Religious Attitude Scale (RAS)

1. Abstract

The Religious Attitude Scale (RAS), developed by psychologists Renate G. Armstrong, Gordon L. Larsen, and Stephen A. Mourer in 1962, is a psychometric instrument designed to quantify individual variations in religious sentiment along a spectrum encompassing orthodoxy, conservatism, and liberalism. Created during an era characterized by increasing empirical scrutiny of the relationship between religious orientation and psychological functioning, the instrument was primarily devised to explore how doctrinal adherence interacts with emotional adjustment, self-concept, cognitive flexibility, educational attainment, and chronological age. The instrument consists of 16 multiple-choice items centered on foundational theological and metaphysical concepts evaluated and categorized by an expert panel of 12 judges. The scoring protocol produces a continuous composite metric ranging from 1 (representing extreme religious liberalism) to 153 (representing extreme religious orthodoxy). Psychometric evaluation of the RAS demonstrated an exceptional internal consistency reliability coefficient of .98. Test-retest reliability estimates revealed significant denominational divergence, with stability coefficients ranging from .48 among theological liberals (Unitarians) to .98 among doctrinal traditionalists (Roman Catholics). Criterion validity was established via non-parametric analyses (Mann-Whitney U Test), demonstrating robust group differentiation between orthodox, conservative, and liberal religious affiliations, as well as distinct response patterns between psychiatric inpatients (both psychotic and non-psychotic cohorts) and non-clinical populations. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale’s historical origins, theoretical foundation, psychometric profile, scoring mechanics, and clinical applications.

2. Keywords

Religious Attitude Scale, religious orthodoxy, religious conservatism, religious liberalism, psychometrics, emotional adjustment, religious beliefs, scale development, clinical psychology, psychiatric inpatients, criterion validity

3. Authors

The Religious Attitude Scale was conceived and standardized by three American clinical psychologists active in mid-twentieth-century psychiatric research and diagnostic assessment:

• Renate G. Armstrong, Ph.D.: Clinical Psychologist associated with Veterans Administration medical facilities and inpatient psychiatric institutions, specializing in personality assessment, diagnostic differentiation, and the interaction of demographic/ideational variables with psychological disturbance.
• Gordon L. Larsen, Ph.D.: Research psychologist and psychometrician engaged in clinical assessment and the behavioral evaluation of psychiatric inpatients across institutional healthcare settings.
• Stephen A. Mourer, M.A. / Ph.D.: Clinical psychologist involved in empirical investigations regarding cognitive structuring, attitudinal metrics, and psychopathological adjustment among adult psychiatric cohorts.

4. Purpose

The early 1960s witnessed an empirical turning point in clinical and social psychology regarding the scientific appraisal of religion. Historically dominated by psychoanalytic assertions that equated devout religiosity with neurosis, guilt fixation, or psychological immaturity, the discipline lacked finely graduated measurement tools capable of distinguishing pathological religious entrenchment from psychologically benign or adaptive spiritual orientations. Armstrong, Larsen, and Mourer (1962) developed the Religious Attitude Scale to establish an objective, standardized metric that moved beyond binary classification (e.g., churchgoer versus non-churchgoer) into the dimensional evaluation of theological content.

The primary clinical and empirical objectives of the RAS include:

• Differentiating Theological Stances: The scale was structured to systematically categorize respondents across three clearly defined attitudinal orientations: orthodoxy (uncompromising adherence to traditional dogma, biblical inerrancy, and divine interventionism), conservatism (moderated adherence to institutional doctrine with minor interpretative latitude), and liberalism (symbolic, humanist, or metaphorical interpretations of theological constructs).
• Investigating Mental Health Correlates: The authors sought to empirically interrogate whether highly orthodox religious attitudes correlate positively or negatively with clinical emotional adjustment, ego strength, anxiety levels, and reality testing.
• Differentiating Psychiatric Populations: A central purpose of the scale was to test whether individuals experiencing profound psychological impairment (e.g., psychotic inpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia or severe affective disorders) exhibit systematically different religious attitudinal profiles compared to non-psychotic psychiatric patients (e.g., neurotic or personality disorder diagnoses) and non-hospitalized individuals.
• Mapping Socio-Demographic Covariates: The scale was intended to quantify the degree to which religious dogmatism or flexibility is moderated by educational level, intelligence, age-related maturation, and explicit denominational affiliation.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the Religious Attitude Scale is conceptualized as a unidimensional ideological continuum that ranges from complete theological dogmatism to complete rationalistic or metaphorical liberalism. The authors operationalized this domain through three primary theoretical anchors:

Religious Orthodoxy

Religious orthodoxy within the RAS framework is defined as the uncritical acceptance of established, literalistic, and supernatural theological doctrines. The orthodox stance presupposes:

• Absolute belief in a transcendent, personal Deity who actively intervenes in human affairs, history, and physical natural laws.
• A literal interpretation of sacred scriptures, treating religious texts as inerrant, divine revelations rather than historical or socio-cultural documents.
• The unequivocal affirmation of core metaphysical dogmas, such as original sin, bodily resurrection, physical immortality, heaven and hell, and divine retribution or salvation.
• Rigid moral boundaries anchored in divine mandate rather than contextual human ethics.

Religious Conservatism

Religious conservatism occupies the intermediate sector of the construct continuum. It is characterized by:

• An enduring commitment to institutional religious structures, ecclesiastical traditions, and regular communal worship.
• A moderate balance between supernaturalism and rationality, wherein traditional doctrines are upheld in general principle but tempered by practical moral considerations.
• An inclination to accept institutional church teachings as authoritative guides for personal morality while refraining from the dogmatic, punitive, or hyper-literalistic positions typical of extreme orthodoxy.

Religious Liberalism

Religious liberalism represents the lower numerical end of the attitudinal spectrum, capturing a cognitive orientation characterized by:

• A de-emphasis or complete rejection of supernatural intervention, miracles, and the literal truth of sacred scriptures.
• A humanist, ethical, or symbolic conceptualization of God, viewing divinity as an abstract cosmic force, the realization of human potential, or a metaphorical representation of universal brotherhood.
• An open-ended, inquiring, and self-directed approach to spiritual and philosophical inquiry that prioritizes empirical evidence, personal conscience, and social justice over ecclesiastical authority or dogma.

6. Theoretical Framework

The architecture of the Religious Attitude Scale is situated at the intersection of mid-twentieth-century personality psychology, psychoanalytic theory, and the emerging empirical psychology of religion. Three dominant conceptual traditions directly informed its design:

The Authoritarian Personality and Ideological Rigidity

Following the seminal work of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) on The Authoritarian Personality, behavioral researchers hypothesized that religious attitudes reflect broader cognitive styles and ego defenses. Orthodox religious attitudes were theorized to parallel the psychological architecture of authoritarianism: intolerance of ambiguity, conventionalism, submission to idealized authority, and anti-intraception. Armstrong and colleagues embedded this perspective by designing items that tested whether the respondent required absolute cognitive closure through dogmatic certainty or could tolerate the ambiguity inherent in liberal, metaphorical interpretations.

Allport’s Dimensionality of Religious Sentiment

Although Gordon Allport later formalized the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity (Allport & Ross, 1967), his earlier treatise, The Individual and His Religion (1950), distinguished between immature religion (characterized by magical thinking, self-serving petitions, and dogmatism) and mature religion (characterized by critical reflection, complexity, and tolerance). The RAS was constructed precisely to measure whether this doctrinal progression along an orthodox-to-liberal axis systematically correlates with general personality integration and psychological health.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Defense Mechanisms

Sigmund Freud’s classical critique postulated that dogmatic religious beliefs serve as protective illusions designed to alleviate infantile helplessness and repress existential anxiety. Armstrong et al. sought to verify empirically whether psychiatric inpatients—whose ego functioning is compromised—resort more frequently to rigid, orthodox religious attitudes as defensive maneuvers compared to individuals with intact reality testing and adaptive psychological coping mechanisms.

7. Validity

The empirical validation of the Religious Attitude Scale was established primarily through criterion-related and known-groups validation methodologies conducted during its standardization in institutional and community samples.

Criterion and Known-Groups Validity

The scale’s primary validity criterion was its demonstrable capacity to statistically discriminate between distinct religious groups known a priori to hold divergent doctrinal beliefs:

• The sample included adherents from three distinct religious traditions across the theological spectrum: Roman Catholics (hypothesized to score highest, reflecting traditional orthodoxy), mainstream Protestants (hypothesized to score in the intermediate conservative range), and Unitarians (hypothesized to score lowest, reflecting radical theological liberalism).
• Application of the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U Test revealed highly significant differences (p < .001) between all three theological cohorts, confirming the scale’s discriminant sensitivity across known theological groups.

Clinical and Psychopathological Correlates

Armstrong, Larsen, and Mourer administered the RAS to clinical inpatient populations at state psychiatric facilities, dividing them into psychotic (e.g., schizophrenic) and non-psychotic diagnostic groups:

• The scale successfully captured subtle variations in religious attitudes across diagnostic categories, demonstrating that psychiatric inpatients exhibited distinct patterns of doctrinal adherence relative to matched healthy community controls.
• Correlational analyses examined relationships between RAS scores and emotional adjustment metrics, indices of self-concept, and educational status. The data indicated that lower educational attainment and older age were positively correlated with higher orthodoxy scores, whereas advanced formal education was strongly associated with theological liberalism.

8. Reliability

The Religious Attitude Scale exhibits exceptional psychometric stability and internal consistency, though test-retest reliability varies systematically depending on the theological orientation of the respondent cohort.

Internal Consistency

Across the combined standardization samples, the scale demonstrated an overall internal consistency coefficient of .98. This high value indicates exceptional conceptual homogeneity among the 16 core religious concepts and confirms that the graded weighting scheme consistently captures a unified underlying attitudinal construct.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments revealed a broad range of test-retest reliability coefficients (r = .48 to .98), which varied substantially as a function of religious denomination:

• Roman Catholic Sample: Demonstrated the highest stability (r = .98), indicating that adherents of dogmatically structured, authoritative traditions maintain highly fixed, consistent responses across time.
• Mainstream Protestant Sample: Exhibited moderate-to-high stability falling between the Catholic and Unitarian cohorts.
• Unitarian Sample: Demonstrated the lowest temporal stability (r = .48). The authors interpreted this lower coefficient not as an instrument flaw, but as a direct reflection of the construct itself: theological liberalism encourages continuous personal re-evaluation, intellectual evolution, and open philosophical questioning, inherently yielding higher variance across repeat administrations.

9. Factor Analysis

At the time of the scale’s construction in 1962, formal exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were computationally prohibitive for routine scale development. Consequently, a mathematical factor analysis was not indicated or performed by Armstrong, Larsen, and Mourer.

Method of Scale Construction and Content Structuring

In lieu of latent variable factor modeling, the authors utilized an expert-judge scaling methodology grounded in classical psychophysics and Thurstone-style attitudinal scale construction:

• The initial phase involved identifying 16 fundamental religious concepts (e.g., God, immortality, prayer, divine revelation, moral transgression).
• A panel of 12 expert judges evaluated, categorized, and scaled response options for each concept according to their degree of orthodoxy, conservatism, and liberalism.
• The resulting pooled judgments established the hierarchical numerical weights assigned to each multiple-choice option, creating a mathematically unified, weighted unidimensional continuum.

Modern Psychometric Appraisal

From the vantage point of contemporary psychometric theory, the scale functions as an a priori unidimensional instrument. Subsequent theoretical reviews of mid-century religious metrics suggest that scales of this nature, if subjected to modern structural equation modeling, typically reveal a dominant general factor reflecting “Theological Traditionalism,” along with two secondary, correlated subfactors capturing “Institutional Deference” and “Humanistic Rationalism.”

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Religious Attitude Scale is a standardized paper-and-pencil self-report inventory. Its operational characteristics are summarized below:

• Instrument Type: Standardized multi-choice attitudinal rating scale.
• Administration Format: Individual or group-administered paper-and-pencil inventory (adaptable for digital survey administration).
• Target Population: Adults aged 18 years and older; validated on both clinical psychiatric inpatients and community adult samples.
• Total Number of Items: 16 multiple-choice items.
• Item Content: 16 foundational theological, metaphysical, and philosophical concepts.
• Response Structure: Each of the 16 items presents multiple response alternatives reflecting varying degrees of theological orthodoxy, conservatism, and liberalism.
• Scoring System and Scale Range: Response choices carry specific numerical values derived from expert-judge weights. The cumulative raw score ranges from:
• 153: Maximum possible score, indicating extreme, uncritical religious orthodoxy.
• Intermediate Scores: Indicating moderate conservatism and conventional religious observance.
• 1: Minimum possible score, indicating radical theological liberalism, humanism, or naturalistic skepticism.
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Religious Attitude Scale was published in 1962 in the Journal of Psychological Studies. As an archival clinical measurement tool developed over six decades ago, the following usage conditions apply:

• Copyright and Access: The scale was originally published in an academic journal. Complete test items and proprietary scoring weights were retained by the authors and the publishing entity. Researchers wishing to utilize the complete, official instrument must consult the original publication (Armstrong et al., 1962) or contact the institutional archives and copyright holders.
• Academic and Non-Commercial Research: Historically, instruments published in early 1960s scientific journals were available for fair-use academic, non-commercial research purposes provided proper scientific citation is maintained. However, modern commercial replication, digital distribution, or incorporation into fee-for-service clinical batteries requires formal permissions.
• Fees: There is no centralized commercial clearinghouse charging standardized per-administration fees for the RAS; access is governed by institutional library subscriptions and standard interlibrary loan services.

12. References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper & Row.
• Allport, G. W. (1950). The Individual and His Religion: A Psychological Interpretation. Macmillan.
• 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
• Armstrong, R. G., Larsen, G. L., & Mourer, S. A. (1962). Religious attitudes and emotional adjustment. Journal of Psychological Studies, 13(1), 35–47.
• Batson, C. D., Schoenrade, P., & Ventis, W. L. (1993). Religion and the Individual: A Social-Psychological Perspective. Oxford University Press.
• Hill, P. C., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (Eds.). (1999). Measures of Religiosity. Religious Education Press.
• Mann, H. B., & Whitney, D. R. (1947). On a test of whether one of two random variables is stochastically larger than the other. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 18(1), 50–60. https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177730491

13. Items of the Scale