Religious Fundamentalism Scale

Abstract

The Religious Fundamentalism Scale, originally formulated by sociologists Frank R. Westie and James G. Martin in their seminal 1959 investigation of intergroup attitudes, serves as one of the earliest standardized psychometric instruments designed to quantify adherence to traditional, conservative Christian theological tenets. Developed within the context of examining the psychosocial correlates of ethnic tolerance and prejudice, the instrument operationalizes religious fundamentalism not merely as broad institutional commitment or subjective devoutness, but specifically as belief in biblical inerrancy, supernatural Christology, physical resurrection, divine miracles, and the eschatological necessity of personal salvation. Comprising nine self-report items evaluated on a four-point Likert-type response continuum ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree,” the instrument balances positively worded doctrinal affirmations (5 items) with negatively phrased skeptical statements (4 items) to mitigate acquiescence response bias.

Psychometrically, the scale demonstrates robust internal consistency, with split-half and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients historically reported between .84 and .90 across community and collegiate samples. Initial validation studies demonstrated significant discriminatory power, distinguishing sharply between individuals categorized as highly prejudiced and those demonstrating tolerant personalities regarding racial and ethnic outgroups. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses consistently support an essentially unidimensional latent construct reflecting orthodox supernaturalism and scriptural authority, while also accommodating slight bifactor inclinations distinguishing supernatural christological convictions from broader cosmological assertions. This article provides an exhaustive academic review of the Martin-Westie Religious Fundamentalism Scale, tracing its theoretical heritage, structural and factorial properties, clinical and sociopolitical utility, cross-cultural limitations, and enduring influence on the social-scientific study of ideology and prejudice.

Keywords

Religious Fundamentalism Scale, James G. Martin, Frank R. Westie, religious orthodoxy, Christian fundamentalism, authoritarianism, prejudice, tolerant personality, biblical literalism, psychometrics, scale validation, social distance.

Authors

The Religious Fundamentalism Scale was designed and validated by James G. Martin and Frank R. Westie. At the time of the instrument’s initial publication in 1959, Frank R. Westie was a prominent sociologist affiliated with the Department of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington, widely recognized for his methodological innovations in measuring racial attitudes, social distance, and the multidimensional facets of institutionalized prejudice. James G. Martin, who collaborated extensively with Westie during his doctoral and post-doctoral work at Indiana University and subsequently held academic appointments at Northern Illinois University, specialized in social psychology, minority-majority relations, and intergroup hostility.

Westie and Martin’s collaboration emerged from a broader sociological imperative in post-World War II American social science to investigate how personal ideology, institutional religiosity, and structural socialization coalesce to foster either tolerant or authoritarian personality orientations. Their work was later canonized and made broadly accessible to psychometricians through its inclusion in the landmark survey compendium Measures of Political Attitudes (1969), edited by John P. Robinson and Phillip R. Shaver at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Religious Fundamentalism Scale is to evaluate an individual’s adherence to an orthodox, supernatural, and doctrinally conservative worldview rooted in historic Protestant fundamentalism. During the late 1950s, sociological and psychological literature increasingly recognized that “religiosity” could not be treated as a monolithic variable. While generic religious participation (such as church attendance frequency or denominational membership) produced contradictory correlations with tolerance, social justice attitudes, and civil liberties, specific ideological and doctrinal dimensions of belief appeared systematically associated with social rigidity and intergroup antipathy.

Martin and Westie designed this nine-item instrument to isolate the doctrinal content of fundamentalism from mere church affiliation. Specifically, the scale was intended to determine whether an uncompromising belief in the literal inspiration of scripture, physical miracles, the divinity of Christ, and exclusive salvific mechanisms functionally characterizes the “intolerant personality.” In their original clinical and field application in an urban midwestern community (Indianapolis, Indiana), the scale served as a core diagnostic tool to differentiate between matched samples of demonstrably tolerant versus categorically prejudiced individuals.

Beyond its initial application in prejudice research, the scale serves several contemporary research and applied functions:

• Sociological Analysis of Ideology: It allows researchers to quantify how traditional religious dogma intersects with socioeconomic status, educational attainment, political conservatism, and nationalism.
• Social and Personality Psychology: The instrument facilitates the empirical examination of cognitive styles, such as need for cognitive closure, integrative complexity, dogmatism, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), illuminating how rigid doctrinal belief systems buffer existential anxiety or perpetuate outgroup derogation.
• Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Attitude Tracking: When embedded within broader demographic surveys, the scale enables sociologists to assess longitudinal shifts in theological conservatism across generational cohorts facing modern secularization.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the Martin-Westie Religious Fundamentalism Scale is theological fundamentalism, characterized by an unbending commitment to foundational, traditional Christian dogma, the supernatural authority of scripture, and an exclusive, personalized christocentric theology. In contrast to modern, content-free, or process-oriented definitions of fundamentalism—such as those proposed decades later by Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, who conceptualized fundamentalism as an attitude asserting that one’s religion possesses the sole, unalterable truth—Martin and Westie operationalized fundamentalism through its substantive doctrinal pillars.

The construct comprises several clearly identifiable thematic facets embedded within its nine items:

1. Scriptural Inerrancy and Divine Inspiration

At the center of Christian fundamentalism is the epistemological primacy of the biblical text. Item 1 (“The Bible is the inspired word of God”) directly measures the respondent’s acceptance of divine revelation over humanistic or secular textual criticism. Fundamentalist cognition relies on the Bible as the final, immutable arbiter of historical, moral, and scientific reality, rejecting theological modernism that views scripture as a culturally bound, metaphorical, or fallible human document.

2. Supernatural Christology and Divinity

The construct posits a sharp theological demarcation between viewing Jesus of Nazareth as a prophetic moral teacher versus recognizing Him as the co-eternal Son of God. Item 4 (“Christ is a divine being, the Son of God”) positively evaluates this dogma, while Item 3 (“Christ was a mortal, historical person, but not a super natural or divine being”) captures secular or theological humanist skepticism. Endorsement of Christ’s ontological divinity is a structural prerequisite of fundamentalist Christian identity.

3. Historical Reality of Miracles and Resurrection

Fundamentalism rejects naturalistic reductionism. Item 5 (“The stories in the Bible about Christ healing sick and lame persons by His touch are fictitious and mythical”) and Item 9 (“Since Christ brought the dead to life, He gave eternal life to all who have faith”) assess cognitive commitment to the empirical reality of biblical miracles. The miraculous healing ministry and the bodily resurrection of the dead are treated not as symbolic allegories for psychological renewal, but as factual, historical interventions by an omnipotent deity into the physical spacetime matrix.

4. Eschatology, Afterlife, and Soteriological Exclusivism

A central dimension of the fundamentalist worldview is the linear, teleological progression of history culminating in divine judgment. Item 6 (“Someday Christ will return”) probes millenarian or apocalyptic expectancy regarding the Second Coming. Concurrently, Item 2 (“The religious idea of heaven is not much more than superstition”) and Item 7 (“The idea of life after death is simply a myth”) index the ontological affirmation of an afterlife and a literal heaven, positioning eternity as the ultimate consequence of earthly religious allegiance.

5. Societal Salvation and Moral Regeneration

Finally, the construct incorporates the belief that societal stability and moral integrity are contingent upon individual and collective religious submission. Item 8 (“If more of the people in this country would turn to Christ we would have a lot less crime and corruption”) evaluates the externalization of theological dogma into civic and sociopolitical spheres, reflecting the conviction that structural societal maladies (e.g., crime, corruption) stem directly from spiritual apostasy rather than socioeconomic inequities.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Martin-Westie Religious Fundamentalism Scale is situated at the intersection of mid-century sociological theories of intergroup relations and psychoanalytic-behavioral theories of the prejudiced personality. Specifically, the scale was conceptualized in the shadow of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) and Gordon Allport’s formulation of the cognitive foundations of prejudice in The Nature of Prejudice (1954).

The Authoritarian Dynamic and Conventionalism

Adorno and colleagues postulated that prejudice is not an isolated, aberrant social attitude, but part of a pervasive, deeply structured personality pattern characterized by rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values, submissive uncritical attitudes toward idealized moral authorities, and a readiness to condemn individuals who violate conventional norms. Fundamentalist religion provides an institutionalized framework that perfectly aligns with these authoritarian dynamics:

• Authoritarian Submission: Total epistemological submission to the absolute, unchallengeable authority of God and biblical scripture.
• Anti-Intraception and Categorical Thinking: An aversion to ambiguity, nuance, and subjective introspection, favoring rigid binary categorizations: saved versus damned, righteous versus wicked, divine truth versus demonic deception.
• Authoritarian Aggression: Moral indignation directed toward those who reject theological orthodoxy, often manifesting as outgroup hostility toward secularists, religious minorities, and non-normative social groups.

Martin and Westie’s “Tolerant Personality” Model

Martin and Westie (1959) sought to empirically invert the traditional focus on the “prejudiced personality” by systematically defining the psychological and ideological characteristics of the “tolerant personality.” They hypothesized that tolerance requires an open cognitive system capable of tolerating ambiguity, appreciating human diversity, and rejecting dogmatic ethnocentrism. Conversely, they theorized that religious fundamentalism functions as an institutionalized cognitive anchor for the intolerant personality.

Within this framework, fundamentalism supplies absolute epistemic certainty. For individuals with low tolerance for ambiguity, the unambiguous, historically grounded, and supernatural doctrines of fundamentalism alleviate existential and moral anxiety. However, this psychological certainty comes at the expense of intergroup flexibility: when an individual believes their group possesses absolute, divine truth, outgroups are inevitably perceived as morally deficient, spiritually corrupt, or dangerous, providing an ideological rationalization for social distance and intergroup antipathy.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Religious Fundamentalism Scale has been scrutinized across multiple empirical investigations involving diverse demographic, regional, and collegiate populations.

Criterion-Related and Known-Groups Validity

The primary validation strategy employed by Martin and Westie (1959) relied on a known-groups design. The authors selected two distinct samples of adults residing in Indianapolis, Indiana, matched closely on key demographic variables (socioeconomic status, neighborhood, sex, and age):

• A “tolerant” group displaying exceptionally low prejudice across a battery of social distance scales evaluating attitudes toward African Americans.
• An “intolerant” group exhibiting exceptionally high prejudice on the identical measures.

Administration of the Religious Fundamentalism Scale revealed profound, statistically significant differences between these two cohorts ($p < .001$). The intolerant cohort scored significantly higher on religious fundamentalism than the tolerant cohort. This dramatic group divergence established robust concurrent and criterion validity, indicating that the scale effectively discriminates along ideological and intergroup behavioral lines.

Convergent and Construct Validity

Subsequent psychometric evaluations have demonstrated substantial convergent validity with related psychological and sociopolitical constructs:

• Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA): Scores on the Martin-Westie scale correlate strongly ($r = .55$ to $.70$) with measures of authoritarianism, particularly the conventionalism and authoritarian submission subdimensions.
• Ethnocentrism and Social Distance: Scores show moderate to strong positive correlations ($r = .35$ to $.52$) with Bogardus-style social distance scales and ethnocentric rejection of ethnic and cultural outgroups.
• Dogmatism and Need for Cognitive Closure: Research evaluating Rokeach’s Dogmatism Scale against the Martin-Westie instrument indicates significant positive associations ($r = .40$ to $.48$), corroborating the theoretical link between doctrinal fundamentalism and general cognitive inflexibility.

Discriminant Validity

Importantly, the scale exhibits adequate discriminant validity when evaluated against non-ideological psychological metrics. It correlates weakly or non-significantly with generalized measures of emotional stability, state anxiety, and non-verbal cognitive ability when educational attainment is statistically controlled. Furthermore, it differentiates effectively between doctrinal fundamentalism and generic church attendance; individuals may attend religious services frequently for social or communal reasons while scoring low on the scale’s specific supernatural and inerrantist items.

Reliability

The reliability of the Religious Fundamentalism Scale has been substantiated through classical test theory (CTT) metrics, establishing that its nine items operate with high internal consistency and measurement precision.

Internal Consistency

In the original normative sample analyzed by Martin and Westie (1959), the split-half reliability coefficient, corrected via the Spearman-Brown prediction formula, was calculated at .84. Subsequent independent investigations utilizing university undergraduates and community adults have reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .82 to .90, reflecting a high degree of interrelatedness among the items despite the concise nature of the instrument.

Item-total correlations across the nine items are consistently robust, typically exceeding $.45$. The negatively phrased items (e.g., Item 2, Item 3, Item 5, and Item 7) demonstrate corrected item-total correlations comparable to the positively phrased items, confirming that the scale’s balancing mechanism successfully captures the underlying construct without sacrificing internal cohesion.

Test-Retest Stability

Longitudinal and short-term stability assessments have revealed strong test-retest reliability. Over a four-to-six-week inter-test interval, test-retest correlation coefficients have remained stable at $r_{tt} = .81$ to $.88$ among adult samples. Because fundamentalist religious beliefs represent deeply internalized, culturally reinforced philosophical and metaphysical schemas, scores remain relatively impervious to transient situational fluctuations, making the instrument exceptionally reliable for cross-sectional and panel research designs.

Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the Religious Fundamentalism Scale has been explored via both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), shedding light on the structural cohesion of the Martin-Westie operationalization.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Historically, unrotated principal components and principal axis factoring procedures applied to the nine items have yielded a prominent single-factor solution. The primary general factor typically accounts for 48% to 58% of the total variance, exhibiting an eigenvalue substantially greater than 1.0 (often ranging between 4.3 and 5.2), with subsequent eigenvalues dropping sharply below 1.0. This “scree cliff” strongly supports the fundamental unidimensionality of the scale when applied within predominantly Christian or culturally Western contexts.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated using modern confirmatory structural equation modeling, a strict unidimensional model demonstrates acceptable fit indices (e.g., $\chi^2 / df < 3.0$, $\text{CFI} ge .93$, $\text{TLI} ge .91$, and $\text{RMSEA} le .07$). However, methodological research demonstrates that model fit improves significantly when accounting for a method artifact associated with item phrasing. Introducing a method factor for the four negatively phrased, reversed items (Items 2, 3, 5, and 7) yields superior fit statistics ($\text{CFI} > .97$, $\text{RMSEA} < .05$). Substantively, all items continue to load strongly onto the general latent factor representing doctrinal fundamentalism, confirming that the Martin-Westie instrument operates as an essentially unidimensional scale suitable for aggregate index computation.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Religious Fundamentalism Scale
• Authors: James G. Martin and Frank R. Westie (1959)
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents; standardized primarily within general community and college populations in Western, Christian-influenced contexts.
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital psychological questionnaire.
• Number of Items: 9 statements.
• Response Scale: 4-point forced-choice Likert continuum consisting of:
  • Strongly agree
  • Agree
  • disagree
  • Strongly disagree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Positively Scored Items (Items 1, 4, 6, 8, 9): Direct scoring reflecting fundamentalist affirmation:
    • Strongly agree = 4
    • Agree = 3
    • disagree = 2
    • Strongly disagree = 1
  • Negatively Scored / Reverse Items (Items 2, 3, 5, 7): Inverted scoring reflecting theological skepticism or modernism:
    • Strongly agree = 1
    • Agree = 2
    • disagree = 3
    • Strongly disagree = 4
• Score Range and Interpretation: Total cumulative scores range from 9 to 36.
  • 9 – 15: Theological Modernism / Secular Skepticism (rejection of biblical inerrancy, supernatural miracles, and christocentric exclusivity).
  • 16 – 23: Moderate / Liberal Theological Orientation (mixed or ambivalent endorsement of supernatural tenets; metaphorical or non-literal interpretation of Christian dogma).
  • 24 – 30: Traditional / Conservative Religiosity (substantial adherence to traditional Christian doctrines).
  • 31 – 36: High Religious Fundamentalism (rigorous commitment to biblical literalism, miraculous intervention, bodily resurrection, and salvific exclusivity).
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Religious Fundamentalism Scale was initially developed and published in 1959 in the American Sociological Review as part of James G. Martin and Frank R. Westie’s empirical study, “The Tolerant Personality.” The complete scale, alongside its scoring protocol and reliability parameters, was subsequently reprinted for academic dissemination in the widely cited reference compendium Measures of Political Attitudes (1969), edited by John P. Robinson and Phillip R. Shaver through the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Under United States copyright conventions governing academic research tools published prior to 1978 without independent statutory copyright registrations, the instrument resides in the public domain. Researchers, clinicians, educators, and sociologists are free to utilize, administer, translate, and adapt the nine-item scale for empirical, non-commercial, and academic research purposes without paying royalty fees or seeking explicit written permission from the authors’ estates or the original publishers. When incorporating the instrument into empirical studies, professional academic ethics dictate appropriate bibliographic attribution to Martin and Westie (1959) and Robinson and Shaver (1969).

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Row.
• Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley.
• 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
• Altemeyer, B., & Hunsberger, B. (1992). Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(2), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0202_5
• Hood, R. W., Hill, P. C., & Williamson, W. P. (2005). The psychology of religious fundamentalism. Guilford Press.
• Kirkpatrick, L. A. (1993). Fundamentalism, Christian orthodoxy, and intrinsic religious orientation as predictors of prejudice: The effects of language and scale content. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32(3), 256–273. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386664
• Martin, J. G., & Westie, F. R. (1959). The tolerant personality. American Sociological Review, 24(4), 521–528. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089539
• McFarland, S. G. (1989). Religious orientations and the targets of discrimination. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28(3), 324–336. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386743
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of political attitudes. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Items of the Scale