Preliminary validation of the North American Protestant Fundamentalism Scale

Abstract

The literature on Protestant fundamentalism is characterised by instruments that are unidimensional, largely assessing Christian orthodoxy, and use inconsistent conceptual definitions. The present study presents an effort to develop and test an instrument using Ammerman’s definition of North American Protestant fundamentalism as a multidimensional construct that includes four components: inerrancy of scripture, evangelism, premillenialism, and separatism. This model was confirmed statistically, and clear evidence of reliability and both convergent and divergent validity is presented. Relationships with other variables, while clearly showing overlap in anticipated directions, also show enough non-shared variance to justify continuing to view fundamentalism as a separate construct.

Keywords:

• Protestant
• fundamentalism
• North American
• measurement