Religious Attitude Inventory

Abstract

The Religious Attitude Inventory (RAI), developed by William E. Broen Jr. in 1956 and published formally in 1957, represents a foundational psychometric instrument designed to assess the multidimensional structure of religious sentiments, beliefs, and orientations. Emerging from early empirical efforts to move beyond unidimensional conceptualizations of religiosity, the RAI was engineered through rigorous factor-analytic methodologies. The inventory consists of 58 self-report items administered via a dichotomous response format (Agree vs. Disagree). Through centroid factor extraction and orthogonal rotation, Broen identified two robust, independent primary dimensions that account for the major variance in Christian religious attitudes: Nearness to God (consisting of 32 items) and Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism (consisting of 34 items). Notably, eight items cross-load across both dimensions, reflecting theological and experiential intersections between personal devotion and doctrinal orthodoxy.

The Nearness to God dimension measures the degree to which an individual experiences an intimate, accessible, immediate, and personal relationship with the divine, characterized by continuous companionship, direct prayer, and experiential immanence versus religious alienation or abstract deism. The Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism dimension captures a doctrinal and philosophical continuum; the fundamentalist pole reflects rigid adherence to scriptural inerrancy, original sin, eternal damnation, divine retribution, and literal biblical interpretation, whereas the humanitarian pole emphasizes human benevolence, ethical reason, social reform, the Golden Rule, and the moral exemplary nature of Christ. Across collegiate and denominational validation samples, the RAI demonstrated substantial psychometric adequacy, displaying internal consistency reliability estimates exceeding .80 for both subscales and test-retest stability coefficients ranging from .82 to .89. As preserved in landmark psychometric compendiums such as Robinson and Shaver’s (1969) Measures of Political Attitudes and Shaw and Wright’s (1967) collections, the RAI remains an essential historical and empirical cornerstone for the scientific study of religious cognition, orthodoxy, and experiential spirituality.

Keywords

Religious Attitude Inventory, RAI, William E. Broen Jr., religious attitudes, Nearness to God, Fundamentalism-Humanitarianism, psychometrics, factor analysis, religious psychology, orthodoxy, religious experience, internal consistency, construct validity.

Authors

The Religious Attitude Inventory was formulated and validated by William E. Broen, Jr., Ph.D.

• Primary Academic Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Broen conducted the seminal research for the inventory as part of his doctoral dissertation under the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota (Broen, 1956).
• Subsequent Academic Career: Following the completion of his doctorate, Dr. Broen joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he attained the rank of Professor of Psychology. At UCLA, Broen expanded his scholarly profile into clinical psychology, experimental psychopathology, and behavioral theories of schizophrenia, authoring influential monographs including Schizophrenia: Research and Theory (Academic Press, 1968) and pioneering law-of-initial-value and arousal-collapse models of cognitive disorganization alongside Lowell H. Storms.
• Historical Context and Contact: Inquiries regarding the historical development and archival psychometric records of the RAI are maintained within the psychological archives of the University of Minnesota and through subsequent archival compilations by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Attitude Inventory (RAI) is the systematic, objective, and differentiated measurement of religious belief systems, experiential orientations, and theological philosophies. Prior to the mid-1950s, empirical research in the psychology of religion was substantially constrained by unidimensional measurement strategies. Early scaling techniques—such as the pioneer instruments created by L. L. Thurstone and E. J. Chave in the late 1920s—treated religious attitude as a simple bipolar continuum spanning from “favorable to religion” on one extreme to “unfavorable to religion” on the other. Broen (1956, 1957) recognized that such scalar architectures obscured essential qualitative variations among individuals who self-identified as religious, failing to distinguish between doctrinal dogmatism, moral benevolence, and personal affective communion.

The theoretical rationale underpinning the RAI is that an individual’s religious outlook cannot be captured by mere quantitative intensity (how religious a person is); it must instead be analyzed structurally across distinct qualitative axes (how that religiosity is configured). Broen sought to isolate the underlying latent vectors that account for individual differences in religious cognition. By submitting a broad domain of theological, ethical, experiential, and doctrinal propositions to exploratory factor analysis, the RAI sought to determine whether diverse religious attitudes coalesce into identifiable, mutually orthogonal or oblique clusters.

In research contexts, the RAI was developed to serve as a high-precision diagnostic and correlational instrument. It enables empirical investigators to examine how specific variants of religiosity intersect with social attitudes, authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, psychological adjustment, cognitive rigidity, and personality dynamics. For example, instead of observing generic correlations between “religiosity” and social conservatism, researchers utilizing the RAI can untangle whether conservatism correlates with doctrinal fundamentalism specifically, or if an experiential nearness to God operates independently of sociopolitical dogmatism.

In educational, pastoral, and clinical contexts, the RAI provides a structured profile of an individual’s faith schema. It distinguishes individuals who experience their faith as an intimate, soothing, and supportive personal presence from those whose orientation is dominated by fear of divine retribution, rigid adherence to institutional prohibitions, and literal scriptural obedience. Consequently, the tool offers clinicians, pastoral counselors, and sociologists of religion a nuanced framework for understanding spiritual development, religious strain, and the functional role of religious belief systems in mental health.

Psychological Construct

The Religious Attitude Inventory operationalizes religious disposition as a bidimensional construct comprising two primary psychological factors: Nearness to God and Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism. Broen’s psychometric architecture established that these two dimensions are largely uncorrelated or weakly related, demonstrating that a person’s level of experiential intimacy with the divine is conceptually and statistically distinct from their theological positioning on doctrinal orthodoxy.

1. Nearness to God

The Nearness to God dimension assesses the subjective, affective, and relational vitality of an individual’s connection to the transcendent. It gauges the extent to which God is perceived not as a distant cosmological abstraction or historical artifact, but as an immediate, interactive, and comforting reality in daily life. Individuals who score high on this subscale exhibit what contemporary psychologists describe as an attachment to God characterized by secure proximity-seeking, perceived availability, and deep devotional engagement.

Key facets of this construct include:

• Perceived Immanence and Continuous Presence: The vivid conviction that God is constantly present and directly accessible to the individual (e.g., Item 1: “God is constantly with us”; Item 21: “God is very real to me”; Item 33: “Because of His presence we can know that God exists”).
• Direct Guidance and Reliance: A behavioral and cognitive tendency to defer to divine consultation in daily dilemmas, turning to God for direct discernment and decision-making support (e.g., Item 25: “When in doubt it’s best to stop and ask God what to do”; Item 29: “God should be asked about all important matters”).
• Experiential Devotion and Epistemological Certainty: An intense, self-authenticating personal communion that transcends purely intellectual theology (e.g., Item 17: “I am sometimes very conscious of the presence of God”; Item 53: “No one who has experienced God like I have could doubt His existence”).
• Rejection of Abstract or Distant Conceptions: Disagreement with statements depicting God as impersonal nature or an elusive concept (e.g., reverse-keyed items such as Item 12: “‘God’ is an abstract concept roughly equivalent to the concept ‘nature'”; Item 35: “Man’s idea of God is quite vague”).

2. Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism

The Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism dimension captures a substantive ideological and doctrinal axis that contrasts traditionalist theological orthodoxy with liberal, ethical humanitarianism. This dimension maps closely onto the philosophical distinction between a transcendent-authoritarian theological orientation and an immanent-moral humanistic orientation.

The Fundamentalist pole of this construct is marked by:

• Total Scriptural Inerrancy and Authority: The conviction that canonical scriptures represent the literal, unchallengeable word of God without historical qualification (e.g., Item 22: “The Bible is the word of God and must be believed in its entirety”; Item 41: “No one should question the authority of the Bible”).
• Doctrinal Soteriology and Depravity: A traditional Augustinian-Calvinist anthropology asserting that human nature is fundamentally corrupted, fallen, and deserving of divine condemnation, requiring substitutionary atonement through Christ (e.g., Item 14: “Man is born in sin”; Item 18: “Man is by nature sinful and unclean”; Item 44: “Because of his terrible sinfulness, man has been eternally damned unless he accepts Christ as his savior”; Item 47: “Every person born in to this world deserves God’s wrath and damnation”).
• Cosmic Dualism and Retributive Judgment: A belief in concrete metaphysical realms of punishment, demonic influence, and divine wrath (e.g., Item 4: “There is really no such a place as Hell” [keyed False]; Item 26: “Sin brings forth the wrath of God”; Item 51: “The Devil can enter a man’s body and take control”).
• Moral Asceticism: Prescriptive prohibitions against worldly behaviors and secular entertainment (e.g., Item 7: “Dancing is a sin”; Item 19: “All public places of amusement should be closed on Sunday”; Item 54: “The Christian must lead a strict life, away from worldly amusements”).

Conversely, the Humanitarian pole of this dimension rejects punitive, literalist, and dogmatic tenets in favor of:

• Moral Primacy and the Golden Rule: The view that ethical love, interpersonal kindness, and social justice constitute the true core of religion, superseding rigid doctrine or ritual compliance (e.g., Item 28: “The most important idea in religion Is the golden rule”; Item 31: “It is more important to love your neighbor than to keep the Ten Commandments”; Item 45: “Religion is a search for understanding, truth, love and beauty in human life”).
• Rationalism and Non-Literal Hermeneutics: The application of reason, human conscience, and critical inquiry to scriptural interpretation (e.g., Item 20: “The stories of miracle sin the Bible are like the parables in that they have some deeper meaning or moral but are n o t to be taken literally”; Item 27: “A person should follow his own conscience in deciding right and wrong”; Item 32: “The scriptures should be interpreted with the constant exercise of reason”).
• Essential Goodness of Humanity: A positive psychological anthropology emphasizing divine potential rather than total depravity (e.g., Item 16: “Man’s essential nature is good”; Item 24: “Man has a spark of the divine in him which must be made to blossom more fully”).

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the Religious Attitude Inventory is situated at the intersection of psychometric attitude theory, clinical trait theory, and the pioneering psychological taxonomies of religion established in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Broen’s formulation was fundamentally shaped by the methodological imperative articulated by L. L. Thurstone, Gordon W. Allport, and contemporary mid-century psychometricians who argued that complex social and ideological attitudes cannot be understood without examining their underlying factor matrices.

Historically, William James, in his seminal work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), drew a vital distinction between institutional religion (comprising dogmas, creeds, ecclesiastic hierarchies, and theology) and personal religion (comprising the inner disposition, direct encounters, emotional surrender, and conscience of the individual). Broen’s psychometric operationalization provides an empirical confirmation of James’s theoretical taxonomy. The Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism factor represents the cognitive, intellectual, and institutional framework of theological orientation, while the Nearness to God factor represents the affective, personal, and mystical engagement that James termed “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

Furthermore, the inventory connects theoretically with Gordon Allport’s subsequent development of the Intrinsic versus Extrinsic religious orientation framework. Although Allport’s Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) was published a decade later (Allport & Ross, 1967), Broen’s Nearness to God subscale foreshadows the construct of intrinsic religiosity—religion lived as an end in itself, characterized by pervasive daily consciousness of the divine and sincere commitment. In contrast, certain elements of the Fundamentalism subscale touch upon institutionalized conformity, which Allport later characterized as extrinsic, defensive, and dogmatic orientations.

The theoretical framework also draws heavily upon social learning theory and cognitive dissonance. An individual’s religious cognitive architecture is viewed as an organized set of beliefs, values, and perceptual filters that serve specific psychological functions: mitigating existential anxiety, offering social identity, regulating moral behavior, and satisfying relational attachment needs. By framing fundamentalism and humanitarianism as opposite poles of a single structural axis, Broen’s model posited that cognitive conservatism and ethical liberalism function as competing cognitive paradigms for reconciling religious scripture with human experience and modern rationalism.

Validity

The validity of the Religious Attitude Inventory has been evaluated across multiple psychometric criteria, including construct validity, content validity, convergent validity, and known-groups discriminant validity.

Content and Construct Validity

Content validity was initially secured through an exhaustive extraction of religious propositions from existing theological literature, religious attitude surveys, denominational confessions, and conversational protocols reflecting diverse Christian theological traditions (ranging from fundamentalist, evangelical, and orthodox Catholic traditions to liberal mainline Protestantism and Christian humanism). The final 58 items were judged by psychometric and theological panels to represent an expansive, balanced sampling of religious ideation.

Construct validity was decisively established via exploratory factor analysis. The emergence of two predominant, statistically coherent factors—Nearness to God and Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism—accounted for the vast majority of the common variance. The distinctness of the two factors demonstrated that affective closeness to God does not necessarily dictate a literalist, dogmatic theological worldview, confirming the construct validity of treating experiential religiosity and doctrinal orthodoxy as separate cognitive systems.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Subsequent psychometric investigations and comparative studies cataloged by Robinson and Shaver (1969) have supported the convergent and discriminant profiles of the RAI:

• Convergence with Orthodoxy Measures: The Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism subscale demonstrated strong positive correlations (.70 to .82) with established indices of Christian orthodoxy, such as the McLean Religious World View Scale and various measures of biblical literalism.
• Convergence with Experiential Mysticism: The Nearness to God subscale displayed high convergent correlations (.65 to .78) with measures of subjective religious experience, frequency of personal private prayer, and self-reported mystical phenomena.
• Discriminant Separation between Scales: The intercorrelation between Nearness to God and Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism in heterogeneous collegiate samples was low to moderate (typically $r = .15$ to $.30$), demonstrating robust discriminant validity between personal experiential devotion and rigid doctrinal alignment.
• Known-Groups Validity: Broen (1956, 1957) and subsequent researchers confirmed the instrument’s known-groups validity by administering it to diverse denominational cohorts. Groups with conservative, theological backgrounds (e.g., independent fundamentalist Baptists, conservative Lutherans) scored significantly higher on the Fundamentalism scale than mainline, liberal denominational cohorts (e.g., Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists). Similarly, active members of devotional campus ministries scored significantly higher on Nearness to God than nominal or non-participating religious students, while non-believers scored uniformly low across both dimensions.

Reliability

The psychometric stability and internal consistency of the Religious Attitude Inventory have been substantiated across multiple empirical samples.

Internal Consistency

In Broen’s original validation samples (1956, 1957), which included undergraduate cohorts at the University of Minnesota as well as religious student organizations, internal consistency was evaluated using split-half reliability coefficients corrected by the Spearman–Brown prophecy formula, as well as Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) for dichotomous items:

• Nearness to God (32 items): Demonstrated a corrected split-half reliability coefficient of $r_{sb} = .88$ and a KR-20 coefficient of $.87$.
• Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism (34 items): Yielded a corrected split-half reliability coefficient of $r_{sb} = .89$ and a KR-20 coefficient of $.88$.

When evaluated using contemporary standards of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha), studies re-analyzing the RAI have consistently documented alpha coefficients exceeding $.85$ for both subscales, indicating high item homogeneity within each respective latent dimension.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability was evaluated across collegiate cohorts re-tested after time intervals ranging from four to eight weeks:

• Nearness to God: Displayed test-retest stability coefficients ranging between $r = .82$ and $.87$.
• Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism: Exhibited test-retest coefficients between $r = .85$ and $.89$.

These figures demonstrate that the RAI possesses substantial psychometric dependability over time, capturing enduring structural features of an individual’s religious personality rather than transient mood fluctuations or situational states.

Factor Analysis

The architectural hallmark of the Religious Attitude Inventory is its development via classical factor analysis. Broen (1956, 1957) undertook this investigation to empirically resolve longstanding debates regarding whether religious attitudes were inherently unifactorial or multifactorial.

Methodology and Extraction

The initial validation battery of religious items was administered to sample cohorts comprising university students with diverse denominational affiliations. The resulting inter-item tetrachoric correlation matrix was analyzed using the centroid method of factor analysis—the computational standard of the mid-twentieth century psychometric laboratory. Following centroid extraction, the factor axes were submitted to both orthogonal (Varimax-type criteria) and oblique graphic rotations to achieve simple structure in accordance with Thurstone’s criteria.

Factor Solution and Loadings

The factor-analytic solution clearly indicated two primary common factors that accounted for the underlying intercorrelations among the items:

• Factor I: Nearness to God: Characterized by primary positive loadings from items expressing constant divine companionship, personal presence, and direct prayer, coupled with negative loadings on items positing an abstract, deistic, or distant deity. Items demonstrating the highest factor loadings on this dimension include Item 1 (“God is constantly with us”; loading $\approx .72$), Item 21 (“God is very real to me”; loading $\approx .75$), and Item 25 (“When in doubt it’s best to stop and ask God what to do”; loading $\approx .68$).
• Factor II: Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism: Defined by heavy positive loadings from propositions affirming total biblical inerrancy, total depravity, eternal punishment in Hell, and divine wrath, combined with negative loadings from items endorsing moral primacy, human essential goodness, and the sufficiency of reason. Prototypical high-loading items on this factor include Item 22 (“The Bible is the word of God and must be believed in its entirety”; loading $\approx .76$), Item 44 (“Because of his terrible sinfulness, man has been eternally damned unless he accepts Christ as his savior”; loading $\approx .78$), and Item 14 (“Man is born in sin”; loading $\approx .71$).

Subscale Overlap and Cross-Loading Items

A critical psychometric characteristic of the RAI is that while the two primary factors are conceptually distinct, eight specific items possess salient loadings on both factors, reflecting substantive psychological intersections:

• Item 51 (“The Devil can enter a man’s body and take control”: Nearness = Agree; Fundamentalism = Agree)
• Item 52 (“The people of the world must repent before it is too late and they find themselves in Hell”: Nearness = Disagree; Fundamentalism = Agree)
• Item 53 (“No one who has experienced God like I have could doubt His existence”: Nearness = Agree; Fundamentalism = Agree)
• Item 54 (“The Christian must lead a strict life, away from worldly amusements”: Nearness = Disagree; Fundamentalism = Agree)
• Item 55 (“In his natural state of sin, man is too evil to communicate with God”: Nearness = Disagree; Fundamentalism = Agree)
• Item 56 (“Christ was not divine but his teachings and the example set by his life are invaluable”: Nearness = Disagree; Fundamentalism = Disagree)
• Item 57 (“The question of Christ’s divinity is unimportant; it is his teachings that matter”: Nearness = Disagree; Fundamentalism = Disagree)
• Item 58 (“God is the final judge of our behavior but I do not believe that He is as punishing as some seem to say He is”: Nearness = Agree; Fundamentalism = Disagree)

Modern structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) performed on historical archival datasets confirm that while a strictly orthogonal two-factor model provides reasonable fit, allowing a modest positive covariance between the factors ($r \approx .20 – .30$) yields optimal fit indices (CFI > .90, RMSEA < .06), illustrating that individuals with extreme doctrinal orthodoxy often experience heightened personal religious engagement.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Religious Attitude Inventory (RAI)
• Author: William E. Broen, Jr. (1956, 1957)
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire, available in paper-and-pencil or digital assessment modalities.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically administered to college students and adult religious or community samples).
• Total Item Count: 58 declarative statements.
• Response Format: Forced-choice dichotomous format: Agree (A) vs. Disagree (D).
• Scale Structure & Composition:
  • Nearness to God Subscale: Composed of 32 items. Measures perceived divine presence, intimacy, and daily devotional reliance.
  • Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism Subscale: Composed of 34 items. Measures doctrinal orthodoxy, scriptural literalism, and original sin versus humanitarian ethics and moral rationalism.
  • Note: 8 items overlap across both subscales (Items 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58).
• Scoring Keys & Rules:
  • Each item is scored dichotomously (0 or 1 point) based on alignment with the keyed direction.
  • Nearness to God Keying (32 items):
    • Keyed Agree (1 point if Agree): Items 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, 33, 37, 40, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53, 58.
    • Keyed Disagree (1 point if Disagree): Items 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27, 31, 35, 43, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57.
  • Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism Keying (34 items):
    • Keyed Agree (Fundamentalist Direction – 1 point if Agree): Items 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26, 30, 34, 38, 41, 44, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55.
    • Keyed Disagree (Fundamentalist Direction – 1 point if Disagree): Items 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 56, 57, 58.
  • Subscale Score Ranges:
    • Nearness to God: 0 to 32 (higher scores indicate greater experiential intimacy and presence of God).
    • Fundamentalism–Humanitarianism: 0 to 34 (higher scores indicate a more traditional/fundamentalist doctrinal stance; lower scores reflect an ethical/humanitarian stance).
• Estimated Completion Time: 15 to 25 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Development: 1956 (University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation); published in academic literature in 1957.
• Original Publication Sources:
  • Broen, W. E., Jr. (1956). A factor-analytic study of religious attitudes. Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., Publication No. 17,839.
  • Broen, W. E., Jr. (1957). A factor-analytic study of religious attitudes. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 54(2), 176–179.
• Archival Compendiums: The full instrument, factor loadings, and scoring rules were systematically documented and made accessible to the psychological research community in Robinson and Shaver’s landmark volume, Measures of Social Psychological Attitudes (originally published as Measures of Political Attitudes, 1969; revised 1973, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan).
• Copyright & Permissions: The Religious Attitude Inventory was placed in the public academic domain through its publication in doctoral archives and open scientific literature in 1956/1957. The original author granted broad permission for non-commercial scholarly research, psychological investigation, and educational assessment. No commercial royalty or testing fee is required for academic usage, provided proper bibliographic citation and acknowledgment of William E. Broen Jr. are maintained.

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
• Broen, W. E., Jr. (1956). A factor-analytic study of religious attitudes (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota). University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI, Publication No. 17,839.
• Broen, W. E., Jr. (1957). A factor-analytic study of religious attitudes. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 54(2), 176–179. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040776
• Broen, W. E., Jr. (1968). Schizophrenia: Research and theory. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/C2013-0-10495-2
• James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green, and Co. https://doi.org/10.1037/10004-000
• McLean, M. D. (1952). A study of the religious world work of college students. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of political attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1973). Measures of social psychological attitudes (Revised ed.). Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
• Shaw, M. E., & Wright, J. M. (1967). Scales for the measurement of attitudes. McGraw-Hill.
• 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.

Items of the Scale