Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale

Abstract

The Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale (IPRO) is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by Kenneth I. Pargament and colleagues in 1987 to conceptualize, quantify, and evaluate the phenomenon of indiscriminate proreligiousness within empirical psychology of religion. Rooted in critical reassessments of Gordon W. Allport and J. Michael Ross's (1967) classic framework of intrinsic versus extrinsic religious orientations, the IPRO addresses the methodological and conceptual artifact of individuals who indiscriminately endorse favorable religious statements regardless of their plausibility. Rather than treating this pattern merely as response acquiescence or an illogical contradiction, the IPRO operationalizes indiscriminate proreligiousness across two distinct ecological dimensions: the Congregational Proreligiousness Scale (PRO-C), comprising 16 items assessing idealized perceptions of church life, leadership, and community functioning; and the Personal Proreligiousness Scale (PRO-P), comprising 12 items evaluating absolutist or implausibly virtuous personal beliefs, spiritual devotion, and behavioral compliance. Both subscales utilize a forced-choice True/False response format that compels respondents to choose between an implausible proreligious extreme and a nuanced, realistic alternative. Psychometric evaluations across diverse samples—including adult church congregants and university students—demonstrate adequate internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from .75 to .82 for PRO-C, and .59 to .75 for PRO-P), stable factor structures via promax oblique rotation, and robust convergent and discriminant validity against measures of social desirability (Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), congregational climate, and general religious salience. The IPRO serves as an indispensable tool for controlling response bias, clarifying typological classifications, and exploring the functional implications of religious idealization.

Keywords

Indiscriminate Proreligiousness, IPRO, Religious Orientation Scale, Kenneth Pargament, Gordon Allport, Congregational Proreligiousness, Personal Proreligiousness, Psychometrics, Religious Coping, Response Bias

Authors

The Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of psychometricians and clinical psychologists led by Kenneth I. Pargament at Bowling Green State University, in collaboration with Michael T. Brannick, Harold Adamakos, David S. Ensing, Mark L. Kelemen, Robert K. Warren, Kathryn Falgout, Paul Cook, and John Myers.

Principal Investigator:

• Kenneth I. Pargament, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. Renowned internationally for his pioneering empirical and theoretical research into the psychology of religion, religious coping mechanisms, spirituality, and mental health.
• Michael T. Brannick, Ph.D.: Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida, specializing in industrial-organizational psychology, quantitative research methodology, and measurement theory.
• Collaborating Co-investigators: Harold Adamakos, David S. Ensing, Mark L. Kelemen, Robert K. Warren, Kathryn Falgout, Paul Cook, and John Myers, who contributed to instrument design, institutional sampling, and psychometric validation.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale (IPRO) is to provide empirical researchers and clinical assessors with a standardized psychometric instrument designed to measure an individual's tendency to accept, endorse, and project uniformly positive, idealizing assessments of religious phenomena, independent of factual plausibility or realistic human limitations. In empirical studies of religion and mental health, self-report measures are routinely confounded by self-presentation biases, socially desirable responding, spiritual impression management, and cognitive oversimplification. The IPRO was engineered specifically to disentangle genuine religious commitment and integration from uncritical, defensive, or indiscriminate religious idealization.

From a research perspective, the IPRO addresses a longstanding methodological vulnerability inherent in Gordon Allport and J. Michael Ross's (1967) Religious Orientation Scale (ROS). In ROS research, participants who scored above the median on both the Intrinsic (I) and Extrinsic (E) subscales were categorized as "indiscriminately proreligious." Allport conceptualized this endorsement pattern as evidence of cognitive muddleheadedness, uncritical thinking, or undifferentiated social acquiescence. However, researchers lacked an independent, psychometrically validated scale designed intentionally to measure indiscriminate endorsement as a psychological construct in its own right, rather than treating it merely as a statistical interaction or residual quadrant resulting from median splits.

The clinical and applied utility of the IPRO extends into the domains of psychological assessment, pastoral counseling, and community psychology. In congregational consultation, assessing congregational proreligiousness (PRO-C) enables researchers and organizational consultants to identify whether members possess a realistic appraisal of church leadership and interpersonal dynamics or whether they engage in collective denial regarding interpersonal conflict, systemic insensitivity, or programmatic deficits. In individual psychotherapy and pastoral care, the personal subscale (PRO-P) allows clinicians to detect rigid, perfectionistic spiritual defenses. Individuals exhibiting extreme personal proreligiousness may struggle with toxic guilt, severe cognitive dissonance, or spiritual bypass when confronted with unavoidable human doubts, negative emotions, or personal transgressions, because their internalized standard demands infallible faith and behavioral perfection.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct of indiscriminate proreligiousness is operationally defined by Pargament and colleagues (1987) as the propensity to affirm religious statements across cognitive, affective, behavioral, and organizational domains, irrespective of their logical plausibility or real-world accuracy. The construct reflects an extreme evaluative bias characterized by idealization, overgeneralization, and defensiveness regarding religious life. To capture the ecological complexity of religious experience, the construct is bifurcated into two correlated yet conceptually independent dimensions: Congregational Proreligiousness (PRO-C) and Personal Proreligiousness (PRO-P).

1. Congregational Proreligiousness (PRO-C)

The PRO-C dimension encompasses an idealized, conflict-free, and omnicompetent conceptualization of one's religious institution, fellow congregants, and clergy. This facet operationalizes indiscriminate proreligiousness across key organizational facets of church life, including governance, leadership responsiveness, interpersonal warmth, volunteer recruitment, programming adequacy, and interpersonal harmony. A respondent endorsing high congregational proreligiousness asserts that the local faith community is entirely free from standard human institutional flaws.

For example, high scorers endorse absolute statements such as "Tensions do not exist among members of this church" and "There are no cliques in this church," while rejecting universally observable human phenomena represented in reverse-scored items such as "Some church activities are boring" or "Church leaders are sometimes insensitive to members' needs." Conceptually, PRO-C does not gauge healthy congregational satisfaction or theological commitment; rather, it reflects institutional sanctification, cognitive minimization of structural flaws, and the defensive denial of interpersonal friction within the religious system.

2. Personal Proreligiousness (PRO-P)

The PRO-P dimension captures an unblemished, hyper-virtuous representation of the individual's own internal religious and devotional life. It reflects the ideological, ritual, consequential, and devotional expressions of religiosity taken to an implausibly perfect extreme. High PRO-P individuals characterize their personal spiritual lives as devoid of doubt, moral lapse, spiritual dryness, or motivational conflict.

Illustrative items require the respondent to affirm statements such as "I always live by my religious beliefs," "My religious beliefs guide me in every one of my daily actions," and "I never disobey the teachings of my faith." Concurrently, they reject normal human variations in religious experience, answering "False" to items such as "Sometimes I daydream during services" and "There have been times when I doubted the existence of God." Rather than indexing mature religious coping or intrinsic devotion, PRO-P captures spiritual impression management, moral scrupulosity, or an inability to tolerate cognitive nuance and developmental ambiguity in one's personal faith journey.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of the Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale is embedded within the intersection of personality theory, psychology of religion, and cognitive-ecological models of human functioning. The primary theoretical impetus originated as an explicit critique and refinement of Gordon Allport's foundational work on religious orientation.

Allport's Intrinsic-Extrinsic Dichotomy and the Typological Dilemma

In their seminal formulation, Allport and Ross (1967) distinguished between two primary motivational orientations toward religion: the intrinsic orientation, wherein individuals view religion as an end in itself (they "live" their religion), and the extrinsic orientation, wherein religion serves instrumental, self-serving, or utilitarian ends such as status, security, or social connection (they "use" their religion). Allport postulated that these two orientations should theoretically exist in an inverse relationship. However, empirical factor analyses frequently revealed that intrinsic and extrinsic items formed orthogonal or positively correlated dimensions rather than opposite poles of a single continuum.

To reconcile this finding, Allport and Ross constructed a 2 × 2 typological matrix based on median splits:

• Consistently Intrinsic: High Intrinsic, Low Extrinsic
• Consistently Extrinsic: Low Intrinsic, High Extrinsic
• Indiscriminately Proreligious: High Intrinsic, High Extrinsic
• Indiscriminately Antireligious (or Nonreligious): Low Intrinsic, Low Extrinsic

Allport viewed the "indiscriminately proreligious" group with skepticism, interpreting their endorsement of both intrinsic and extrinsic items as evidence of an acquiescent response set, cognitive confusion, or an indiscriminate urge to embrace any favorable religious label. Furthermore, Allport observed that this indiscriminately proreligious quadrant consistently scored highest on measures of ethnic prejudice and dogmatism.

Pargament's Reconceptualization

Kenneth Pargament challenged Allport's assumption that high intrinsic and high extrinsic scores represent an illogical or contradictory mental state. Pargament argued that an individual can logically, meaningfully, and coherently both "live" and "use" their religion. A deeply committed believer might draw profound existential meaning and internal spiritual guidance from faith (intrinsic), while simultaneously valuing church attendance for fellowship, community support, and emotional solace during times of stress (extrinsic).

Consequently, Pargament and his team posited that if indiscriminate proreligiousness is a meaningful clinical and psychological phenomenon, it must not be defined circularly through a statistical artifact of the ROS. Instead, it must be conceptualized as an independent psychological construct characterized by an indiscriminate tendency to evaluate religious material favorably regardless of plausibility. By constructing items that pair highly religious claims with implausible, absolutist premises, the IPRO forces respondents to distinguish between authentic religious commitment and uncritical idealization.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and content validities of the Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale have been established across multiple empirical investigations involving diverse religious populations, church members, and undergraduate student cohorts.

Content and Structural Validity

Content validity was established through comprehensive item generation covering the primary domains of religious engagement identified in sociological and psychological literature: leadership, interpersonal dynamics, educational programming, devotional habits, ritual practice, and ethical compliance. In the initial validation study conducted by Pargament et al. (1987), an exploratory factor analysis with promax oblique rotation supported a stable two-factor structure corresponding cleanly to the hypothesized Congregational (PRO-C) and Personal (PRO-P) dimensions. All retained items demonstrated primary factor loadings of .20 or higher. Crucially, acquiescent response set bias was mitigated through the systematic inclusion of balanced reverse-scored items (8 reverse-scored items on PRO-C; 5 on PRO-P).

Discriminant Validity: Social Desirability

A central psychometric concern when measuring idealization is whether the instrument merely assesses generalized social desirability or need for approval. To evaluate this, Pargament et al. (1987) examined correlations between the IPRO subscales and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1964):

• In the adult church congregant sample ($N = 261$), Marlowe-Crowne correlated moderately with PRO-P ($r = .52$) and weakly with PRO-C ($r = .29$).
• In the university student sample ($N = 305$), Marlowe-Crowne correlated moderately with PRO-P ($r = .49$) and weakly with PRO-C ($r = .31$).

These moderate coefficients confirm that while PRO-P shares some variance with generalized impression management, both subscales retain substantial unique variance (accounting for approximately 73% to 91% of non-shared variance), demonstrating that indiscriminate proreligiousness is distinct from general social desirability.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

The convergent and discriminant validity of the IPRO is further supported by differential correlation patterns across external religious and organizational criteria:

• Inter-subscale Correlation: PRO-C and PRO-P correlated moderately with each other ($r = .40$ in church members; $r = .44$ in students), indicating that they assess related but psychometrically distinct domains of religious idealization.
• Congregational Climate and Satisfaction: Across church and student samples, PRO-C exhibited substantially stronger median correlations with measures of congregational climate, institutional satisfaction, and perceived community support ($r = .43$) compared to PRO-P ($r = .22$) and the Marlowe-Crowne scale ($r = .14$).
• Personal Religious Commitment: Conversely, PRO-P demonstrated significantly higher median correlations with indicators of individual religiousness—such as intrinsic religious orientation (Hoge, 1972), frequency of prayer, church attendance, religious salience, orthodoxy, and God-control beliefs—yielding a median $r = .30$, compared to PRO-C ($r = .10$) and Marlowe-Crowne ($r = .09$).
• Relation to Allport's Typology: When evaluating Allport and Ross's 2 × 2 typology on the ROS, individuals categorized as "indiscriminately proreligious" displayed modest but statistically significant positive associations with PRO-P, verifying that the scale successfully isolates the construct Allport identified while removing methodological confounding.

Reliability

The reliability of the Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale has been documented across normative samples reflecting different developmental stages and religious engagement levels.

Internal Consistency

In the original validation study by Pargament et al. (1987), internal consistency was evaluated separately for the Congregational Form (PRO-C, 16 items) and the Personal Form (PRO-P, 12 items) using Cronbach's alpha across two distinct demographic samples:

• Adult Church Sample ($N = 261$): Drawn from two Lutheran congregations ($N = 155$) and one Presbyterian congregation ($N = 106$) in Michigan (median age = 43 years; 41% male). Cronbach's alpha was $.78$ for PRO-C and $.75$ for PRO-P, demonstrating solid internal consistency for both subscales in mature, church-attending adult populations.
• University Student Sample ($N = 305$): Comprising church-going undergraduate volunteers from a Midwestern university (median age = 19 years; 27% male; 53% Roman Catholic, 43% Protestant, 4% Other). Cronbach's alpha was $.82$ for PRO-C, but dropped to $.59$ for PRO-P.

Psychometric Analysis of Subscale Discrepancy

The lower reliability of PRO-P within the student cohort ($lpha = .59$) was investigated by Pargament and colleagues. The authors attributed this attenuation to two key psychometric factors:

1. Restriction of Variance and Endorsement Ratios: In dichotomous true/false formats, item intercorrelations are mathematically constrained when endorsement proportions depart substantially from 50%. A notable proportion of student participants exhibited low endorsement frequencies on several extreme personal proreligiousness items, thereby attenuating inter-item covariance.
2. Developmental Integration: The student cohort scored significantly lower than the adult congregant sample on validated measures of intrinsic religious motivation (e.g., Hoge's 1972 Intrinsic Scale). Given that emerging adults often experience heightened religious questioning, exploration, and transition, their personal religious cognitive structures are less unified and consolidated, producing less stable response patterns across personal devotional statements.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale was rigorously evaluated during instrument development using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The researchers subjected the combined pool of candidate items to a principal axes factor analysis followed by an oblique (promax) rotation, accommodating the theoretical expectation that personal and congregational proreligious sentiments would be correlated.

Factor Extraction and Loadings

The factor extraction clearly confirmed a robust two-factor solution that accounted for the underlying item variance across both church-attending and student populations:

• Factor 1: Congregational Proreligiousness (PRO-C): Consisted of 16 items reflecting idealized institutional, pastoral, and interpersonal congregational attributes. All retained items yielded substantial factor loadings ($ge .20$, with the majority exceeding $.40$ to $.65$). Crucially, with the exception of only two PRO-C items that exhibited marginal secondary cross-loadings, items loaded cleanly and exclusively on their target factor.
• Factor 2: Personal Proreligiousness (PRO-P): Consisted of 12 items addressing personal devotional perfection, unquestioned adherence to religious rules, and total absence of religious doubt. Factor loadings on the target dimension were consistently above $.20$.

Bipolarity and Control for Acquiescence

The factor pattern matrix demonstrated that positively worded items (affirming absolute perfection) loaded positively, while negatively worded, reverse-scored items (acknowledging normal congregational problems or personal doubts) loaded negatively on the unrotated factors and positively once keyed properly. This structural pattern verifies that the factors do not represent method artifacts of positive versus negative item wording or pure acquiescence response sets, but rather substantive psychological dimensions reflecting a continuum between indiscriminate idealization and discriminating realism.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale is a self-administered, 28-item psychometric inventory consisting of two distinct modular subscales. It can be administered as a unified instrument or as independent subscales depending on research requirements.

Test Structure

• Total Item Count: 28 dichotomous items.
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Congregational Form (PRO-C): 16 items assessing idealization of church climate, clergy, and congregational dynamics.
  • Personal Form (PRO-P): 12 items assessing idealization of personal faith, ritual commitment, and moral infallibility.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized online survey.
• Time Required: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes for the full 28-item battery.
• Target Population: Churchgoers, religious adherents, adolescents, and adults across diverse theological traditions.

Response Format and Scoring Rules

• Response Options: Dichotomous forced-choice format: True or False.
• Item Directionality:
  • Congregational Form (PRO-C):
    • Regular Scored (8 items): 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 15.
    • Reverse Scored (8 items, marked with (R)): 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16.
  • Personal Form (PRO-P):
    • Regular Scored (7 items): 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11.
    • Reverse Scored (5 items, marked with (R)): 3, 5, 8, 10, 12.
• Scoring Protocol:
  • For regular items, an endorsement of True represents an indiscriminate proreligious response and is assigned 1 point; False is scored 0 points.
  • For reverse-scored items (R), an endorsement of False represents an indiscriminate proreligious response and is assigned 1 point; True is scored 0 points.
  • PRO-C Subscale Score: Sum of points across items 1–16 (Range: 0 to 16).
  • PRO-P Subscale Score: Sum of points across items 1–12 (Range: 0 to 12).
  • Total IPRO Score: Sum of PRO-C and PRO-P (Range: 0 to 28), where higher aggregate scores reflect greater indiscriminate proreligiousness.
• Categorical Classification Guidelines:
  • When using indiscriminate proreligiousness as a categorical independent variable in ANOVA or typological models, researchers are strongly cautioned against using sample-dependent median splits, which introduce severe classification instability across different samples.
  • Instead, investigators should apply the theoretical midpoints of the scales:
    • PRO-C: Scores $ge 8$ categorize an individual as High Congregational Proreligiousness.
    • PRO-P: Scores $ge 6$ categorize an individual as High Personal Proreligiousness.

Normative Reference Values

Baseline reference data established by Pargament et al. (1987) provide empirical benchmarks for comparative evaluation:

• Adult Church Congregant Sample ($N = 261$):
  • PRO-C Mean: $4.51$ ($SD = 3.19$)
  • PRO-P Mean: $4.01$ ($SD = 2.68$)
• University Student Sample ($N = 305$):
  • PRO-C Mean: $6.08$ ($SD = 3.75$)
  • PRO-P Mean: $4.23$ ($SD = 2.16$)

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Indiscriminate Proreligiousness Scale was officially published in 1987 in the peer-reviewed journal Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 182–200). The copyright for the original article belongs to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) and its publishing partners (Wiley-Blackwell).

Consistent with standard academic research conventions, the scale items and scoring guidelines were placed in the public domain for non-commercial, scholarly, educational, and clinical research purposes. Academic researchers, educators, and clinicians are permitted to reproduce and administer the scale without royalty fees, provided proper bibliographic attribution is given to Kenneth I. Pargament and his co-authors. Commercial software developers, assessment publishers, or entities seeking to integrate the scale into for-profit proprietary diagnostic suites must secure explicit formal permissions and appropriate licensing agreements from the copyright holder and authors.

References

• Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5(4), 432–443. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0021212
• Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1964). The approval motive: Studies in evaluative dependence. John Wiley & Sons.
• Hathaway, W. L., & Pargament, K. I. (1990). Intrinsic religiousness, religious coping, and psychosocial competence: A covariance structure analysis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 29(4), 423–441. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387310
• Hoge, D. R. (1972). A validated intrinsic religious motivation scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11(4), 369–376. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384677
• Pargament, K. I., Brannick, M. T., Adamakos, H., Ensing, D. S., Kelemen, M. L., Warren, R. K., Falgout, K., Cook, P., & Myers, J. (1987). Indiscriminate proreligiousness: Conceptualization and measurement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 26(2), 182–200. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385792
• Pargament, K. I., Ensing, D. S., Falgout, K., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Van Haitsma, K., & Warren, R. (1990). God help me (I): Religious coping efforts as predictors of the outcomes to significant life events. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18(6), 793–824. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00938065
• Pargament, K. I., Olsen, H., Reilly, B., Falgout, K., Ensing, D. S., & Van Haitsma, K. (1992). God help me (II): The relationship of religious orientations to religious coping with negative life events. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(4), 504–513. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386859

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)