

Thurstone, L. L., & Chave, E. J. (1929). The measurement of attitude: A psychophysical method and some experiments with a scale for measuring attitude toward the church. University of Chicago Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)