Nondoctrinal Religion Scales

1. Abstract

The Nondoctrinal Religion Scales, developed by the prominent American sociologist J. Milton Yinger in 1969 and revised in 1977, represent a pioneering effort within the psychology and sociology of religion to conceptualize and measure religiosity through a functional rather than a substantive lens. Traditional psychological instruments historically operationalized religion through institutional adherence, doctrinal orthodoxy, ecclesiastical participation, and belief in specific theological tenets (such as monotheism, divine revelation, or scriptural inerrancy). Yinger challenged this Western-centric, institutional bias by arguing that religion is fundamentally an existential structural response to universal human dilemmas: the inevitability of suffering, the confrontation with systemic injustice, and the threat of existential meaninglessness. The initial 1969 instrument comprised seven self-report statements rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale, intended to differentiate between “religious” and “nonreligious” orientations toward ultimate human problems without requiring allegiance to institutional creeds. In 1977, Yinger expanded the framework into a 20-item cross-cultural questionnaire assessing five thematic domains: meaninglessness, suffering, injustice, general religious efficacy, and political intervention.

Despite its theoretical importance and widespread citation as a foundational paradigm of invisible or functional religiosity, subsequent psychometric investigations—most notably by Nelsen, Everett, Mader, and Hamby (1976), Roof, Hadaway, Hewitt, McGaw, and Morse (1977), and Brown (1981)—revealed serious psychometric vulnerabilities. Independent evaluations consistently demonstrated poor internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients falling below .40 for the 7-item composite. Furthermore, exploratory factor analyses failed to yield a stable, unidimensional structure, producing divergent multidimensional solutions across distinct collegiate samples. Crucially, validation studies indicated that items intended to measure nondoctrinal existential awareness exhibited substantial correlations with conventional doctrinal orthodoxy and traditional devotionalism, calling into question the instrument’s discriminant validity. This article provides a comprehensive academic assessment of the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales, delineating their historical emergence, theoretical architecture, psychometric properties, structural critiques, and contemporary relevance for the operationalization of existential concern and secular spirituality.

2. Keywords

Nondoctrinal Religion Scale, J. Milton Yinger, functional definition of religion, existential psychology, ultimate concerns, suffering, meaninglessness, injustice, psychometrics, invisible religion

3. Authors

The primary architect of the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales was John Milton Yinger (July 6, 1916 – July 28, 2011), an eminent American sociologist who served as the 68th President of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1977. Yinger completed his doctoral training in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1942, where his early scholarship examined the socio-political adaptations of religious organizations under conditions of war and institutional conflict. In 1947, Yinger joined the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio, where he taught for several decades as Professor of Sociology and Anthropology until his retirement in 1987. Throughout his career, Yinger made foundational contributions to the scientific study of intergroup relations, ethnicity, race relations, and particularly the sociology of religion, authoring seminal treatises such as Religion in the Struggle for Power (1946), Religion, Society, and the Individual (1957), and The Scientific Study of Religion (1970).

Subsequent psychometric evaluations and replications of Yinger’s nondoctrinal measurement model were conducted by prominent social scientists, including:

• Hart M. Nelsen, Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America and later Pennsylvania State University, known for his rigorous empirical inquiries into denominational behavior and the sociology of youth religion.
• Wade Clark Roof, J. F. Rowny Professor of Religion and Society Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, celebrated for his extensive sociological investigations into baby-boomer spirituality, secularization, and religious pluralism.
• Laurence B. Brown, an Australian psychologist of religion based at the University of New South Wales, who published pioneering critical assessments of psychometric scaling within psychological studies of belief systems.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales was to resolve a profound methodological and theoretical impasse in the empirical sociology and psychology of religion: the conflation of religiousness with institutionalized church dogma. Historically, standardized instruments designed to gauge religious commitment—such as church attendance indices, orthodoxy checklists, frequency of prayer, or explicit adherence to Biblical creedal formulations—were intrinsically tethered to Western, Judeo-Christian ecclesiasticism. Such substantive measures systematically categorized individuals who had abandoned traditional religious institutions or who rejected traditional theistic terminology as “nonreligious,” “secular,” or “atheistic.”

Yinger posited that this substantive paradigm created severe measurement bias, failing to capture emergent, unconventional, or private orientations toward the human condition. He maintained that religion is fundamentally a structural, functional universal: wherever human beings encounter the boundaries of their comprehension, control, and endurance, they generate symbolic frameworks to cope with these boundary situations. Consequently, Yinger designed the 1969 7-item scale to measure the degree to which individuals engage in “nondoctrinal religion”—a shared, cross-cultural substructure of ultimate concerns that operates independently of formal theological dogmas. The instrument was devised to assess how respondents interpret suffering, confront existential injustice, perceive underlying order amidst cosmic chaos, and assess the broader value of human religious striving, without invoking sectarian idioms or theological jargon.

In applied research, the scale was intended to function across secularized populations, youth cultures, and cross-cultural cohorts where traditional ecclesiastical structures had weakened, but where existential grappling remained pervasive. By eliminating overt religious terminology (such as “God,” “salvation,” “sin,” or “scripture”), the instrument aimed to provide a culture-fair, non-sectarian diagnostic metric capable of identifying functional equivalents of religion in secular societies. In the revised 1977 comparative version, Yinger expanded this rationale into an international comparative program, administering a 20-item scale across students in Korea, Japan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. His objective was to determine whether universal patterns of ultimate concern (categorized under meaninglessness, suffering, injustice, religious coping, and political coping) varied systematically as a function of national origin, gender, and broad civilizational heritage, thereby establishing an empirical baseline for the universal functional substructures of human religiosity.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological and sociological construct operationalized by the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales is functional religiosity, conceptualized as an individual’s orientation toward, and symbolic defense against, the fundamental crises of existence. Yinger explicitly rejected substantive operationalizations that define religion by the content of specific beliefs (e.g., belief in a supreme deity, angels, or an afterlife). Instead, he posited that religiousness is constituted by a set of psychological and existential strategies through which individuals manage ultimate threats to coherence, justice, and survival.

Core Dimensions of the Construct

Across the 1969 formulation and its 1977 expansion, the construct comprises five distinct yet interrelated existential dimensions:

• Existential Order and Meaning vs. Meaninglessness: This dimension assesses an individual’s cognitive conviction that life possesses an underlying coherence, pattern, and purpose, even in the presence of chaotic, destructive, or absurd occurrences. In Yinger’s construct, a “religious” orientation is characterized by the belief that life’s mysteries, while potentially beyond contemporary human cognitive mastery, are nonetheless underpinned by an ultimate order that humanity will eventually comprehend (e.g., 1969 Item 7: “Despite the often chaotic conditions of human life, I believe that there is order and pattern to existence that someday we’ll come to understand”). Conversely, non-religious or demoralized stances reflect apathy toward existential questions or resignation to cosmic meaninglessness.
• The Cognitive and Affective Framing of Suffering: Rather than viewing pain and mortality strictly as physiological or biological catastrophes, the nondoctrinal religious orientation frames suffering as a transformative crucible. Yinger conceptualized this dimension as the capacity to integrate suffering, injustice, and death into a positive existential schema, viewing adverse experiences as avenues for increased insight, ethical maturation, and endurance (e.g., 1969 Item 2 and Item 6).
• Perception of Injustice and Human Conflict: This dimension taps an individual’s struggle with moral evil, structural inequity, and intergroup hostility. It measures the degree to which an individual confronts the apparent triumph of undeserving persons and widespread violence without lapsing into nihilistic cynicism, maintaining an enduring moral and existential engagement with the problem of human reconciliation (e.g., 1969 Item 3).
• Appreciation of Religious Coping Efficacy: This facet measures a generalized respect for humanity’s historical and cross-cultural religious efforts to resolve the human predicament. Regardless of whether an individual agrees with specific denominational dogmas, this dimension evaluates whether they acknowledge religious practices as legitimate, dignified, and valuable strategies for coping with existential limitations, rather than dismissing them as wasted time and misplaced energy (e.g., 1969 Items 1 and 4).
• Comparative Functional Efficacy (Religion vs. Politics): Integrated explicitly into the 1977 iteration, this dimension examines whether individuals locate the ultimate resolution of human suffering and injustice within the realm of inner symbolic/spiritual transformation (religious means) or external socio-structural engineering (political action), thereby capturing the psychological dialectic between existential transcendence and instrumental activism.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical foundations of the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales are rooted in the classical sociological tradition of structural functionalism, drawing heavily upon the theoretical contributions of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and contemporary cultural anthropology. In particular, Yinger’s conceptual architecture reflects an intersection between the existential theology of Paul Tillich, the anthropological semiotics of Clifford Geertz, and the sociological phenomenology of Thomas Luckmann.

Paul Tillich and the Concept of Ultimate Concern

Central to Yinger’s measurement model is Paul Tillich’s formulation of religion as the state of being grasped by an “ultimate concern” (Tillich, 1957). In Tillich’s existential theology, genuine faith is not the intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions or historical dogmas; rather, it is an act of total commitment directed toward that which demands unconditional surrender and promises total fulfillment. Yinger operationalized Tillich’s philosophical abstraction by asserting that ultimate concerns are universal because human beings across all societies confront identical structural limits: the biological inevitability of death, the psychological burden of suffering, the sociopolitical reality of injustice, and the ontological threat of meaninglessness. Therefore, any cognitive or behavioral system designed to address these boundary conditions functions structurally as a religion.

Clifford Geertz and the Cultural Defense Against Chaos

Yinger explicitly cited anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s influential essay, “Religion as a Cultural System” (1966), as a primary inspiration for the scales. Geertz asserted that religion provides humans with a set of sacred symbols that formulate conceptions of a general order of existence, thereby buffering the human psyche against three profound threats to cognitive coherence:

1. The limits of human analytical capacities (bafflement and ignorance);
2. The limits of human emotional endurance (the problem of suffering);
3. The limits of moral insight and justice (the problem of evil).

Geertz argued that religious systems do not necessarily attempt to eliminate suffering or explain away evil; rather, they provide symbolic schemas that make suffering sufferable and evil structurally meaningful. Yinger adapted this perspective into a psychometric methodology, postulating that agreement with items affirming the transformative potential of suffering or the existence of an overarching cosmic pattern signifies the presence of an active cultural/existential defense system.

Thomas Luckmann and ‘Invisible Religion’

The scale was also deeply informed by Thomas Luckmann’s seminal work, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (1967). Luckmann argued that modern secularization does not entail the extinction of religion, but rather its deinstitutionalization. As traditional church bureaucracies lose their overarching authority, religion recedes from the public institutional sphere into the private sphere of the autonomous individual. This privatized, “invisible” religiosity focuses on subjective themes such as personal identity, self-realization, and existential meaning-making. Yinger intended his 1969 and 1977 scales to serve as the empirical measuring instruments for Luckmann’s invisible religion, capturing the latent, diffuse, and poorly institutionalized expressions of faith that conventional sociological surveys routinely overlooked.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales have been the subject of extensive empirical scrutiny, generating considerable debate regarding what the scales actually measure.

Construct and Discriminant Validity Challenges

The fundamental theoretical claim underlying Yinger’s scale was that nondoctrinal religion represents an autonomous dimension of religiosity that exists independently of traditional ecclesiastical commitments. However, empirical investigations by independent psychometricians failed to support this distinction. In a rigorous test of the 1969 7-item scale involving 217 undergraduate students, Nelsen, Everett, Mader, and Hamby (1976) examined the relationship between Yinger’s items and standard measures of traditional religiosity. Their findings demonstrated that scores on the Yinger items were strongly correlated with traditional sectarian orthodoxy, biblical fundamentalism, frequency of personal prayer, and self-rated religiosity.

Rather than functioning as a unique measure of “invisible” or “nondoctrinal” religiosity among secularized individuals, the items operated predominantly as subtle proxies for conventional religious belief. Individuals who scored high on Yinger’s scale were overwhelmingly those who were actively involved in traditional Christian institutions, whereas genuinely secular, unchurched individuals typically rejected both doctrinal and Yinger’s functional formulations. Consequently, Nelsen et al. concluded that Yinger’s measure lacked discriminant validity from traditional religious commitment.

Convergent and Predictive Evidence

These findings were replicated and expanded by Roof, Hadaway, Hewitt, McGaw, and Morse (1977) in a study of 113 respondents from the Northeastern United States. Roof and colleagues administered the 7-item scale alongside extensive batteries measuring civil religion, traditional orthodoxy, devotionalism, and anomie. The authors found that Yinger’s items demonstrated modest convergent validity with constructs measuring broad humanitarian concern and institutional affirmation. However, the items failed to correlate in hypothesized ways with measures of alienation or social marginality. The scale exhibited virtually no predictive utility for differentiating between secular humanists who maintained deep existential commitments and individuals who were completely disengaged from philosophical questions.

In a subsequent investigation of the 1977 20-item instrument, Brown (1981) administered the scale along with items measuring religious fundamentalism to a cohort of 80 Australian respondents. Brown noted that the multidimensional items on suffering, injustice, and political efficacy failed to coalesce into meaningful predictive patterns. He concluded that Yinger’s structural assumptions were fundamentally flawed because respondents did not organize their cognitive representations of meaning, suffering, and politics along the functional lines hypothesized by sociological theory.

8. Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the Nondoctrinal Religion Scales is marked by a conspicuous absence of internal consistency reporting in Yinger’s original publications, followed by consistently poor reliability statistics in independent replication studies.

Original Author Reporting

In his 1969 and 1977 publications, Yinger did not report Cronbach’s alpha, split-half coefficients, or test-retest reliability estimates. Because Yinger’s primary analytical strategy involved treating each item as an independent categorical indicator and reporting percentage marginals across demographic subsets, he did not initially advocate for summing the items into a singular composite scale score. Consequently, he provided no empirical evidence demonstrating that the items possessed internal consistency or temporal stability.

Independent Empirical Findings

When subsequent researchers attempted to operationalize Yinger’s items as a summative measurement tool, the resulting internal consistency statistics failed to satisfy minimal psychometric conventions:

• Nelsen et al. (1976): Evaluated the full 7-item 1969 instrument in a sample of 217 university students and obtained an overall Cronbach’s alpha of .34. Inter-item correlations were extraordinarily low, ranging from r = .19 to r = .28. When subscales derived from factor analysis were examined independently, the reliability coefficients remained completely inadequate: Factor 1 (“Acceptance of Belief and Order”) yielded an alpha of .45, while Factor 2 (“Acceptance of the Value of Suffering”) yielded an alpha of .37.
• Roof et al. (1977): Administered the 1969 scale to 113 respondents and confirmed the findings of Nelsen et al., reporting similarly depressed internal consistency reliability across the total item set (composite alpha < .40). Subscale reliabilities for their three-factor solution similarly hovered between .35 and .52, well below the standard .70 benchmark required for research instrumentation.
• Brown (1981): Found that the 20-item 1977 revision exhibited pervasive item heterogeneity, with internal consistency across the conceptual clusters (meaninglessness, suffering, injustice, religion, politics) remaining unacceptably weak due to contradictory item valences and ambiguous item phrasing.

To date, no peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated acceptable test-retest reliability ($r_{tt} ge .70$) for either the 1969 or 1977 instruments. The empirical record indicates that the items operate as conceptually disparate statements rather than mutually reinforcing indicators of a unitary latent construct.

9. Factor Analysis

Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) of the 1969 7-item scale have consistently demonstrated that the instrument violates the assumption of unidimensionality. Rather than indexing a single latent trait of functional religiosity, the items fragment into disparate, poorly defined dimensions that vary across distinct geographic and demographic samples.

The Nelsen et al. (1976) Two-Factor Model

Nelsen and colleagues subjected the 7 items to an exploratory principal components analysis followed by varimax orthogonal rotation ($N = 217$). The analysis yielded a two-factor solution accounting for only a modest proportion of total variance:

• Factor 1: Acceptance of Belief and Order: Defined predominantly by Item 1 (religious efforts as a waste of resources; negative loading), Item 4 (value of world religions despite disagreement), and Item 7 (belief in an underlying order to existence). This factor tapped general cognitive tolerance and institutional affirmation of religious systems.
• Factor 2: Acceptance of the Value of Suffering: Defined by Item 2 (suffering, injustice, and death shaped by beliefs) and Item 6 (destructive experiences as sources of understanding and endurance). This factor tapped the specific existential rationalization of adversity.
• Items 3 (violence and inability to live in peace) and 5 (lack of interest in the basic human condition) exhibited weak or split loadings across both factors, failing to cleanly integrate into the structural model.

The Roof et al. (1977) Three-Factor Model

In an attempt to replicate Nelsen’s findings, Roof and associates conducted an independent factor analysis on their Northeastern sample ($N = 113$). Their results diverged markedly, extracting three distinct factors with an eigenvalue cut-off greater than 1.0:

• Factor 1: Value of Religious Efforts: Dominated by Items 1 and 4, reflecting a general appraisal of the legitimacy of traditional religious striving.
• Factor 2: Value of Difficult Experience: Dominated by Items 2 and 6, aligning with Nelsen’s suffering dimension.
• Factor 3: The Basic Human Condition: Dominated by Item 3 (pessimism regarding human violence) and Item 5 (interest in ultimate existential questions).

Roof et al. noted that while Factors 1 and 2 exhibited modest structural stability across samples, Factor 3 was unstable, possessing questionable psychometric utility. Crucially, the factor structure failed to hold together under confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) standards, with elevated residual variances and low factor determinacy scores.

Structural Critiques of the 1977 20-Item Scale

In the 1977 revision, Yinger proposed five theoretical clusters: Meaninglessness (Items 1–4), Suffering (Items 5–8), Injustice (Items 9–12), Religion (Items 13–18), and Politics (Items 19–20). However, Brown’s (1981) factor analysis of this 20-item iteration demonstrated that empirical item clustering did not mirror Yinger’s theoretical taxonomy. Items tapping suffering and injustice collapsed together onto generalized social pessimism factors, while the political efficacy items loaded independently, displaying zero structural connection to existential or religious items. In summary, factor analytic research indicates that Yinger’s items do not tap a unified psychological substructure of nondoctrinal religion.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The original, historically validated 7-item instrument developed by J. Milton Yinger (1969) is structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Nondoctrinal Religion Scale (1969 Version)
• Author: J. Milton Yinger
• Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire; statements evaluated using a standardized Likert-type response scale.
• Item Count: 7 items (the expanded 1977 comparative revision contains 20 items).
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes for the 7-item version; 10 to 15 minutes for the 20-item version.
• Response Anchors:
  • 1 = fully agree
  • 2 = partly agree
  • 3 = uncertain
  • 4 = partly disagree
  • 5 = fully disagree
• Scoring and Directionality Rules:
  • In Yinger’s original 1969 methodology, responses were treated categorically rather than summed into an aggregated continuous index. Yinger identified specific response poles as reflecting a “religious” orientation:
  • Items Scored as “Religious” via Disagreement: For Items 1, 3, and 5, disagreement responses (Option 4 “partly disagree” and Option 5 “fully disagree”, representing higher numerical values on the 1–5 scale) were categorized as the “religious” response.
  • Items Scored as “Religious” via Agreement: For Items 2, 4, 6, and 7, agreement responses (Option 1 “fully agree” and Option 2 “partly agree”, representing lower numerical values on the 1–5 scale) were categorized as the “religious” response.
  • Summative Scoring (Psychometric Adaptations): When subsequent researchers (e.g., Nelsen et al., 1976; Roof et al., 1977) computed composite scale scores, items were reverse-coded such that higher scores uniformly indicated higher functional/nondoctrinal religiosity. Specifically, Items 2, 4, 6, and 7 were reverse-scored ($6 – X$). Total scores on the 7-item scale range from 7 to 35, with higher scores reflecting greater existential concern and functional religious affirmation. However, in light of the demonstrated poor internal consistency ($lpha < .40$), composite summation is psychometrically discouraged without structural modification.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults across general, collegiate, and cross-cultural populations.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The original Nondoctrinal Religion Scale was published by J. Milton Yinger in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR) in 1969, followed by the expanded 20-item cross-cultural comparative revision in 1977. The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion is the official journal of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), currently published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Under contemporary fair-use academic guidelines, the 7-item and 20-item scale items are widely considered historical research instruments available for non-commercial, educational, and empirical academic research purposes, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Yinger (1969, 1977) and the journal. Commercial reproduction, inclusion in commercial assessment software, or broad distribution within for-profit manuals requires formal copyright clearance through the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion or Wiley-Blackwell’s Rights and Permissions department. No user fees or royalties are required for individual academic researchers utilizing the published items for non-profit scholarly investigations.

12. References

• Brown, L. B. (1981). Another test of Yinger’s measure of nondoctrinal religion. The Journal of Psychology, 107(1), 3–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1981.9915200
• Geertz, C. (1966). Religion as a cultural system. In M. Banton (Ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (pp. 1–46). Tavistock Publications.
• Luckmann, T. (1967). The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. Macmillan.
• Nelsen, H. M., Everett, R. F., Mader, P. D., & Hamby, W. C. (1976). A test of Yinger’s measure of nondoctrinal religion: Implications for invisible religion as a belief system. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 15(3), 263–267. https://doi.org/10.2307/1384069
• Roof, W. C., Hadaway, C. K., Hewitt, D., McGaw, D., & Morse, R. (1977). Yinger’s measure of non-doctrinal religion: A Northeastern test. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 16(4), 403–408. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385317
• Tillich, P. (1957). Dynamics of Faith. Harper & Row.
• Yinger, J. M. (1969). A structural examination of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 8(1), 88–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385257
• Yinger, J. M. (1970). The Scientific Study of Religion. Macmillan.
• Yinger, J. M. (1977). A comparative study of the substructures of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 16(1), 67–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385816

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)