Differences and similarities in religious and paranormal beliefs: a typology of distinct faith signatures

Abstract

We applied latent class analysis (LCA) to derive a statistically reliable typology of religious and paranormal beliefs in a large, diverse sample of New Zealanders (N=4422). We identified five patterns of belief, which we call faith signatures, reflecting distinct combinations of high or low belief in different religious teachings and paranormal phenomena. Although conventional wisdom pits agnostics against religious believers, we found that undifferentiated skeptics (41%) and religious exclusives (12%) expressed similarly high levels of disbelief for most types of paranormal phenomena, with religious exclusives showing traditional religious beliefs only. Also, we found striking similarities between undifferentiated believers (9%), New Age spiritualists (13%), and moderate agnostics (25%), all of whom accorded belief to supernatural realities across a number of religious and paranormal phenomena. However, only undifferentiated believers committed to the truth of superstitions. Importantly, we also found that faith signatures are reliably associated with demographic variables and core psychological traits (anomie, trust, and happiness). Thus, LCA reveals that the classifications “religious” and “secular” obscure subtleties in distinct categories of supernatural orientations. Furthermore, by scratching the surface of what appears to be a highly secular society, our results challenge conventional distinctions between religious and secular orientations. The key distinction is not between belief and disbelief but rather between levels of discrimination in different types of belief.

Keywords:

• anomie
• cognition
• latent class analysis
• paranormal
• religion
• secularization

Acknowledgements

This paper was conceived and the majority of the research conducted while Marc Wilson and Chris Sibley were on sabbatical at Harvard University. We are grateful to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Victoria University URF Grant #8-3046-108855 for supporting Joseph Bulbulia and Chris Sibley. We are grateful to Richard Sosis, Lara Greaves, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.