The Circumplex of Faith Modes

Abstract

This article presents the Circumplex of Faith Modes (CFM), a model that integrates and organizes the existing body of knowledge about the types of religiousness in the Allportian approach and related strands of research. The model was developed from the emic perspective, describing the various forms of Christian religiousness understood as the relationship between man and God within the community of the Church. Here, faith plays out in two domains: the relationship with Transcendence (God) and the relationship with the community of the Church (the psychosocial domain). In both domains, the various faith modes are described using two orthogonal dimensions: in the former domain these are (1) one’s attitude to God/relationship with God and (2) one’s attitude to the doctrine/rites/prescriptions/law; and in the latter domain the dimensions are (1) the significance/role of the religious community and (2) the role/strength of self in one’s personal attitude to God and the doctrine. The circumplex was created by superimposing the orthogonal dimensions of the two domains rotated by 45 degrees with respect to one another, with the four dimensions forming its main axes. The resulting model distinguishes and describes eight modes of faith (poles of the four dimensions), which are related to one another in specific ways and which comprise the Circumplex of Faith Modes.