Moral Representativeness and Satisfaction with One’s Religious Community

ABSTRACT

Belonging to a community of believers represents a basic component of most religions. According to a social-functional account of religion, a primary function of religious belief is to bind individuals to these types of cooperative, moral groups. However, this framework has yet to investigate what factors are associated with being more or less “bound” to a particular community. Although previous research has found that being very representative of the congregation in terms of religious belief (e.g., fundamentalism) is an important factor, the social-functional account suggests that being representative of the binding moral beliefs of the community should mediate this effect. In this study, participants from 23 churches completed measures assessing religious and moral beliefs. Analyses revealed that moral representativeness was associated with greater satisfaction with one’s faith community, above and beyond theological belief. Moreover, representativeness in terms of binding moral foundations mediated the relationship between satisfaction and representativeness in terms of religious fundamentalism.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Jack Shand Research Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. The author thanks the participating churches for their hospitality and willingness to allow us into their communities. The author also thanks Regan Bolotin, Sophia Carpiniello, Lily Fortin, Madeline Kaplan, Anna Markovitz, Najee Mendes, Leeza Rojas, and Karen Sauter for their assistance in data collection and Andrew Stewart for his guidance on the analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Detailed instructions for computing these types of variables, along with the syntax required, are provided in Garcia et al. (2015).

2. In Kenny and Garcia (2012), this submodel is known as the contrast model, and it is appropriate when the actor similarity and other similarity effects are equivalent in magnitude and opposite in sign. In the current study, these conditions were met. In the complete model, regressing satisfaction on the GAPIM religious fundamentalism variables, β_I = .15 and β_I’ = −.13, and no difference was observed in terms of model fit compared to the contrast model, χ²(1) < 1, p = .988.

3. Actor and others scores for these two moral foundation factors were excluded from the analysis due to high collinearity with existing variables in the model.