The interplay between post–critical beliefs and self–consciousness

Abstract

D. Wulff (1991) developed a notion of post-critical beliefs as a proposal for the description of religion in the light of the progress of secularization and socio-cultural changes. According to his theory, we can situate(place) potential attitudes toward religion in a two-dimensional space. The vertical dimension stands for Inclusion vs. Exclusion of Transcendence, and the horizontal one-for the way an individual interprets religious content: Literal vs. Symbolic. In this way, the two dimensions determine four quadrants, each reflecting a potential attitude towards religion, operationalized by D. Hutsebaut (1996) in the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS) as: Orthodoxy, External Critique, Relativism and Second Naiveté. The research presented in this paper is our attempt at fi n ding an answer to the question whether the religious attitudes determined by Wulff are related to self-consciousness types. We tested 159 adult individuals by means of the PCBS scale by D. Hutsebaut and the Self-consciousness scale (O-Z scale) by Z. Zaborowski and Z. Oleszkiewicz. The results of these tests are that the refl ective type of self-consciousness correlated positively with Orthodoxy and Second Naiveté and negatively with External Critique and Relativism