Assessing Spirituality in a Diverse World

By Paul Wink and Raymond F. Paloutzian

This volume addresses an important problem in social scientific research on global religions and spirituality: How to evaluate the role of diverse religious and spiritual (R/S) beliefs and practices within the rapid evolution of spiritual globalization and diversification trends. The book examines this question by bringing together a panel of international scholars including psychologists, sociologists, and researchers in religious studies, public health, medicine, and social work. The content includes chapters describing innovative concepts of post-Christian spirituality, Eastern forms of meditation, afterlife beliefs associated with the three dominant cultural legacies, various non-religious worldviews, spiritual Jihad, and secular and religious reverence. The book also covers such important themes as spiritual well-being, faith, struggle, meaning making, modeling, and support, as well as mysticism and using prayer to cope with existential crises. This book advances theunderstanding of the role of R/S across different faiths and cultural systems, including both Western and non-Western ones, and enriches the mainstream of psychological sciences and practices. It appeals to students, educators, researchers, and clinicians in multiple related fields and disciplines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030521400

Book preview

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

A. L. Ai et al. (eds.)Assessing Spirituality in a Diverse Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52140-0_2

Mainstreaming the Assessment of Diverse Religiousness and Spirituality in Psychology

P. Scott Richards¹  , Raymond F. Paloutzian² and Peter W. Sanders³

(1)

Center for Change of Universal Health Services, Inc., Orem, Utah, USA

(2)

Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

(3)

Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to articulate reasons why religious and spiritual measures that are valid across different faith traditions and cultures are needed in psychological science and practice. We explain why measuring and assessing spirituality and religiousness is relevant for researchers and practitioners, review some historical background about assessment of religiousness and spirituality, and acknowledge some practical and conceptual challenges to measuring and assessing these constructs. We conclude by proposing some ideas that may help in the effort to bring religious and spiritual measures and assessment more fully into the mainstream of psychological science and practice.

Keywords

Spiritual measuresSpiritual outcomesSpiritual assessment challengesInternet assessmentReligiosity measurement historyCross-cultural religion/spirituality measuresInternational spiritual assessmentInternational psychology of religion/spirituality

P. Scott Richards,

PhD, received his doctorate in counseling psychology in 1988 from the University of Minnesota. He is coauthor of A Spiritual Strategy for Counseling and Psychotherapy (1997, 2005), coeditor of the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Religious Diversity (2000), and coauthor of Spiritual Approaches in the Treatment of Women with Eating Disorders (2007), all of which were published by the American Psychological Association. He received the William C. Bier award in 1999 from Division 36 (the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality) of the American Psychological Association for outstanding contributions to findings on religious issues. He is a fellow of Division 36 and served as President of the Division from 2004 to 2005. Dr. Richards is a licensed psychologist and is the Director of Research at the Center for Change in Orem, Utah. He is retired from Brigham Young University where he was a Professor of Counseling Psychology from 1990 until 2018.

Raymond F. Paloutzian,

PhD, Claremont Graduate School, is Professor Emeritus of experimental and social psychology at Westmont College and consultant to the Religion, Experience, and Mind (REM) Lab Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was Visiting Professor at Stanford University and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He edited The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (1998–2016). He wrote Invitation to the Psychology of Religion, third ed. (Guilford, 2017) and edited Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Psychological Pathways to Conflict Transformation and Peace Building (with A. Kalayjian; Springer, 2010), the Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, second ed. (with C. L. Park; Guilford, 2013), and Processes of Believing: The Acquisition, Maintenance, and Change in Creditions (with H.-F. Angel, L. Oviedo, A. L. C. Runihov, & R. J. Seitz; Springer, 2017).

Peter W. Sanders,

PhD, received his doctorate in Counseling Psychology in 2017 from Brigham Young University. He currently works as a therapist and research director at Utah Valley University Student Health Services. He specializes in data analysis and the integration of technology into psychotherapy. He is currently a project co-director over a large scale psychotherapy research project evaluating the efficacy of spiritually-oriented psychotherapies in diverse contexts.

1 Mainstreaming the Assessment of Diverse Religiousness and Spirituality in Psychology

During the past 30 years, research and scholarship about the role of religion and spirituality in mental and physical health, personality functioning, social attitudes and behavior, and psychotherapy has mushroomed, particularily within the psychology of religion field (Koenig, McCullough, & Larson, 2001; Paloutzian & Park, 2005, 2013; Pargament, Exline, & Jones, 2013; Pargament, Mahoney, & Shafranske, 2013; Richards & Bergin, 2014). Hundreds of research studies on religion and mental health have documented the potential benevolent influence of religious commitment and spirituality and clarified some of its possible negative effects (Koenig et al., 2001). In addition, basic psychological research has provided insight into the relationships between religiousness and spirituality and many additional dimensions of human functioning, including social psychology, personality, lifespan development, cognition, and group and social dynamics (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003).

In the clinical realm, practitioners and researchers with interests in religion and spirituality have developed many different spiritually integrated psychotherapy techniques and approaches (e.g., Pargament, Mahoney, & Shafranske, 2013; Richards & Bergin, 2005, 2014; Sperry & Shafranske, 2005). Spiritual approaches have now been integrated with the healing practices of most Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and they have been used to treat diverse client populations with a variety of clinical issues (e.g., Richards & Bergin, 2014).

The expansion of research about religion and spirituality has been made possible in part by advances in the conceptualization and measurement of these contructs (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003; Hill & Hood, 1999). The psychology and sociology of religion fields have a long history of measuring and assessing religiousness and spirituality (R/S) using cutting edge psychometric methods (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003; Gorsuch, 1984; Moberg, 2002, 2011, 2012). Hundreds of questionnaires and scales of R/S have been constructed and used in psychology and sociology of religion research (e.g., Hill & Hood, 1999; Kapuscinski & Masters, 2010). The R/S scales are overall of reasonable quality with good content and predictive validity and respectable reliabilities (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003; Gorsuch, 1984; Kapuscinski & Masters, 2010). We will say more about the history and current state of the R/S measurement and assessment later in the chapter.

2 Why R/S Assessment Is Important for Research and Application

We believe that R/S measurement and assessment is relevant to psychological science and practice for several reasons. Almost 35 years ago, Strommen (1984), a psychology of religion expert and editor of Research on Religious Development: A Comprehensive Handbook (Strommen, 1971), wrote that religious beliefs and values [we have found] are among the best predictors of what people will say or do (p. 151). This has not changed as we have entered the first two decades of the twenty-first century, where we have been reminded on an almost daily basis of the powerful influence that religion, or non-religion, plays in people’s lives throughout the world—for good and bad.

In the basic human sciences, such as social psychology, sociology, personality psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, multicultural psychology, health psychology, and trauma psychology, scientists and practitioners who wish to understand human beings must consider the role that religion and spirituality plays in their lives. Researchers in the psychology of religion field have made many valuable contributions to the understandings of how R/S influences human beings (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003), but mainstreaming R/S assessment and measurement outside of the psychology of religion subspecialty field remains an important need to advance psychological science.

In the clinical research domain, R/S assessment is crucial for advancing understandings about how to help human beings in psychological treatment. The possibility that spiritual or religious growth may help promote and maintain other positive changes in clients’ lives needs scientific investigation (Richards et al., 2005). Psychotherapy research that assesses client spiritual outcomes could also help ease the concerns or even fears that some religious people have, that psychotherapy might undermine their faith (Richards & Bergin, 2014). This could lead to greater numbers of referrals from religious leaders and the increased usage of mental health services by religious people.

We think it is also crucial for practitioners to conduct R/S assessments to monitor and document the effectiveness of their own work. By understanding clients’ spiritual worldviews, psychotherapists are better able to empathically understand each client. R/S assessment can also help clinicians decide if R/S interventions would be indicated with clients and if so, which ones would be most helpful. R/S assessment can also help clinicians determine whether clients’ R/S beliefs are harmful to mental health or if they or if they might be used as a resource to promote healing (Richards & Bergin, 2005).

3 Historical Overview of R/S Measurement

The history of measurement in this field can be represented as a sequence of four overlapping but identifiable measurement periods, each with its own manifestations, drawbacks, and unmet needs that lead to the next period. We are now several years into the fourth period, rich with measures, which are beginning to be better validated and more theory-related than in the past. How did the field get here?

3.1 Prelude and Principles

Levels of Measurement

A look into deep history reveals that early humans did things that today would be called religious or spiritual. They worshiped gods, believed supernatural agents did things on earth, and believed that people lived in some form after their body died. But not all people believed these things. If we gave ancient people a questionnaire that asked, do you believe in X? where X could stand for a god, spirit, or soul of a dead person, and the answer could be either Yes or No, we would be measuring some aspect of some religious variable. At a modern computer, we would code these responses as either a 1 or a 2, the basic criteria for a nominal level of measurement. Surveys given today that ask, Do you believe in God? are functionally identical in their nominal level of measurement, in which answer options are limited to yes or no. Measurement, though, gets far more complex than that.

The moment we ask someone how strongly he or she holds a belief, or the degree of assurance that it is true, or how much the teachings of a specific religion are personally accepted, we have changed the level of measurement from a nominal level to an ordinal, interval, or ratio measure—each of which taps increasingly precise aspects of the R/S variables to be assessed. These stepwise aspects make R/S measurement no different from measurement in the rest of science. But there is an aspect of many psychological measures that makes them, and R/S measures in particular, beset with an important interpretive problem.

R/S Measures of the Unseen?

For each of the four levels of measurement, a measure of something will have one of two characteristics. The first possible characteristic is analogous to that of any measure of a tangible, physical property of people or things—such as number of kilos in weight, their countable behaviors, or the number of hairs on their head (if you wished to count them)—measures for which the meaning is in principle a publically accessible index about which, assuming accurate counting, no one will disagree. The frequency of praying, amount of money given to the church, mosque, or synagogue, and documenting a performance of a religious ritual are measures of this sort—scholars agree that the frequency of prayer equals the number of times a person prayed in a unit of time. That is objectivity.

The second possible characteristic of R/S measures, however, is not objective in the sense illustrated above. They are instead measures of something unseen—about whose meanings people can disagree greatly. For example, if you are asked to rate the strength of your belief in Doctrine D on a 1–7 scale (where 1 = not at all, and 7 = totally), scholars agree on the numeral you selected, but they may disagree greatly about what that number means. If you answer 6 that My Faith is the most important thing in my life, does that mean you will die for your Faith, kill others for Faith, give money to the poor because you think it is a good deed, or forgive someone who hurt you because you think doing so honors your Faith? One cannot tell. The exact meaning of the 6 to the individual cannot be known to external observes; it may not even be known to the individual who answered 6 to the question. Developing valid, reliable, and objective measures of subjective mental properties, essential for some psychology of R/S research and applications, is far more difficult than assessing tangible our countable properties of things or events. (See Paloutzian et al., Chap. 17, 2021, this volume, for further elaboration of this point.) But of course, these challenges do not apply only to psychological researchers interested in measures of aspects of religiousness and spirituality. Behavioral scientists who study many other subjective mental properties, including intelligence, emotions, psychiatric symptoms, personality functioning, attitudes, values, and so forth, also face such challenges. Clarity about the issues in the above discussion is important in all domains of behavioral science.

Can We Measure R and S?

Another conundrum is inherent in the language we use to talk about R/S measurement: We cannot measure religion or spirituality. We can measure only variables that represent aspects of particular religions and spiritualities. This is because neither religion nor spirituality is a singularity. They are complex cultural concepts with highly contested meanings (Taves, 2015), some of which are complete opposites of each other (Prothero, 2010). This is why we need to talk about religions and religiousness, not religion, and be clear about which aspect of religiousness of which religion we are measuring when we assess anything within the R/S orbit—hoping to make an accurate attribution of what it means (Paloutzian & Park, 2021, in press).

3.2 From 1899 to 1969: The Lull

One of the first books titled the psychology of … anything was Starbuck’s (1899) Psychology of Religion. A little gem for its time, its methods of measurement were precursors to those of today. In particular, he had people answer questions about the development of their religious life, and then tabulated (i.e., measured) in what time of life a religious awakening may have occurred. His landmark research lead to the conclusion, often stated still today, that adolescence is the time of life when someone is most prone to religious conversion or awakening. Measurement was inherent in this field when it began.

There followed more than a half-century in which questionnaires were used to measure religious variables. Typically, these asked questions about belief in God, denominational affiliation, and similar simple variables. Such research was relatively easily interpretable in its time, because it was when denomination meant something. (See Argyle and Beit-Hallahmi (1975) for documentation of many studies of this sort.) There were also classical grand psychological theories at that time (e.g., Freud, Jung, variations of Behaviorism, Gestalt Psychology), but the questionnaire data and the theories were basically irrelevant to each other. This circumstance sustained for more than a half century, so that as late as the end of the 1960s, Dittes (1969), in his landmark chapter on the psychology of religion in the Handbook of Social Psychology, said that we have theories and large amounts of data, but somehow each seems to have no relevance to the other. This circumstance changed.

3.3 A Mid-Century Spike

To document this change, Hill and Hood’s (1999) Measures of Religiosity listed all psychology of R/S measures extant through the end of the twentieth century. There were only 15 such measures published in the 60 years between 1900 and 1960. In the single decade of the 1960s, an additional 16 were added. The remainder of the 126 R/S measures reviewed in the book were developed in the years before the turn of the millennium. The midcentury period had set the stage for movement in this field.

An important moment occurred when Allport and Ross (1967) published an article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), the basis of which was the relationship between scores on the Intrinsic-Extrinsic Religious Orientation Scale (I-E ROS) and racial prejudice in churches of six Christian denominations in the Eastern U.S. Shortly thereafter, Robinson and Shaver (1973) published Measures of Social Psychological Attitudes that included a chapter on measures of religiousness. The I-E ROS was among them, and this triggered a great many studies that investigated the relation between I-E and seemingly everything else. The I-E ROS lead to variations and refinements (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989; Gorsuch & Venable, 1983), critiques (Donahue, 1985; Kirkpatrick, 1989; Kirkpatrick & Hood Jr., 1990), the addition of the Quest measure (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Batson & Schoenrade, 1991a, 1991b), and translations into other languages and use in other countries (Ghorbani & Watson, 2006; Socha, 1999). Even with its flaws, it is still in use today.

Somehow, the publication of research with an R/S measure in an elite mainstream journal by a highly esteemed renowned author helped promote a significant amount of activity across a broad swath of the psychology of R/S. This was the end of the beginning.

3.4 Late Century Expansion

Many measures followed. A short list includes measures of Faith Development (Fowler, 1981, 1986, 1991), an extrapolation based on Kohlberg’s (1969) stages of moral reasoning, later transformed into measures of Faith Styles (Streib, 2001; Streib, Hood Jr., & Klein, 2010), and reinterpreted in context of women’s issues (Gilligan, 1982). Later, because the original method of measuring faith development required scoring and interpreting lengthy interviews, subsequent measures of faith development were developed in questionnaire format (Leak, 2008).

Additional measures assessed prayer (Spilka & Ladd, 2013), Christian Orthodoxy (Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982), right wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992), religious fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992, 2004), religious coping (Pargament, Koenig, & Perez, 2000), degree of spirituality (Piedmont, 2001), degree of spiritual well-being (Ellison, 1983; Paloutzian & Ellison, 1982), values (Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz, 1992); mysticism (Hood Jr., 1975), religious doubts (Altemeyer, 1988; Hunsberger, McKenzie, Pratt, & Pancer, 1993; Hunsberger, Pratt, & Pancer, 2002), and many related constructs.

Two key points clarify what these measures did and did not do. First, they were both clinical and non-clinical in what they were about. They reflected the across-the-board lines of research in the filed—clinical, developmental, social psychological, motivational, belief-related, experience-related, value-laden, and agnosticism, affording research across the board on psychology of R/S topics. Second, due to the logical constraints inherent in the concept of religion, no measure directly assessed religion as such; in all cases they were measures of variables that represented aspects of religiousness as a human behavior, not religion. They were attempts at doing psychology.

It was in the wake of these beginnings that the new millennium began. It was a great service to the field that the Hill and Hood (1999) volume was published when it was, because it served as the resource where someone could easily locate all extant measures at his or her fingertips. Not only did this facilitate psychology of R/S research in the U.S., but also it made the English versions of the scales easily accessible to international scholars. This facilitated the development of the internationalization of the field, a process that forced (and is forcing) some scholars in the West to dig deeper into the psychological processes we are aiming to understand, instead of merely exporting Western ideas to the rest of the world.

3.5 The New Millennium: Going Global

The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 changed not only the political world. It also changed the psychology of R/S. In short order, mainstream psychology began to take this topic seriously, research in the psychology of R/S rapidly expanded internationally, and publications of R/S research accelerated on a steep curve (Paloutzian, 2017b). Three milestones accent these trends.

First, three landmark handbook chapters on the measurement of R/S variables were published by Hill (2005, 2013) and Hill and Edwards (2013), and supplemented by a chapter by Büssing (2012) on measures of R/S variables applicable to the field of spirituality in healthcare. These are the most up-to-date and authoritative discussions of R/S measures at the present time.

Second, new creatively designed assessment tools are appearing. To highlight three examples, the Views of Suffering Scale measures 10 dimensions of theodicy, the first of its kind. The Multidimensional Existential Meaning Scale (George & Park, 2017) offers an intellectually rich advance over past measures with a tripartite assessment of life meaning that consists of comprehension, purpose, and mattering. The robustness of anti-atheist prejudice has been cleverly measured by way of cognitive errors (Giddings & Dunn, 2016).

Third, international scholarship on the measurement of R/S variables has increased as indicated by scales developed in English being translated into other languages, and by measures developed by international scholars in their own language beginning to be translated into English. For example, Abu-Raiya, Pargament, Mahoney, and Stein (2008) developed a psychological measure of Islamic religiousness, Tarakeshwar, Pargament, and Mahoney (2003a, 2003b) published measures of Hindu coping and Hindu pathways, Unterrainer et al. (Unterrainer, Ladenhauf, Moazedi, Wallner-Liebmann, & Fink, 2010; Unterrainer, Nelson, Collicutt, & Fink, 2012) created the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being, and Schnell (2015) developed an instrument to assess dimensions of secularity.

Psychology is beginning to go global. The scales cited above are among the beginnings of scholarship to help internationalize the field of the psychology of R/S. Due to the need for cross-cultural validation of not merely scales but individual items (Wolf, Ihm, Maul, & Taves, 2021), the future will likely show that what is most psychologically important is not the mere answers to questions, but the meanings that underpin those answers (Paloutzian & Park, 2014, 2021). If we take this to heart, our international scholarship can help lead us toward global understanding.

4 Challenges with Measuring R/S

Although many reliable and valid R/S measures have been developed, they have rarely been used by researchers in the mainstream behavioral sciences (Richards & Bergin, 2005). In addition, few practitioners use R/S assessment or treatment outcomes measures in their clinical work (Richards & Bergin, 2005). Furthermore, most R/S measures were developed within a Western (American) cultural milieu and a Christian theological framework; thus their suitability for other countries and religious traditions is unclear (Kapuscinski & Masters, 2010). Finally, R/S measures are rarely published and distributed commercially, which has further limited their accessibility and ease of use for both clinicians and researchers.

Another major challenge with measuring and assessing R/S is the great religious and spiritual diversity that exists in the world (Moberg, 2002, 2012). Many philosophers, theologians, and social scientists agree that religiousness and spirituality are universal human concerns and basic conditions of human existence (e.g, Sue, Bingham, Porche-Burke, & Vasquez, 1999). There is tremendous diversity, though, in how R/S is understood and expressed. Approximately 80% of the world’s population identify with a religious tradition. The religious diversity in the world includes five major Western or theistic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism) and six major Eastern world religions (i.e., Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Shintoism, Confucianism, and Taoism) (Richards & Bergin, 2014; Smart, 1993, 1994). Each of these world religions has numerous sub-divisions or sub-traditions, reflecting great diversity in belief and practice within each of them (Richards & Bergin, 2014; Smart, 1993, 1994).

Large numbers of people also find meaning outside of one of the major world religions within transpersonal, humanistic, and existential philosophical traditions (e.g., Finnegan, 2008; Lukoff & Lu, 2005; Tacey, 2004). Others understand spirituality in their own ways without adherence to formal institutional or philosophical frameworks (Finnegan, 2008; Sperry & Shafranske, 2005; Tacey, 2004) and about 16% of the world’s population consider themselves atheistic, agnostic, or nonreligious (Lee, 2015). Nonreligious people must also grapple with existential and spiritual questions about the origins of life and the meaning and purpose of life, human suffering, and death. Within this context of global diversity that exists in the world, how can behavioral scientists develop R/S measures that respect and honor it? This is a daunting task, but one that this book aspires to help address.

There is also much diversity and some controversy about how R/S should be operationalized and measured (Moberg, 2002, 2011, 2012; Zinnbauer, Pargament, & Scott, 1999). Although early researchers often used unidimensional and single-item measures when studying religiosity (e.g., religious affiliation, frequency of church attendance), numerous studies show that religiousness and spirituality are multidimensional constructs (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). As noted earlier, during the past 50 years, theorists and researchers have described and operationalized many dimensions of religiousness and spirituality (Moberg, 2002, 2012).

Several scholars have argued that the large number and great variety of religious and spiritual measures is both a boon and a bane for the behavioral sciences and mental health practitioners (Gorsuch, 1984; Kapuscinski & Masters, 2010; Moberg, 2002, 2011, 2012). One benefit of having a large variety of psychometrically validated R/S measures is that both researchers and practitioners have many choices when looking for ways to assess religion and spirituality in their research and/or therapeutic work. Having a variety of available choices may make it more feasible for researchers and practitioners to select R/S assessment measures that are a good religious and cultural fit for their research studies or clientele (Moberg, 2002).

One potential disadvantage of having so many different R/S measures is that it can be confusing for researchers and clinicians to decide which ones to use because there is no widely accepted agreement about how to define and measure R/S variables (Kapuscinski & Masters, 2010; Moberg, 2002, 2012; Paloutzian, 2017a). This lack of conceptual clarity forces researchers and clinicians to cope with the vast range of confusing and uncatalogued definitions, types of spirituality, research instruments, and their applications (Moberg, 2012, p. 513). Researchers and clinicians who hope to find universally applicable measures of religiousness or spirituality that are valid and useful across diverse religious and cultural traditions are sure to be disappointed—such measures do not exist (Moberg, 2002, 2012).

A natural reaction to the proliferation of R/S assessment measures and conceptual fragmentation and confusion is to attempt to consolidate R/S measures into a superordinate construct that captures the common variance between the measures, creating a common assessment tool (Moberg, 2002). This approach assumes that only the common variance is of value in these measures or that additional measures are extraneous.

It is also possible, however, that the proliferation of measures is a necessity and a boon to the field. If the measures are capturing nuanced aspects of a phenomenon even if there is some common variance, then removing these more particular aspects for the sake of consolidation and consensus could be a great loss. Given the inevitable intersection of religion and spirituality with other aspects of cultures, these nuanced differences could be incredibly important to capturing R/S phenomena (Moberg, 2002, 2012). If we rush to consolidate measures, we may be at risk of losing important information about the constructs we are assessing. More importantly, it could lead to measures that erase cultural-specific aspects of R/S from our instruments (Moberg, 2002).

Nevertheless, the disadvantages of having such an extensive array of R/S measures still exist. How do we prevent ourselves from fragmenting the field by each researcher and clinician using different measures to assess the same phenomenon? The field certainly does not benefit from the duplication of measures. These are difficult issues, but we believe they are the questions that need to be considered in order for R/S assessment to improve and gain greater prominence in mainstream psychology. In the following section, we discuss approaches to R/S assessment that offer novel solutions to these issues.

5 Collaborative Directions for the Future

This book illustrates one valuable strategy for addressing the need for R/S measures that have been developed with the goal of meeting the need for differentiated and culturally sensitive measures. The present book brings together a diverse group of researchers, scholars, and practitioners sharing the work they have done. They provide psychometric information for a variety of innovative instruments that appear suitable across diverse groups and beliefs within our increasingly diverse and interactive world. This compendium of measures holds promise for contributing to (1) a better understanding of the role of spirituality and religion across different faith and cultural systems, including non-Western ones, and (2) helps enrich the mainstream of psychological science and practice by providing R/S measures for the purposes of both research and clinical practice.

Another important future direction for addressing the need for R/S measures is for researchers to collaborate to avoid unnecessary duplication and to clarify and refine the constructs of R/S. There are several projects currently underway that are attempting to provide means of collaborating and building off of previous work in the field. One initiative is website created by the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The address for this site is www.​thearda.​com. The major focus of this site is to provide a centralized database for data gathered from religion research. In addition to providing data, the ARDA’s site has several features that are designed to assist in the measurement of religious constructs (see Bader & Fink, 2017, for a more complete description). The first major feature is a repository of religious measures. This includes access to all items of the measure, the response scales, as well as normative information, the population assessed, and data for individual items. This database can provide a centralized resource for researchers looking to develop or use measures of various religious constructs. In using this, it is possible that duplication could be decreased, and strong existing measures can be discovered by researchers.

In addition to having the measures in a centralized location, the ARDA has developed a software called the Measurement Wizard that can be accessed on the site. The Measurement Wizard is the result of a comprehensive effort to categorize all items and measures from the database, thus allowing researchers to easily find measures related to a specific topic. The Measurement Wizard also provides comparative data between measures in similar areas, allowing users to evaluate specific response scales and determine the best way to proceed with measurement with that topic. This effort could help us to refine R/S constructs and ensure that researchers can build on existing efforts in measurement. Researchers can also submit their data to the ARDA site, allowing it to become a part of this effort to refine measurement methods. It is hoped that in the future, more researchers will use sites such as ARDA’s to compare the work they are doing with that of others. R/S assessment would benefit greatly from more researchers contributing to and using the ARDA’s measurement resources.

Another important future direction that needs to be addressed how to increase the use of R/S assessments in clinical practice. Most psychotherapists do not use R/S assessments. Although this may be partly due to biases clinicians have toward R/S, it is also possible that it is due to lack of knowledge of where to find them and lack of time to seek out highly specific measures for individual clients. Given the proliferation of R/S measures, even a willing clinician is likely to experience substantial information overload when attempting to identify measures to use in their practice. It is more likely that they will use the measures if they can be presented to them within the context of their daily work instead of requiring them to seek them out.

To address this issue, one possible future direction would be the development of software solutions that incorporate machine learning technology to provide personalized recommendations of R/S measures to clinicians. Readers are likely to have encountered such technology in online shopping sites that recommend similar products to those previously purchased. The core concept of this technology is the use of statistical models to predict or recommend materials out of a large database that are most likely to be relevant for specific people in specific situations (Ricci, Rokach, & Shapira, 2015). Applied to R/S measurement, it could be used to recommend measures to therapists that are likely to be relevant to a specific client’s religion, culture, and values. In providing these recommendations, the software would bring new measures to the clinician’s attention based on what is relevant for current clinical needs. If these measures are integrated into the software, they could be easily deployed to clients and could provide feedback reports to therapists. This could provide a means for recommending culture or denomination-specific measures to clinicians, as not all clients would receive the same assessments. Additionally, the results of these measures could help therapists to identify culture-specific aspects of the client’s spirituality and increase the cultural knowledge and competence of the therapist.

This approach would require collaboration and in order to create the large database needed to build the models. The machine learning algorithms require that data from the measures be in a common dataset to facilitate comparison. Additionally, in order for the measures to be feasibly available to clinicians, the measures would need to be stored in a common location. Finally, the system would need to be integrated within existing clinician workflows to decrease the time burden required of them.

One example of such a system is the Bridges Assessment System (BAS ; Sanders, Richards, McBride, & Allen, 2016). The BAS is designed to provide a unified platform for administering and providing feedback for a variety of measures. The BAS has a measure building feature that will allow researchers, treatment sites, and therapists to add unique measures to the system, and determine when they want these measures administered in treatment. The BAS is currently being used for data collection in a collaborative project that will involve approximately 20 studies of spiritually-oriented therapies in nearly a dozen countries. As part of the project, the principal investigators have the ability to add R/S assessments to the BAS and determine at which session of psychotherapy they will be administered to clients. Additionally, two measures will be administered every session, providing a common metric between studies. All data from these studies will be saved in the BAS database, allowing for the creation of a big dataset that has dozens of measures represented.

This dataset will provide the basis for creating machine learning models that can recommend measures from the pool that the client has not yet seen but that may be relevant. In the future, the BAS will be used with a variety of R/S and non-R/S measures so that they can be conveniently be located in one place, allowing clinicians to have access to assessments that will prove highly relevant and culturally-specific for their clients. In putting non-R/S and R/S measures in the same location, it becomes more likely that the R/S assessments can be integrated with other measures of clinical concerns. This will create a database of measures that can easily be used in clinical research, and provide seamless integration with clinical practice.

6 Conclusion

As social scientists begin to tackle increasingly diversified belief systems in the United States and around the globe, new challenges lie in assessing faith concepts across different beliefs and cultures. An immediate gap for psychologists to meet is creating new or enabling existing instruments to validly and consistently assess faith concepts across diverse beliefs. To help address this gap, the remainder of this book reflects a collaborative scientific effort to advance assessment of R/S variables with solid psychometric information on a variety of measures reflecting today’s global trends.

Because of advances in Internet and computer technologies, it is now possible for researchers and practitioners throughout the world to continue collaborative efforts in additional ways to develop, refine, and validate R/S measures. The internet has given us a passport to collaboration (Au, Hertwig, Klatzky, & Tang, 2016).The same technologies will also make it possible to easily disseminate inexpensive, high quality R/S measures useful to both psychological researchers and practitioners, as well as in reports to clinicians and counselors to aid in treatment planning and outcome monitoring.

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Part IIAdvanced Topics Related to Spiritual Worldviews

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

A. L. Ai et al. (eds.)Assessing Spirituality in a Diverse Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52140-0_3

The Post-Christian Spirituality Scale (PCSS): Misconceptions, Obstacles, Prospects

Dick Houtman¹   and Paul Tromp¹

(1)

KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Dick Houtman

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

According to the received view in sociology of religion, post-Christian spirituality is radically privatized, individualized, and fragmented, and as such lacks a coherent worldview or ideology. A more specialized literature exposes this notion as a misconception, however, so that it is possible after all to measure post-Christian spirituality by means of a standardized unidimensional scale. This literature conveys seven logically interrelated ideas that are central to the worldview of post-Christian spirituality: (1) perennialism (the notion that ‘deep down’ all religions are identical and interchangeable); (2) bricolage (the notion that one needs to feel free to draw on different religions in a way that makes sense personally); (3) immanence of the sacred (the notion that the sacred is present in the cosmos as an impersonal spirit, energy, or life force); (4) aliveness of the cosmos (the notion that the cosmos is not inanimate but alive); (5) holism (the notion that the sacred connects everything within the cosmos); (6) self-spirituality (the notion that the sacred resides within rather than without the self); and (7) experiential epistemology (the notion that experiences and emotions are emanations of the spiritual self that lies within). These seven notions have been operationalized into Likert-type items that together form a reliable and unidimensional Post-Christian Spirituality Scale that can, among other things, be used in health-related research.

Keywords

Cultic milieuMystical religionPost-Christian spiritualityReligious privatizationSpiritual but not religiousSpiritual turn

Dick Houtman,

PhD, is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion at KU Leuven, Belgium. His principal research interest is cultural change in the West since the 1960s, especially how the process has transformed the realms of politics, religion, consumption, and social science itself. He has published extensively on religion and spirituality in journals like Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Social Compass and Journal of Contemporary Religion. He is currently completing two books, provisionally titled Science under Siege: Contesting Scientific Authority in the Postmodern Era (edited with Stef Aupers and Rudi Laermans) and On the Wings of Imagination: The Romantic Turn in the West. Personal website: www.​dickhoutman.​nl.

Paul Tromp,

MSc, is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, Belgium. His PhD project focuses on religious decline and religious change in (Western)Europe since the 1980s. Recently, he also completed a book chapter with Professor Peter Achterberg, titled Cultural Worldviews and Climate Change: A Vignette Experiment in the Netherlands in which we show that news stories about climate change are interpreted (or understood) differently depending on the cultural worldview of its reader. This chapter is forthcoming in the provisionally titled book Science under Siege: Contesting Scientific Authority in the Postmodern Era (edited by Dick Houtman, Stef Aupers and Rudi Laermans).

1 The Post-Christian Spirituality Scale

While in the past decades ‘spirituality’ has quickly become one of the new buzzwords in the study of religion, it has proven to be notoriously difficult to pin down conceptually and operationally. The main reason is that it manifests itself in a myriad of different ways and social contexts, both within established Christian churches and beyond. Indeed, in his seminal study After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s, Robert Wuthnow (1998) distinguishes three different manifestations, types, or forms of spirituality. Besides a more traditional dwelling spirituality he discusses a more recently emerged, more individualistic seeking spirituality, and a practice form of spirituality that can be found both within and beyond church communities. This diversity on the ground points out that it is vital to escape crude and one-size-fits-all binaries of religion versus spirituality and to be clear about the type of spirituality one addresses.

In this chapter, we discuss, conceptualize and operationalize one type of spirituality that markedly overlaps with Wuthnow’s seeking spirituality and that we call post-Christian spirituality. By using this label we do not suggest that it by definitional fiat lacks support in Christian churches and communities—indeed, it is found in liberal Christian circles, too (Campbell, 2007; Houtman, Pons, & Laermans, forthcoming). More than that, to study where exactly this type of spirituality is most and least typically found we first need a scale that accurately measures it. The label post-Christian spirituality rather expresses that this type of spirituality sets itself decidedly apart from traditional Christian understandings of religious authority. As we will explain in more detail below, this does not mean that it dismisses God, the Bible or the ideas of Christian preachers out of hand as false and flawed. It rather means that the latter are no longer accepted as authoritative in the sense of being understood as superior to sources of religious authority found in other religions.

Indeed, discontents about traditional Christian understandings of religious authority have meanwhile made many in the West suspicious of the notion of religion and keen to identify as spiritual but not religious (Fuller, 2001). This is why present-day sociologists of religion and religious studies scholars jot down remarkable answers to fairly elementary interview questions. Are you religious?; No, I am not. I am quite interested in spirituality, though. Or: No, I am not religious; I want to follow my personal spiritual path. Or even: No, I am not religious, because (sic) I want to follow my personal spiritual path. Another example of a nowadays often-heard and profoundly new response pattern: Do you believe in God?; No, I do not, but I do believe that there is something. Many Westerners apparently no longer understand God as a person and creator who needs to be believed in and obeyed, but rather as a diffuse and vaguely defined something.

Answers like these puzzle anyone raised with the notion that religion is about church-based belief in a God who has created the world and revealed the truth. Such answers appear to occur more frequently in Western Europe than in North America, arguably due to historically informed differences pertaining to religion and freedom. For while in Europe religion has always had to carry the historical burden of oppression, persecution, and lack of freedom, the first colonists that landed on the Atlantic shores of North America had precisely fled religious strife in Europe to build a new society based on ideals of religious freedom (e.g., Woodhead, 2004, pp. 94–95). There are nonetheless no good reasons to assume that such spiritual understandings of religion have meanwhile become widespread in Western Europe only, while they are virtually non-existent in North America – indeed, Wuthnow’s (1998) work provides compelling counterevidence for the United States, as does recent work by Watts (2018a, 2018b) for Canada. Yet, for the historical reasons just cited, it may well be the case that in North America those who embrace such spiritual understandings of religion are more involved in Christian churches and communities than their Western-European counterparts are. Whether or not this is the case is an important question for future research.

Be this all as it may, answers in Western Europe to elementary interview questions like the ones just cited indicate that the traditional language of religion has increasingly given way to one of spirituality, with many today disliking the former and embracing the latter. Spirituality is in effect no longer primarily perceived as the opposite of materiality (as in spirit and matter), but also often understood as the opposite of religion (Huss, 2014). So while traditional Christian religion has surely lost much of its former appeal and legitimacy in Western Europe, it has not simply given way to secular non-religiosity, but also to various types of spirituality, not least a post-Christian type that is eager to distinguish itself from Christian religion’s traditional understandings of religious authority. This process of religious change is typically theorized as a general shift from religion to spirituality, often identifying the latter with New Age and conceiving it as post-Christian, alternative, or holistic (e.g., Heelas & Woodhead, 2005). Even though as indicated above there is certainly more to spirituality than this, we here just address the latter, referring to it as post-Christian spirituality.¹

This post-Christian spirituality differs profoundly from Christian religion as the West has known it for centuries. It embraces a conception of the sacred as a diffuse spirit or life force that permeates and unifies all of the cosmos and that can only be personally experienced, which causes external sources of religious authority to be rejected as illegitimate. Sociologists of religion have traditionally taken it to be radically fragmented and individualized, suggesting that unlike Christian religion, it lacks a coherent and unifying worldview. If this were indeed the case, it would of course be impossible to study it by means of a standardized scale. We explain below why this notion of a coherent underlying spiritual worldview being absent is flawed, however, and discuss in detail how this informs our Post-Christian Spirituality Scale.

This Post-Christian Spirituality Scale is important because it enables a recalibration of religious research to major changes that have occurred on the ground. Most students of religion in the West, particularly Western Europe, agree nowadays that Christian religion has declined significantly since the 1960s, while alongside other manifestations of spirituality post-Christian spirituality has become increasingly widespread in the same period (e.g., Campbell, 2007; Heelas & Woodhead, 2005). The latter has its historical roots in the so-called counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Roszak, 1969), which witnessed a massive increase in interest in post-Christian spirituality and oriental religions (Campbell, 2007; McLeod, 2007; Sebald, 1984). The interest of The Beatles in the teachings of the Maharishi Yogi (The man who gave transcendental meditation to the world) and their visits to his ashram in Rishikesh, India, constitutes a case in point. Even though post-Christian spirituality has meanwhile lost much of its former socially critical edge, it even today echoes the characteristic countercultural rejection of external authorities and its foregrounding of the inner world as an entry to genuine freedom and liberty.

Much like the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s itself, the dissemination of post-Christian spirituality since then is first of all a Western phenomenon, sparked by typically Western cultural discontents about alienating modern orders. Indeed, the turn to post-Christian spirituality signifies a shift from a Western dualistic worldview towards a monistic or holistic Eastern one (i.e., an Easternization of the West; Campbell, 2007). Yet, due to Western modernity’s spread to non-Western countries, post-Christian spirituality has also begun to spread to countries like Japan (Mullins, 1992; Shiroya, 2017), Nigeria (Hackett, 1992), and South Africa (Oosthuizen, 1992).

The profound transformation of the religious landscape of the West that has resulted from the spiritual turn since the 1960s calls for a scale for post-Christian spirituality to complement scales for the measurement of other types of spirituality and traditional Christian beliefs. For such a scale is not only vital for mapping the corollaries and consequences of post-Christian spirituality, not least in the realm of health and health care, but also for systematically testing contemporary theories of religious change. For today’s long-standing international survey programs like the European Social Survey (ESS), the European Values Study (EVS), and the World Values Survey (WVS) feature an overly narrow and Christian-informed conception of religion, which biases research findings towards decline of religion rather than religious change. Their questionnaires are in effect more useful for recording the dissolution of the Christian religious formations of the past than for mapping the newly emerging ones. They maneuver much of contemporary religion out of sight, arguably its most rapidly expanding part (Houtman, Heelas, & Achterberg, 2012). The unfortunate absence of a good scale for post-Christian spirituality has forced students of religious change to rely on second-best options. One is comparing the young and the elderly to then interpret any differences found as cohort effects that indicate religious change rather than life cycle effects that have emerged across the life course (Houtman & Mascini, 2002). Another solution—if that is what it is—is to make use of overly crude and unreliable measures that leave much to be desired (Houtman & Aupers, 2007).

2 Theoretical Basis

2.1 Religion Beyond Church and Sect

The widespread misconception that post-Christian spirituality