Do Religious Styles and Schemata Change over Time: Results with the Religious Schema Scale

In three Bielefeld-Chattanooga Projects – the Studies on Deconversion, on the semantics and psychology of “Spirituality,” and the current longitudinal Study on religious change –, we included a perspective on religious development. As instruments we used, besides the faith development interview (FDI) as qualitative instrument, the Religious Schema Scale (RSS) as quantitative instrument to assess religious schemata and religious styles. Results with the RSS indicate not only clear relations to faith development scores, but constitute a perspective of its own on religious development, because the three religious schemata, which are assessed by the RSS subscales truth of text and teachings (ttt), fairness, tolerance and rational choice (ftr) and xenosophia/interreligious dialog, profile a specific domain of religious development, namely attitudes toward other religions and worldviews in relation one’s own. After re-interviewing the same persons, we are able to present results not only on cross-sectional, age groups-based analyses, but also in longitudinal analysis.