Thou shalt worship no other gods — unless they are celebrities: the relationship between celebrity worship and religious orientation

Abstract

The Celebrity Attitude Scale, Quest Scale, and the Age-Universal I-E scale-12 were given to 307 British participants in an attempt to provide further psychometric validation of the former and determine the relationship between celebrity worship and religiosity. Results generally supported those of an earlier study showing that the Celebrity Attitude Scale has good psychometric properties. Results also indicated that as religiosity increases for both men and women the tendency to “worship” celebrities decreases. However, the mean of the 12 relationships reported here was only −0.20, suggesting that many religious people apparently ignore the religious teaching that “Thou shalt worship no other Gods,” or fail to connect it to their “worship” of celebrities. A series of multiple regressions revealed combinations of celebrity-related and religiosity measures that predicted scores on the Celebrity Attitude Scale and its three factors.