Cultural Influences on Religious Experience and Motivation

Abstract

The present investigation focused on possible cultural influences on religious experience and religious motivation among 165 Orthodox Israeli Jews from Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Ethiopian cultural backgrounds. Discriminantfunction analysis was performed on measures of introvertive, extrovertive and interpretive religious experience as measured by the M-Scale (Hood 1975) and measures of religious motivation as measured by the MRBQ (Lazar, Kravetz, and Frederich-Kedem 2002). This analysis showed that a combination of experience and motivation measures -interpretive religious experience coupled with non-family based religious motivations - distinguished between these groups belonging to the same religion but coming from different cultural backgrounds, thus providing support for cultural influence on these religious variables.