Religious Expression Scale

1. Abstract

The Religious Expression Scale (RES) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument formulated by Donald M. Boan (1978) to evaluate individual differences in the phenomenological modalities of religious expression within an evangelical Christian framework. Building directly upon the seminal distinctions introduced by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)—specifically the dialectic between doctrinal/intellectual modes and intuitive/experiential manifestations—the RES operationalizes cognitive-doctrinal versus affective-mystical approaches to personal faith. Theorists have subsequently conceptualized these stylistic variations in relation to dual-process models of human cognition and hemispheric lateralization hypotheses within the neuroscience of religion (Ash et al., 1996).

The complete instrument is composed of two primary sections: Part 1 comprises 59 Likert-scale self-report statements rated on a 6-point continuum ranging from 1 (“disagree strongly”) to 6 (“agree strongly”), designed to measure latent cognitive and emotional orientations; Part 2 consists of 24 descriptive and behavioral items assessing demographic characteristics, religious practices (such as Bible study frequency, glossolalia, and personal evangelism), and life stress events. Exploratory factor analyses conducted on institutional and community samples revealed an underlying nine-factor architecture: General Religious Commitment, Intellectual Emphasis, Affective Emphasis, Philosophical Orientation, Intense Affective Experience, Social/Emotionally-Dependent Style, Bible Teaching Orientation, Social Affective Style, and Miscellaneous Religiosity Items.

Psychometric evaluation demonstrates high internal consistency across subscales, with Spearman-Brown split-half reliability coefficients exceeding .80 for all factors. Construct and criterion-related validity were established through discriminant function analyses distinguishing between theological student populations with predefined doctrinal or charismatic orientations (achieving a 72.9% overall predictive accuracy) and through systematic convergences with empirical religious behaviors. The RES remains an important historical and clinical measurement tool in the psychology of religion, neuropsychological religious research, pastoral counseling, and empirical theological inquiry.

2. Keywords

Religious Expression Scale, Donald M. Boan, psychology of religion, religious orientation, intellectual faith, affective faith, charismatic Christianity, psychometrics, William James, hemisphericity

3. Authors

The Religious Expression Scale was originally developed and psychometrically validated by Donald M. Boan, Ph.D., as part of his doctoral dissertation completed at the Rosemead Graduate School of Professional Psychology at Biola University in La Mirada, California (Boan, 1978). The theoretical and neuropsychological correlates of the scale were later investigated and expanded upon by Charlotte Ash, C. Crist, D. Salisbury, M. Dewell, and Michael J. Boivin, whose collaborative empirical inquiry examined unilateral and bilateral cerebral hemispheric processing advantages on visual matching tasks in relation to the specific religiosity styles indexed by the RES (Ash et al., 1996).

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Expression Scale (RES) is to provide a quantitative, multidimensional measurement of how individuals experience, cognitive-intellectually structure, and emotionally manifest their personal religious faith within an evangelical Christian theological milieu. While early instruments in the psychometrics of religion frequently treated religiosity as a unidimensional variable or focused strictly on church attendance and global orthodoxy, the RES addresses the qualitatively distinct pathways through which religious commitment is lived out. Specifically, the instrument seeks to capture the enduring stylistic dichotomy between a predominantly intellectual, doctrinal, and analytical orientation toward faith versus a predominantly affective, experiential, intuitive, and relational style of faith.

Theoretical Rationale and Clinical Applications

From a theoretical perspective, individual adherents sharing identical denominational affirmations or adherence to systematic orthodox creeds may nonetheless inhabit profoundly divergent psychological realities. One believer may express commitment through meticulous textual exegesis, historical-grammatical theology, and cognitive coherence, whereas another believer may locate authentic spiritual reality in affective warmth, personal encounters with the Holy Spirit, spontaneous worship, and communal emotional vulnerability. The RES was developed to systematically map these stylistic variances, delineating how an individual’s cognitive style intersects with spiritual praxis.

In clinical and pastoral counseling contexts, the RES serves several vital diagnostic and therapeutic functions:

• Pastoral Assessment and Spiritual Direction: Counselors can utilize subscale profiles to identify whether a counselee’s spiritual crisis stems from intellectual doubts, cognitive dissonance, or affective deprivation, enabling personalized pastoral interventions aligned with the individual’s psychological orientation.
• Interpersonal and Marital Conflict Resolution: Divergences in religious expression between romantic partners (e.g., an analytical spouse paired with an intensely experiential spouse) can generate chronic misunderstandings regarding authentic worship and spirituality; the RES clarifies these differences as stylistic rather than deficits in devotional sincerity.
• Church Leadership and Institutional Dynamics: Educational institutions, seminaries, and church leadership boards can evaluate corporate spiritual climates, identifying potential institutional polarization between administrative doctrinal rigor and charismatic emotional community expression.
• Cognitive Neuropsychological Research: In experimental psychology, the RES serves as an operational benchmark for examining correlations between spiritual preferences and cognitive processing styles, such as cerebral hemispheric processing asymmetries (Ash et al., 1996).

5. Psychological Construct

The primary construct underlying the Religious Expression Scale is the stylistic multidimensionality of religious faith expression. Rather than measuring how much faith an individual possesses, the RES measures in what psychological manner that faith is configured. The construct rests on the conceptualization that human religious phenomenology involves distinct mental faculties: cognitive-analytical parsing of theological information versus affective-perceptual encounters with the divine. Through empirical factor extraction, Boan (1978) organized this broad psychological construct into nine distinct dimensions:

Factor I: General Religious Commitment

This dimension reflects global, overarching religious devotion, salience, and personal investment in faith. It encapsulates the extent to which religious faith serves as a central organizing axis for the individual’s entire life, transcending specific stylistic preferences. High scorers endorse items affirming that their faith touches every facet of their daily existence and that ultimate meaning is anchored in spiritual truth.

Factor II: Intellectual Emphasis

Intellectual Emphasis represents the conscious prioritization of rational reflection, systematic theology, and analytical cognitive processing as the primary vehicle of religious expression. Believers scoring high on this dimension conceptualize faith through logic, consistency, and doctrinal coherence (e.g., “I would say that I ‘think’ my religion”; “Christianity may be seen as a logical system of beliefs”). For these individuals, emotionalism is viewed with caution, and faith maturity is equated with intellectual comprehension.

Factor III: Affective Emphasis

In contrast to the intellectual dimension, Affective Emphasis measures the degree to which religious faith is experienced and communicated through emotion, subjective feelings, and heartfelt intuition. High scorers favor the experiential impact of their spirituality (e.g., “I would say that I ‘feel’ my religion”; “I prefer to witness about the love I experience in Christ”). Faith is primarily validated through an internal sense of emotional security, divine presence, and personal affective warmth.

Factor IV: Philosophical Orientation

This subscale captures an intellectualized concern with existential questions, worldview coherence, apologetics, and the broader societal, historical, and philosophical implications of theological commitments. Items tapping this dimension address interactions with non-believers centered on philosophical soundness and the intersection of faith with scientific, political, and institutional paradigms.

Factor V: Intense Affective Experience

Distinct from generalized emotional warmth, this dimension assesses openness to, and pursuit of, profound, non-ordinary emotional and spiritual phenomena. It encompasses experiences of being emotionally overwhelmed during worship, dramatic encounters with the divine presence, and the expectation of miraculous, supernatural interventions in ordinary Christian life (e.g., “During a church service I may become emotionally overwhelmed by the Spirit of God”).

Factor VI: Social/Emotionally-Dependent Style

This construct indexes an externalized, relational reliance on the faith community for emotional support and spiritual validation. Individuals exhibiting this style prioritize personal vulnerability, communal sharing of burdens, and compassion from fellow believers, acknowledging that their faith cannot flourish in solitary contemplation (e.g., “I need other people to help me through the emotional aspects of my life”).

Factor VII: Bible Teaching Orientation

Bible Teaching Orientation delineates an affinity for formal, structured biblical exposition, intellectual study of the scriptures, and academic engagement with biblical scholarship. High scorers place central importance on textual study for spiritual discernment, preferring pastors who operate as scholarly expositors rather than emotional or motivational speakers.

Factor VIII: Social Affective Style

This factor reflects an expressive, evangelistic, and relational orientation characterized by personal testimony, active outreach, and sharing one’s subjective emotional transformation with others. It highlights relational evangelism within group contexts where interpersonal connection serves as the primary bridge for transmitting spiritual truths.

Factor IX: Miscellaneous Religiosity Items

This residual category includes scale items that demonstrated meaningful variance within the broad construct of religious life but did not load cleanly or exclusively onto any of the preceding eight primary factors. These items encompass idiosyncratic expressions of individualistic practices, personal autonomy in faith development, and generalized theological attitudes.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the Religious Expression Scale is anchored in the classic philosophical and psychological taxonomy articulated by William James in his Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James formulated a fundamental distinction between institutional religion—characterized by ecclesiastical structures, theological dogmas, formal rituals, and intellectualized codifications—and personal religion, which originates in the immediate, unmediated, inner experiential encounters of the individual with the divine. James posited that intellectual formulations are inherently secondary interpretations built upon primary intuitive and affective experiences. Boan (1978) translated James’s qualitative observations into an empirical measurement framework, positing that individual Christians systematically gravitate toward one of these two operational modes.

Cognitive Styles and Neuropsychological Lateralization

Beyond Jamesian phenomenology, the scale was influenced by the emergence of dual-process theories of cognition and split-brain research during the 1960s and 1970s. Prominent neuroscientists and psychologists (e.g., Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga) established that the left cerebral hemisphere typically mediates sequential, analytic, verbal, and logical processing, whereas the right cerebral hemisphere specializes in holistic, spatial, synthetic, and affective processing.

Boan (1978) hypothesized that preferences for doctrinal, text-centered, and analytical religious expressions reflect a predominantly left-hemispheric cognitive style, whereas preferences for spontaneous, charismatic, mystical, and emotionally driven expressions align with right-hemispheric cognitive functioning. This conceptualization was subsequently tested by Ash et al. (1996), who administered the RES alongside tachistoscopic visual half-field matching tasks. Their findings demonstrated that specific dimensions of religious expression correlate with unilateral and bilateral visual processing efficiencies, supporting the theoretical premise that styles of religiosity are linked to underlying neurocognitive processing tendencies.

7. Validity

The construct, criterion-related, and content validity of the Religious Expression Scale were established through a four-stage empirical validation protocol designed by Boan (1978):

1. Item Sensitivity and Distributional Properties

Initial item evaluation focused on item sensitivity across the diverse calibration samples. Frequency distributions for each of the 59 Likert items were examined for severe skewness, ceiling effects, or floor effects. Items demonstrating adequate distributional spread and discriminating power across participants were retained to ensure maximum construct variance.

2. Factorial Validity

Exploratory factor analysis on the full sample of several hundred respondents confirmed that items organized into distinct, interpretable clusters corresponding to intellectual versus affective modes of religious expression. The emergence of coherent factors (e.g., Intellectual Emphasis vs. Affective Emphasis) provided internal structural validity for the bifurcated theoretical model.

3. Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

Criterion validity was tested via a known-groups design utilizing two distinct theological seminary populations hypothesized to occupy opposite poles of the intellectual-affective continuum:

• Talbot Theological Seminary (n = 46): Located in La Mirada, California, representing an intellectually rigorous, non-charismatic, expository evangelical tradition.
• Melodyland School of Theology (n = 61): Located in Anaheim, California, representing a charismatic, renewal-oriented, affectively expressive tradition.

A discriminant function analysis using the RES factor scores successfully predicted seminary institutional affiliation with an overall accuracy rate of 72.9%. Talbot students exhibited significantly higher loadings on verbal-intellectual and doctrinal factors, whereas Melodyland students demonstrated markedly higher scores on affective, experiential, and charismatic dimensions, confirming the instrument’s capacity to discriminate between known behavioral-theological cohorts.

4. Construct Validity via Behavioral Convergence

Construct validity was corroborated by examining the statistical convergence between the psychometric dimensions of Part 1 and the empirical religious practices reported in Part 2. Individuals with elevated scores on the Intellectual Emphasis and Bible Teaching subscales reported significantly higher rates of independent doctrinal study, favored scholarly pastoral preaching, and expressed skepticism regarding contemporary supernatural interventions. Conversely, individuals scoring high on Affective Emphasis and Intense Affective Experience demonstrated statistically significant associations with behavioral practices such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), spontaneous prayer styles, and reported unmediated encounters with the divine presence.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency of the Religious Expression Scale was evaluated using the Spearman-Brown split-half formula across the extracted factor subscales. In Boan’s (1978) normative sample, the Spearman-Brown reliability coefficients exceeded .80 across all primary factors, indicating strong item homogeneity within each subscale domain.

Subsequent psychometric evaluation by Ash et al. (1996) reaffirmed satisfactory internal consistency when utilizing factor-weighted scoring algorithms. Because Boan’s initial dissertation protocol focused on cross-sectional factorial and discriminant validation, formal test-retest reliability coefficients across longitudinal intervals were not published in the original work. However, the stability of cognitive-affective styles across equivalent non-clinical populations provides indirect evidence for temporal stability, though comprehensive test-retest evaluations remain an area for future psychometric research.

9. Factor Analysis

Boan (1978) subjected the 59 Likert-scale items in Part 1 to an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with orthogonal rotation across a diverse normative sample comprising both theological students and community church participants (fundamentalist, mainline evangelical, and charismatic congregations across Southern California). The empirical factor solution revealed nine distinct dimensions accounting for the majority of shared variance:

Item loadings across the extracted factors were consistently robust, providing empirical justification for the multifactorial model of Christian religious expression.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The complete Religious Expression Scale is structured as follows:

• Format: Two-part self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital psychometric questionnaire.
• Part 1 Structure: 59 psychometric declarative statements assessing cognitive, affective, philosophical, and social dimensions of religious faith expression.
• Response Scale (Part 1): 6-point balanced Likert-type scale without a neutral midpoint:
  • 1 = Disagree strongly
  • 2 = Disagree mildly
  • 3 = Disagree slightly
  • 4 = Agree slightly
  • 5 = Agree mildly
  • 6 = Agree strongly
• Part 2 Structure: 24 descriptive, biographical, demographic, and behavioral items assessing age, gender, education, income, marital status, denomination, parental church affiliation, monthly church attendance, weekly personal Bible study frequency, evangelistic witnessing frequency, personal experience and frequency of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), assurance of salvation, perceptions of divine presence, life transition history (moves and job changes in past 5 years), and personal/family stressors (e.g., physical illness, financial strain, marital distress, substance abuse).
• Administration Time: Approximately 20 to 30 minutes for complete administration.
• Target Population: Adult and adolescent respondents within Christian (primarily evangelical, fundamentalist, or charismatic) populations.
• Scoring Protocols: While no singular commercial scoring manual was issued, research protocols (e.g., Ash et al., 1996; Boan, 1978) employ two validated methods:
  • Unweighted Subscale Scoring: Calculating the mean or sum of raw response values (1 to 6) for items associated with each primary factor after reverse-scoring negatively keyed items.
  • Factor-Weighted Scoring: Multiplying each item response by its standardized factor loading from the exploratory factor analysis and summing the resulting products to compute factor scores.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Religious Expression Scale was developed by Donald M. Boan in 1977 and formally published in his doctoral dissertation at the Rosemead Graduate School of Professional Psychology, Biola University, in 1978. As an academic dissertation instrument, the scale was placed in the public domain for scholarly and non-commercial educational research purposes via Dissertation Abstracts International (Boan, 1978).

No proprietary licensing fees, royalties, or commercial testing agency permissions are required for non-profit academic research, pastoral counseling training, or psychological scholarship. Researchers and clinicians employing the RES should cite the original dissertation and subsequent peer-reviewed psychometric literature (e.g., Ash et al., 1996) in their publications.

12. References

Ash, C., Crist, C., Salisbury, D., Dewell, M., & Boivin, M. J. (1996). Unilateral and bilateral brain hemispheric advantage on visual matching tasks and their relationship to styles of religiosity. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 24(2), 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164719602400205

Boan, D. M. (1978). The development and validation of a measure of religious expression (Doctoral dissertation, Rosemead Graduate School of Professional Psychology, Biola University, 1977). Dissertation Abstracts International, 40(04B), 1864.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: Does the corpus callosum enable the human condition? Brain, 123(7), 1293–1326. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/123.7.1293

James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green & Co. https://doi.org/10.1037/10004-000

Sperry, R. W. (1982). Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral hemispheres. Science, 217(4566), 1223–1226. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7112125

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)