Make Believe Unmakes Belief?: Childhood Play Style and Adult Personality as Predictors of Religious Identity Change

Abstract

Links between current religious status and both childhood play style and adult personality (Five-Factor Model) were explored in a Canadian undergraduate sample. The lifelong religious reported being less open to experience, but more agreeable and conscientious, relative to apostates (who left their childhood faith for no faith), switchers (who migrated to a different faith), converts (who adopted faith since childhood), and the lifelong nonreligious. Relative to the two lifelong groups, apostates and switchers—and, to a lesser extent, converts—reported stronger interest and engrossment in pretend play involving props, peer collaborators, and/or imaginary characters, as well as less interest in organized sports. A childhood predilection for pretend play may function as a marker of greater ability and willingness to consider the implications of experiencing the self in different roles in an “as if” world. In turn, this predisposition may eventuate in a significant ideological shift in response to unmet cognitive and/or emotional needs, consistent with current understandings of religious change.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Rebecca Leitch, Elyse Redden, and Kristina Schrage for their assistance with data collection, and to Raluca Petrican for her helpful suggestions.

Notes

¹ Of these two, additional data suggest that cognitive factors had a greater impact on participants' ideological shifts than did affective factors: After selecting the labels that best described their religious category in childhood and at the time the data were collected, respectively, participants in the second sample were asked to explain “in simple, clear language” why they thought that their religious identity had stayed the same or had changed. The second author coded the 182 participant responses in terms of whether cognitive themes (e.g., being able to “think for oneself” with advancing age and accepting or rejecting the family's stance, being exposed to other religions or scientific ways of thinking) and/or affective themes (e.g., religion “feeling right” based on life experiences, becoming disillusioned, seeking existential comfort) were mentioned. Fifty-eight of 66 individuals (or 88%) who reported an ideological shift since childhood (i.e., apostates, switchers, and converts) mentioned cognitive factors as being influential, whereas only 40 of 115 (or 37%) of the two lifelong groups implicated cognitive factors in their decision to remain identified with the same category since childhood: This difference was significant, χ²(1) = 47.62, p < .001. In contrast, those who changed and those who did not were equally (un)likely to cite affective factors as influential (9% in each group), χ²(1) = .01, p = .91. To the extent that a predilection for pretend play in childhood indeed functions as a marker of the “capacity to engage in counterfactual or would-be thinking [emphasis added]” (Bretherton, 1989, p. 403), then this pattern of findings makes sense.