Comments on Hoge's "Free Will Behavior Index"

Abstract

Writing in the late 1960s during the height of political and social turmoil throughout America, Martin E. Marty (1970) described two opposing "parties" in contemporary American Protestantism. On the one hand were "Private" Protestants whose faith "accented individual salvation out of the world, personal moral life . . . , [and] rewards or punishments in another world in a life to come." The other "party" (which Marty called "Public Protestantism") was "public insofar as it was more exposed to the social order and the social destinies of men" (Marty, 1970:179). Although these theological traditions had existed side by side throughout the early 19th century, Marty argued that opposing theological parties solidified during the industrializing and urbanizing post-Civil War era. Taking his cue from Marty, Dean R. Hoge (1976) developed several indices to assess the various components of this twol-party experience. One component was a continuum with the presumed poles of "free will vs. the social interpretation of human behavior" (Hoge, 1976:75). According to Hoge, persons adhering to the "Private" pole of this component are expected to, stress "the will of the individual as the main determinant of behavior. . . . Social problems are at their root personal problems, and the best way to approach them is to appeal to the will of the individual." The programmatic implications of this perspective for Christians involve personal evangelism and conversion. Believers who fall within the "Public" party would hold "that social impacts on the individual are so great that individual freedom is limited. Social forces often overwhelm individual will power, and many social problems demand action to change those forces." The practical consequences for Christians having this perspective are corporate efforts towards large-scale social change. Measuring this bi-polar dimension has been particularly difficult. In two separate surveys-one in 1972 of selected New Jersey Presbyterians and the other in 1973 of a nationwide sample of Presbyterians (Hoge, 1976:135-136) -Hoge used a total of eight Likert-type items (4 items in each study) to assess this dimension. From these sets of four items Hoge selected the three most highly inter-correlated in each survey to measure the Free Will Behavior issue. Hoge, et al. (1978) used a three-item Free Will Behavior Index in conjunction with several other indices to, test Marty's two-party hypothesis. They found that: