Moral Development Level and Religious Behavior

Abstract

A basic assumption of Kohlberg's (4) cognitive-developmental approach to moral development is that formal learning has little impact on personal morality. Rest1 reported that moral development level is unrelated to either frequency of church attendance or religious denomination, and earlier findings (2) that behaviorally measured honesty is unrelated to Sunday School attendance. Thus, ethics training through institutionalized religion may not generalize to the greater sociery. Religion is now widely accepted as multidimensional, but comparisons of moral development level with indices of religion other than frequency of church attendance nr denomination do not appear in the literature. The current study aimed to extend the measures of religion into other areas of behavior and into belief. Rest's1 adaptation of the Kohlberg moral dilemma questionnaire was administered to 80 psychology undergraduates who volunteered for extra academic credit. Ten males and ten females, mean ages 20.1 and 20.3 yr., respectively, were enrolled in each undergraduate academic year. At the same time, the subjects also received a questionnaire of personal religious behavior, the scale of intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation ( 1 ) , and a measure of belief in the Bible as the literal word of God (3). The Hogge and Friedman scale has a reported split-half reliability of .92 and discriminates well among members of distinctive religions like Unitarians and Southern Baptists. Mean scores were 105.8 for moral development (SD = 20.8), 45.7 for scriptural literalism (SD = 12.0). and 54.0 for intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation (SD = 3.2). Pearson r between subject's level of moral development and intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation (r = -.01, df = 79) was nonsignificant. The correlation between subject's morality and literal scriptural belief (r = .44, df = 79, p < .01) was significant and accounted for 19% of the total variance. Also significant was the cotrelation between scriptural literalism and religious orientation (r = .64, df = 79, p < .01). These results support the half-century old Hartshorne and May (2) findings and suggest that studies relating moral development to religious belief may need to assess some aspects of religion other than frequencies of church attendance and prayer.