Inventory of Religious Concepts

Abstract

The Inventory of Religious Concepts (IRC) is a specialized psychometric assessment instrument developed in 1947 by educational researcher Harold Baker Dunkel under the auspices of the American Council on Education‘s Cooperative Study in General Education. Designed primarily as an evaluative module within the broader Inventory of General Life Goals, the IRC was constructed to investigate the empirical contributions of religious dogma, spiritual reflection, and moral philosophy to undergraduate students’ broader outlooks on life during a transitional period in post-World War II American higher education. The complete inventory comprises 130 items: 120 items divided evenly or proportionally across ten specific thematic subscales, and an ancillary 10-item exploratory index addressing idiosyncratic, esoteric, or marginal theological tenets. The ten substantive dimensions evaluate: (1) Hebrew-Christian Concept of God, (2) Attitudes toward God (Theism and Nontheism), (3) Historic Christian Doctrines and Practices, (4) Nontraditional Expressions of Religious Values, (5) Attitudes toward the Bible, (6) Support of the Church, (7) Attitudes toward the Economic Order, (8) Attitudes of Christians toward War, (9) One’s Sense of Worth or Purpose, and (10) Freedom and Determinism. Rather than implementing conventional unipolar or bipolar evaluative labels that carry normative connotations—such as “liberal versus conservative” or “devout versus secular”—the inventory employs an ideologically neutral categorical scheme designated as x (affirmation/agreement), y (rejection/disagreement), u (uncertainty), and n (no opinion or perceived irrelevance/meaninglessness). Classical test theory evaluation across a standardization cohort of approximately 700 collegiate students demonstrated internal consistency coefficients (estimated via Kuder-Richardson Formula 21) ranging from .44 for the Economic Order and Sense of Worth dimensions to .86 for Historic Christian Doctrines and Practices. While contemporary statistical factor modeling was not conducted during its initial formulation, the instrument represents a landmark historical effort to systematically quantify the multidimensionality of religious attitudes, higher criticism, socioeconomic ethics, and existential phenomenology in academic contexts.

Keywords

Inventory of Religious Concepts, Harold B. Dunkel, American Council on Education, General Education in the Humanities, Religious Attitudes Measurement, Protestant Orthodoxy, Biblical Higher Criticism, Christian Pacifism, Kuder-Richardson Formula 21, Classical Test Theory, Higher Education Assessment

Authors

The Inventory of Religious Concepts was formulated under the directorship of Harold Baker Dunkel, Ph.D. (1912–1990), who served as a research associate for the Cooperative Study in General Education organized by the American Council on Education (ACE). Dunkel was a prominent educational theorist, classical scholar, and psychometrician affiliated with the University of Chicago. The development of the scale was not merely an isolated psychometric endeavor but the collective product of the Committee on the Humanities of the Cooperative Study, which integrated faculty representatives, theologians, and curriculum specialists from twenty-two participating American colleges and universities. Administrative and institutional oversight was provided by the American Council on Education, located in Washington, D.C., which published the comprehensive findings in the landmark volume General Education in the Humanities (Dunkel, 1947).

Purpose

The foundational rationale behind the formulation of the Inventory of Religious Concepts was pedagogical, institutional, and diagnostic. During the late 1930s and 1940s, American higher education experienced an introspective reorientation concerning the overarching objectives of the liberal arts curriculum. Colleges sought to determine how core humanistic and spiritual studies influenced students’ evolving philosophies of life. The Cooperative Study in General Education sought to create objective, standardized instruments that could systematically identify students’ religious, ethical, and moral beliefs upon collegiate matriculation, track longitudinal shifts resulting from general education, and facilitate instructional adaptations tailored to empirical student needs.

From an applied research and clinical counseling perspective, the IRC served several interconnected purposes:

• Institutional Curriculum Diagnostic: It enabled academic institutions—particularly church-related colleges, independent liberal arts institutions, and municipal universities—to appraise whether their humanistic and theological curricula were fostering critical thinking, biblical literacy, or dogmatic entrenchment.
• Idiographic Profiling: Through Dunkel’s fourfold scoring paradigm ($x, y, u, n$), instructors and student personnel workers could analyze an individual student’s intellectual tensions. For instance, counseling faculty could detect compartmentalized cognitions, such as simultaneously endorsing scientific evolution and theological fundamentalism, or exhibiting pronounced spiritual commitment alongside severe existential alienation.
• Investigating the Intersections of Faith and Social Action: The IRC explicitly challenged the notion that religious belief exists in a cognitive vacuum. By integrating subscales examining free enterprise versus socialized economies, and pacifism versus justified military force, the scale was intended to assess how theological tenets translate into civic, political, and economic worldviews.
• Delineation of Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy: The scale provided a nuanced mechanism for distinguishing students who totally rejected theological frameworks from those who rejected historic dogma yet embraced nontraditional, humanistic, or naturalistic expressions of ultimate concern.

Although initially developed for Christian (predominantly Protestant) undergraduate cohorts, the conceptual blueprint of the IRC laid the groundwork for contemporary multivariable inventories of religious orientation, worldview coherence, and existential maturity.

Psychological Construct

The central psychological construct operationalized by the Inventory of Religious Concepts is multidimensional religious orientation and theological posture. Unlike unipolar scales measuring mere frequency of devotion or institutional adherence, the IRC conceptualizes religious cognition as an intricate nexus of theological beliefs, epistemic presuppositions, moral imperatives, socioeconomic philosophies, and existential self-evaluations. The overarching construct is partitioned into ten distinct psychological dimensions:

1. Hebrew-Christian Concept of God (10 Items)

This subscale measures the cognitive acceptance or rejection of classical anthropomorphic, paternal, and providential representations of the Divine. High $x$ scores represent an individual who warmly embraces traditional biblical metaphors—viewing God as a loving Father, an intimate Companion sharing in worldly tragedy, an omniscient creator, and an active sovereign directing cosmic events toward a redemptive teleology. Conversely, high $y$ scores reflect an epistemic dismissal of anthropomorphic language as obsolete, infantile, or scientifically unsupportable.

2. Attitudes toward God: Theism and Nontheism (10 Items)

Operating as an ideological counterpoint to the first subscale, this construct evaluates secular humanism, naturalism, and theological skepticism. Items capture the extent to which an individual views the concept of God as an unnecessary vestige, an obstacle to social responsibility, or a mere projective symbol of human ideals. Here, an $x$ designation reflects a resolute nontheistic or agnostic stance (affirming that humans must solve global challenges without supernatural intervention), whereas a $y$ designation represents the active rejection of nontheism in favor of transcendent divine reality.

3. Historic Christian Doctrines and Practices (20 Items)

This dimension quantifies alignment with historic Protestant orthodoxy and creedal dogma. It assesses assent to core systematic doctrines: the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead, original sin and the inherent depravity of human nature, substitutionary atonement via the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, bodily resurrection, the virgin birth, personal salvation exclusively through grace, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, eschatological judgment (heaven and a literal hell), and sacramental participation in baptism and Holy Communion. Endorsement ($x$) signifies adherence to systematic orthodox dogma, while divergence ($y$) indicates heterodoxy or theological modernism.

4. Nontraditional Expressions of Religious Values (10 Items)

Capturing the influence of religious naturalism, process theology, and the Social Gospel, this construct gauges openness to reimagining divine reality through functional, moral, and sociological frameworks. High $x$ respondents perceive God as the “personality-producing force,” the “integrating reality of life,” or the power operating toward righteousness, defining sin functionally as anything that impedes human flourishing. This dimension differentiates secularized individuals from those who possess rich spiritual commitments untethered to creedal literalism.

5. Attitudes toward the Bible (20 Items)

This scale isolates epistemic approaches to sacred scripture, specifically demarcating biblical literalism/inerrancy from higher historical-critical scholarship. Items probe belief in physical miracles (e.g., Jesus walking on water, raising the dead), verbal inspiration, predictive messianic prophecy, and the literal truth of Genesis creationism. Conversely, reversed items assess the recognition of mythological motifs, legendary narratives, composite authorship, and evolutionary biology. An $x$ profile signifies biblical traditionalism, while a $y$ profile indicates an endorsement of higher biblical and literary criticism.

6. Support of the Church (10 Items)

This construct examines institutional religiosity and ecclesial commitment. It measures the valuation of the institutional church as an indispensable divine-human society, the perceived necessity of regular public worship for spiritual development, and willingness to support ecclesial evangelism, foreign missions, and operational finances. High $y$ scores identify anticlerical sentiments, institutional alienation, or the conviction that secular civic bodies can replace religious bodies.

7. Attitudes toward the Economic Order (10 Items)

Recognizing the intimate historical link between religious conviction and social ethics, this scale measures alignment with laissez-faire capitalism versus democratic socialism. It assesses principles regarding absolute private property rights, the societal benefits of commercial competition, and minimal government regulation ($x$), contrasted with collective public ownership, the socialization of medicine, and cooperative economic planning ($y$).

8. Attitudes of Christians toward War (10 Items)

This subscale evaluates ethical frameworks regarding state-sanctioned violence and the doctrine of the “just war” versus radical Christian pacifism (associated historically with the historic peace churches such as the Society of Friends/Quakers, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren). Affirming $x$ reflects the conviction that armed force is justifiable in defense of ideals and that national military service is a Christian obligation; affirming $y$ reflects absolute nonviolence, refusal to participate in warfare, and adherence to the principle of the Cross as incompatible with lethal combat.

9. One’s Sense of Worth or Purpose (10 Items)

Measuring the subjective existential outcome of worldview formation, this dimension gauges an individual’s personal sense of meaning, perceived divine teleology, and self-efficacy. High positive scores reflect an internal conviction that one’s life possesses transcendent significance and that God has placed the individual in the world to make a meaningful contribution. Depressed scores capture anomie, purposelessness, drabness of existence, and existential despair.

10. Freedom and Determinism (10 Items)

This philosophical construct appraises human agency versus mechanistic determinism. Items probe the degree to which human actions, character, and moral choices are viewed as completely controlled by heredity, subconscious processes, Pavlovian/behavioral conditioning, and socioeconomic forces ($x$), versus traditional assertions of free will, personal moral agency, and individual accountability ($y$).

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Inventory of Religious Concepts is rooted in the early-to-mid 20th-century intersection of educational progressivism, functional psychology, and the theological controversies of Modernism versus Fundamentalism. Four primary intellectual currents directly structured Dunkel’s conceptualization:

1. The Cooperative General Education Movement and Functionalism

Under the intellectual leadership of educational philosophers influenced by John Dewey and the University of Chicago school of thought, general education was conceived as an effort to cultivate the whole person. The Cooperative Study in General Education operated on the premise that formal schooling must examine not merely cognitive mastery of discrete disciplines, but the functional integration of values, attitudes, and life goals. In General Education in the Humanities, Dunkel argued that a student’s “philosophy of life” is the ultimate integrating capstone of their intellect. Religion was operationalized not as an isolated metaphysical abstraction, but as a dynamic psychological force shaping ethical choices, political preferences, and psychological resilience.

2. The Modernist-Fundamentalist Polarization

The decades preceding the instrument’s publication were characterized by profound theological upheaval in American Protestantism, known historically as the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy. The rise of Darwinian evolutionary biology, archaeological discoveries in the Ancient Near East, and European historical-critical methodologies (pioneered by figures such as Julius Wellhausen) created a sharp rift within academic and ecclesial institutions. The IRC was theoretically configured to map a student’s cognitive position along this specific epistemological continuum—evaluating whether an individual’s belief system was anchored in pre-critical inerrancy or adapted to scientific naturalism and the Social Gospel movement championed by Walter Rauschenbusch.

3. Thurstone’s Psychophysical Attitude Scaling

From a psychometric standpoint, the IRC emerged following the groundbreaking methodological innovations of Louis Leon Thurstone and E. J. Chave, who demonstrated in their 1929 monograph The Measurement of Attitude that subjective religious inclinations could be quantitatively scaled. Dunkel integrated Thurstone’s fundamental insight—that attitudes represent affect for or against a psychological object—while expanding it into a multi-categorical typological paradigm capable of preserving uncertainty and cognitive dissonance.

4. Idiographic Existential Psychology

The scale anticipates the subsequent theoretical contributions of Gordon Allport (specifically the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation) and existential psychology (as articulated by Viktor Frankl). Dunkel’s insistence on capturing “One’s Sense of Worth” alongside doctrinal assent highlights the theoretical conviction that theological beliefs fundamentally serve an existential buffering function, either conferring profound existential coherence or producing neurosis when unexamined dogmas clash with scientific inquiry.

Validity

The validity framework of the Inventory of Religious Concepts presents a fascinating historical snapshot of psychometric methodology during the mid-1940s, prior to the ubiquitous adoption of modern structural equation modeling and standardized construct validation protocols.

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was rigorously established through iterative expert consensus. The items were not fabricated by a single researcher; rather, intercollegiate committees comprising theologians, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists across twenty-two diverse higher education institutions drafted, debated, and refined the item pool. Items were deliberately sampled to reflect representative ecclesiastical debates, classic liturgical confessions (such as the Apostles’ Creed), and pervasive socio-political controversies of the era. The face validity of the resulting 120 categorized statements was regarded as exceptionally robust by participating faculties.

Concurrent Validity

Although formal quantitative concurrent validation was curtailed prior to the publication of the final 1947 report due to the wartime mobilization of key psychometric personnel, Dunkel reported critical preliminary criterion-related associations. Specifically, inventory scores in the categories assessing the Hebrew-Christian Concept of God and Support of the Church exhibited substantial positive correlations with established Thurstone Attitude Scales measuring attitudes toward God and the Church. Students affirming orthodox statements on the IRC showed near-perfect convergence with high positive attitude ratings on the Thurstone benchmarks.

Idiographic and Clinical Case-Study Validation

In lieu of extensive multivariate matrices, Dunkel demonstrated construct and discriminative validity through detailed qualitative case studies of student archetypes based on frequency distributions across the $x, y, u,$ and $n$ quadrants. For example, Dunkel documented individual profiles exhibiting:

• The Compartmentalized Orthodox Student: Characterized by high $x$ frequencies in historic doctrine and biblical inerrancy, combined with elevated $u$ (uncertainty) and $n$ (no opinion) on economic and war subscales, demonstrating cognitive insulation of personal piety from broader social ethics.
• The Disillusioned Secular Modernist: Characterized by complete endorsement ($x$) of nontheism, higher criticism, and evolutionary biology, coupled with high rejection ($y$) of ecclesial structures and marked instability in the “Sense of Worth” category.

These detailed longitudinal narratives confirmed that the instrument reliably differentiated between distinct, coherent phenomenological modes of religious functioning, providing strong qualitative construct validation.

Reliability

Reliability for the Inventory of Religious Concepts was systematically evaluated on a representative normative baseline cohort of $N = 700$ undergraduate students drawn from the participating institutions. Internal consistency coefficients were calculated for each of the ten categorized dimensions utilizing the Kuder-Richardson Formula 21 ($KR_{21}$).

The $KR_{21}$ formula provides a conservative lower-bound estimate of test reliability under the assumption of approximately equal item difficulties:

$$KR_{21} = \frac{k}{k – 1} \left( 1 – \frac{M (k – M)}{k \cdot s^2} \right)$$

where $k$ represents the number of items in the subscale, $M$ represents the subscale mean score, and $s^2$ represents the variance of the total scores on the subscale.

The empirical reliability coefficients reported in Dunkel’s (1947) normative analysis are summarized below:

The statistical variation in reliability coefficients across subscales reveals important psychometric nuances. The dimensions measuring explicit theological dogma—such as Historic Christian Doctrines and Practices (.86), Hebrew-Christian Concept of God (.81), and Attitudes toward the Bible (.81)—demonstrate high reliability due to their clearly defined creedal definitions. Conversely, scales addressing Attitudes toward the Economic Order (.44) and One’s Sense of Worth (.44) exhibited lower coefficients. This attenuation can be attributed to item brevity ($k = 10$), the inherent multidimensionality of socioeconomic attitudes, and the strict mathematical properties of $KR_{21}$, which systematically underestimates true reliability whenever item difficulties vary.

Factor Analysis

At the time of the IRC’s creation in 1947, large-scale matrix inversion and computerized exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were not practically accessible for high-dimensional 130-item instruments. Consequently, the scale’s subscales were derived via rational-deductive categorization through interdisciplinary faculty committees rather than empirical latent factor modeling.

From the standpoint of contemporary latent variable modeling and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the theoretical architecture of the IRC implies a hierarchical or multi-factor oblique structure:

• First-Order Theological Dimension: Encompassing the shared latent variance among the Concept of God, Theism/Nontheism, Historic Doctrines, and Biblical Inerrancy subscales. Modern psychometric evaluation would likely reveal strong cross-loadings, demonstrating a primary latent factor of theological orthodoxy versus secular rationalism.
• First-Order Social-Ethical Dimension: Comprising the Economic Order and Christian Attitudes toward War subscales, reflecting civic and institutional ideology.
• First-Order Existential-Philosophical Dimension: Uniting One’s Sense of Worth and Freedom versus Determinism, capturing internal locus of control and perceived meaning in life.
• Bifactor Model Potential: Contemporary structural equation modeling of the IRC would ideally test a bifactor model containing a general factor of “Traditional Christian Worldview” alongside orthogonal group factors accounting for unique subscale variance. Such an analysis would clarify whether scales with lower $KR_{21}$ values (such as Economic Order and Sense of Worth) reflect excessive residual error or distinct, meaningful latent dimensions.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational framework, administrative design, and scoring rubrics of the Inventory of Religious Concepts are outlined below:

• Instrument Designation: Inventory of Religious Concepts (IRC); occasionally cataloged as part of the Inventory of General Life Goals.
• Author/Originator: Harold Baker Dunkel, Ph.D., for the American Council on Education (1947).
• Item Inventory: 130 items total (120 core items divided into 10 thematic subscales + 10 miscellaneous identifying items assessing esoteric, occult, Christian Science, and Catholic beliefs).
• Target Population: Undergraduate college and university students; primarily intended for individuals from Christian (Protestant) cultural backgrounds.
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire; group or individual administration.
• Estimated Completion Time: 40 to 60 minutes for the full 130 items.
• Response Modality: A four-alternative categorical choice architecture designed to eliminate stigmatizing labels:
  • x: Agreement / acceptance of the statement.
  • y: Disagreement / rejection of the statement (the position to which the $x$ stance is untenable).
  • u: Uncertain (the respondent feels ambiguous or has not formed a firm conclusion).
  • n: No opinion (the statement has no meaning, is perceived as hopelessly ambiguous, or relies on unacceptable assumptions).
• Scoring and Quantification Protocols:
  • Categorical Profile Scoring (Standard Dunkel Method): Computation of absolute frequency counts of $x, y, u,$ and $n$ responses within each of the ten content categories. These counts are plotted to produce an idiographic intellectual profile.
  • Univariate Quantitative Scoring: A recommended alternative converts responses to numerical values for statistical aggregation: $x = 3$, $u = 2$, $n = 2$, and $y = 1$.
  • Reversed Item Scoring: Specific items (marked with an asterisk in the scale manual) represent counter-normative or critical theological positions. For these items, scoring designations are reversed ($x = y$ and $y = x$) prior to subscale aggregation.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Inventory of Religious Concepts was originally published in 1947 in the research monograph General Education in the Humanities by the American Council on Education (ACE), Washington, D.C. Because the instrument was published in the United States prior to 1978 without explicit subsequent copyright renewal, the instrument is generally recognized as being in the public domain under historical US copyright statutes.

The scale was developed as a cooperative service instrument to assist colleges in curricular evaluation and educational research. Consequently, there are no commercial royalty fees associated with its non-profit educational or scholarly implementation. Researchers and psychometricians seeking to administer, adapt, or digitize the scale for academic research should properly cite the primary historical source: Dunkel, H. B. (1947). General Education in the Humanities. American Council on Education.

References

• Allport, G. W. (1950). The individual and his religion: A psychological interpretation. Macmillan.
• American Council on Education. (1947). Cooperative study in general education: A brief report of its findings and implications. American Council on Education.
• Dewey, J. (1934). A common faith. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1n2txwz
• Dunkel, H. B. (1947). General education in the humanities. American Council on Education.
• Kuder, G. F., & Richardson, M. W. (1937). The theory of the estimation of test reliability. Psychometrika, 2(3), 151–160. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02288391
• Rauschenbusch, W. (1917). A theology for the social gospel. Macmillan.
• Thurstone, L. L., & Chave, E. J. (1929). The measurement of attitude: A psychophysical method and some experiments with a scale for measuring attitude toward the church. University of Chicago Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)