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Spiritual But Not Religious? Evidence for Two Independent Dispositions
Author(s) -
Saucier Gerard,
Skrzypińska Katarzyna
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2006.00409.x
Subject(s) - psychology , spirituality , personality , social psychology , big five personality traits , relevance (law) , big five personality traits and culture , mysticism , religious orientation , absorption (acoustics) , theology , medicine , philosophy , physics , alternative medicine , pathology , political science , acoustics , law
Some psychologists treat religious/spiritual beliefs as a unitary aspect of individual differences. But a distinction between mysticism and orthodox religion has been recognized by scholars as well as laypersons, and empirical studies of “ism” variables and of “spirituality” measures have yielded factors reflecting this distinction. Using a large sample of American adults, analyses demonstrate that subjective spirituality and tradition‐oriented religiousness are empirically highly independent and have distinctly different correlates in the personality domain, suggesting that individuals with different dispositions tend toward different styles of religious/spiritual beliefs. These dimensions have low correlations with the lexical Big Five but high correlations with scales (e.g., Absorption, Traditionalism) on some omnibus personality inventories, indicating their relevance for studies of personality.