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ABSTRACT
The Post Critical Belief Scale (PCBS) is used to assess how people experience religion in a Christian context. The purpose of this study was to explore the psychometric properties and the factorial structure of the PCBS in Colombian samples. The dimensions underlying the PCBS (inclusion vs. exclusion of transcendence and literal vs. symbolic) could only be identified when segmenting the sample using an independent measure of religious practice, the System of Belief Inventory (SBI). The procedure used to successfully identify the data structure proposed by the scale leads to suggest that the dimensions of religious experiences are highly sensitive to historical processes and that the orthogonal disposition of the PCBS sub-scales can be a by-product of secularisation and not religious experience only. This emphasises the need to use convergent measures of religiosity and highlights the difficulties of using measures whose context sensitivity has not been tested. The results also offer the opportunity to critically analyse the assumptions of standardisation practices around psychometric tests.