Varieties of Quest and the Religious Openness Hypothesis within Religious Fundamentalist and Biblical Foundationalist Ideological Surrounds

P Watson,Ronald Morris,Zhuo Chen

doi:10.3390/rel5010001

P Watson, Ronald Morris + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/rel5010001

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Abstract

According to the Religious Openness Hypothesis, the religious and psychological openness of American Christians is obscured by a defensive ghettoization of thought associated with a Religious Fundamentalist Ideological Surround and can be discovered instead within a Biblical Foundationalist Ideological Surround. A test of this claim examined Religious Fundamentalism, Biblical Foundationalism, Quest, and Multidimensional Quest Scales in 432 undergraduates. Christian Religious Reflection, Religious Schema, and Religious Orientation measures clarified these two ideological surrounds. Partial correlations controlling for Biblical Foundationalism described a Religious Fundamentalist Ideological Surround that more strongly rejected Quest and that more generally displayed a failure to integrate faith with intellect. Partial correlations controlling for Religious Fundamentalism revealed a Biblical Foundationalist Ideological Surround that was more open to Quest and that offered numerous demonstrations of an ability to unite faith with intellect. These data supplemented previous investigations in demonstrating that Christianity and other traditional religions have ideological resources for promoting a faithful intellect.

Highlights

Implicit in the research of many psychologists interested in religion is the assumption that reason supplies a universal standard for evaluating faith
Against any simple embrace of this assumption, the Ideological Surround Model (ISM) develops the postmodern argument that dominant perspectives within professional psychology and traditional religion operate as incommensurable social rationalities [1,2,3,4]
Data for the various multidimensional operationalizations of Quest seemed usefully clarified in terms of their categorization as Agnostic and Non-Agnostic by Beck and Jessup [27]

Summary

Introduction

Implicit in the research of many psychologists interested in religion is the assumption that reason supplies a universal standard for evaluating faith. Against any simple embrace of this assumption, the Ideological Surround Model (ISM) develops the postmodern argument that dominant perspectives within professional psychology and traditional religion operate as incommensurable social rationalities [1,2,3,4]. To say that social rationalities are incommensurable is not to say that they are wholly incompatible. Rationalities are incommensurable to the extent that they bring communal thought and practices into alignment with different ultimate standards. Christianity and other religious traditions organize life relative to some community-specific vision of God. Social sciences instead pursue thought and practices that reflect an at least tacit commitment to some reading of nature. “supernatural” and “natural” ideological surrounds will lack a common standard that makes it possible to adjudicate between the two or to falsify one system of rationality based upon the other. Christian Psychology deserves to be studied in its own right as a separate system of social rationality [5,6,7]

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