Categorizing People by Their Preference for Religious Styles: Four Types Derived from Evaluation of Faith Development Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article presents a typology that categorizes people according to their profile of religious styles which concerns, among other things, the sources where they derive validity and stability, when confronted with religious and existential questions or inter-religious challenges. The modeling of this typology is an empirical complement to Streib’s model of religious styles which, in turn, is a critical advancement of Fowler’s faith development theory. Data are religious style assignments to the answers on the 25 questions in the Faith Development Interview (FDI), which has been administered to 677 participants in the United States and Germany. We present results based on a theory-driven approach to determine a person’s religious type by incorporating frequencies of religious style assignments from the evaluation of their FDI. We also explored convergent validity with latent class analysis and a machine-learning algorithm. Results based on three samples converged on four religious types: Substantially Ethnocentric, Predominantly Conventional, Predominantly Individuative-Reflective, and Emerging Dialogical-Xenosophic types. We reported the profiles of the four types with reference to group differences on religious schemata and openness to experience.

Acknowledgments

This article presents an empirical complement to Streib’s (2001) model of religious styles that was published in this journal. Now, after our research teams in Bielefeld and Chattanooga were able to conduct and evaluate more than 700 faith development interviews (FDI), which was made possible by generous grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG; Grants STR570/5-3; STR570/15-1; STR570/17-1; STR570/20-1) and from the John Templeton Foundation (Grant#55249), we could move forward to the typological modeling of FDI results of three subsamples.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. The Ancient Greek word xenos means stranger or foreigner, and sophia means wisdom. Thus, “xenosophia” means the wisdom that might emerge from the encounter with the strange and the wisdom of adequately responding to the strange. While we are probably the first to introduce this term in the psychology of religion and in empirical research, we are not the first to use it. As noted by Streib (2018), we have been inspired by Waldenfel’s (2011) and Nakamura’s (2000) philosophy of the alien. According to these philosophers, the decisive characteristic of “xenosophia” is a specific kind of responsivity that resists hastily putting the strange in a box and making it an other. In other words: xenosophia is characterized by hermeneutic humility. In this understanding, we regard xenosophia being the opposite to xenophobia.

2. In the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd editions of the Coding Manual (DeNicola & Fowler, 1993; Fowler et al., 2004; Moseley, Jarvis, & Fowler, 1986), the instruction is given to simply average all faith stage assignments to the 25 FDI questions into a total FDI score – ignoring the fact that codings are nominal data, which cannot be treated as if they were continuous. Thus, there is the need for avoiding this error and thus for developing an algorithm for a final conclusion in FDI evaluation that still accounts as much as possible for the variance of style assignments to the 25 questions.

3. On a conceptual level, this variety of styles in one interview calls the presupposition into question that an individual could only operate on the basis of one stage or style, a presupposition (labeled “structural whole”) that had been established by Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer (1983) and explicitly agreed to by Fowler (2001).

4. This is visualized, with reference to Loevinger’s (1976) milestone model, in a figure by Streib (2001), p. 150.

5. For more details, see the section on measures below.

6. Note that the hierarchical ranking of the four types does not imply linear developmental progression.

7. A parallel of the LCA/LTA approach is the modeling of personality types (for example, by Asendorpf, Borkenau, Ostendorf, & van Aken, 2001; Gerlach, Farb, Revelle, & Nunes Amaral, 2018), where ratings on the five personality traits – neuroticism (N), extraversion (E), openness to experience (O), agreeableness (A), and conscientiousness (C) – are modeled to yield clusters with distinct patterns of N, E, O, A, and C. These clusters are interpreted as personality types. Of course, our study based on 677 interviews cannot compete with Gerlach and colleagues’ 1.5 Million sample, but we note structural parallels in the process of type construction.

8. The hypothetical model and the Mplus syntax can be found in the Supplemental Material to this article.

9. Presented in Figure S.2 in the Supplementary Material.

10. Detailed results for each sample are presented in three tables in the Supplementary Material.

11. Because the Religious Schema Scale items were included in the questionnaire for the second phase of the Deconversion Study, the number of answers to the RSS is only N = 102.

12. See paper, “Why movers Stay?” http://www.statmodel.com/download/Why%20Movers%20Stay.pdf at the Mplus website. While it is a plausible explanation that the Mplus model “doesn’t specify that movers can’t stay,” this does not raise confidence that class assignments are trustworthy for all cases.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [55249];German Research Foundation [STR570/5-3; STR570/15-1; STR570/17-1; STR570/20-1]