Rejection of Christianity Scale

Abstract

The REJECTION OF CHRISTIANITY SCALE is a specialized psychometric instrument consisting of 20 items designed to quantify negative attitudes towards the core elements of the Christian faith. Developed primarily in the context of Northern Ireland, the scale was created to address a methodological limitation in existing religious attitude measures, which typically focused only on positive orientation, leading to potential acquiescence response bias.

The instrument was derived from an initial pool of 32 negatively worded items covering eight overlapping conceptual domains, including God, church, belief, and religious practice. Through exploratory factor analysis, the final 20 items were selected based on their consistent coherence. While the term “Christianity” is intentionally omitted from the items, the use of related concepts such as “God,” “clergy,” and “resurrection” anchors the scale specifically to the Christian tradition.

Keywords

Rejection of Christianity, Negative religious attitudes, Religious psychology, Scale development, Acquiescence bias, Northern Ireland, Adolescent spirituality.

Authors

J. Greer, L. J. Francis (or Frances).

Purpose

The principal purpose of the REJECTION OF CHRISTIANITY SCALE is to provide a reliable measure of negative religious orientation. This development was crucial because standard scales used in contexts like Northern Ireland often focused exclusively on positive faith, thereby failing to capture genuine rejection and potentially inflating scores due to methodological artifacts like acquiescence bias.

By employing negatively-valenced items, the scale successfully offsets this response tendency, leading to a more accurate assessment of an individual’s true disposition toward religious structures and beliefs. Furthermore, the scale’s existence supports theoretical advancements in the psychology of religion, aligning with motivational theories that suggest measuring both approach (positive motivation) and avoidance (negative motivation or rejection) behaviors provides a more robust framework for understanding religious commitment and non-commitment.

Construct

The scale measures the construct of Rejection of Christianity, defined as a generalized negative disposition toward the key tenets, institutions, and figures associated with the Christian faith. This construct is operationalized across 20 items that probe specific areas of rejection.

The underlying conceptual areas tapped by the items include rejection of institutional religion (the church, the clergy), rejection of core doctrines (God, belief, life after death, resurrection), and rejection related to societal aspects (religious education, authority, and the conflict between religion and science). Although the term “religion” is used broadly in the items, the content ensures that the scale specifically assesses rejection within the framework of Christianity.

Validity

The validity of the Rejection of Christianity Scale has been assessed primarily through content and concurrent/construct validation methods in the initial studies.

Content Validity: Content validity is judged to be good, reflecting the comprehensive nature of the items covering different facets of rejection (e.g., God, church, belief). A notable consideration is the use of the generic term “religion” rather than the explicit “Christianity” in the item set. However, the specific content—mentioning the “miracles of Jesus” and “the resurrection”—ensures that the scale is functionally specific to the Christian context.

Concurrent and Construct Validity: The scale demonstrates high concurrent and construct validity. It correlates significantly and predictably with established positive measures of Christian faith, confirming that the scale measures the opposite pole of religious commitment. Additionally, the scale successfully differentiates between Protestant and Catholic adolescents in the Northern Ireland population in ways consistent with existing religious data. However, the source notes that differential validity—comparing the scale’s unique contribution relative to positively worded instruments—was not tested initially.

Reliability

The scale exhibits strong measures of internal consistency across diverse samples of Northern Irish adolescents, demonstrating its reliability in measuring the construct of rejection.

• In the 1992 publication (Greer & Francis), the internal consistency coefficients were reported as .94 for a sample of 466 Protestant adolescents and .90 for 409 Catholic adolescents.
• An earlier investigation (Greer & Francis, 1990) reported an internal consistency reliability of .93 based on a larger sample size of N = 1,177.

These high reliability scores confirm that the 20 items consistently measure a singular underlying factor of negative religious attitude within the specified population group (Forms 4 to 6 students in Northern Ireland).

Factor Analysis

The development of the final 20-item scale involved rigorous item reduction based on factor analysis. The initial item pool comprised 32 negatively worded items designed to tap into eight conceptual areas relevant to religious rejection: religion, God, church, belief, religious practice, individual rights, authority, and science.

Exploratory factor analyses were employed to refine this pool. While the specific methodology (e.g., type of rotation or extraction) for the exploratory factor analysis was not detailed in the source material, the outcome was the selection of 20 items that demonstrated the most consistent coherence, ensuring a unidimensional or highly correlated factor structure representing the overall rejection construct (Greer & Francis, 1992, p. 1346).

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report psychometric scale

Format: 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 5 (Strongly agree).

Language Available: English

Population Group: Adolescents (specifically Protestant and Catholic students)

Age Group: Approximately 14 to 16 years old (Forms 4 to 6)

Population Details: Normative data is restricted to Protestant and Catholic male and female adolescents attending schools in Northern Ireland.

Test Methodology: The scale is described as easily administered and scored. Users should be aware of potential interpretation issues for individuals who express general anti-religious sentiment but remain personally pro-Christianity, requiring careful interpretation of item wordings.

Keywords

Psychological measurement, Religious scale, Greer and Francis, Negative valence, Attitude measurement, Denominational differences, Adolescence, Psychometrics.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not Provided

Affiliation Email addresses: Not Provided

Correspondence Address: Not Provided

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: Initial research 1990; Scale publication 1992.

Permissions & Fee: Information regarding current permissions and associated fees is not provided in the source material.

Reference’s

Greer, J., & Francis, L. J. (1992). Measuring “rejection of Christianity” among 14 to 16-year-old adolescents in Catholic and Protestant schools in Northern Ireland. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 1345-1348.

Greer, J. E., & Frances, L. J. (1990). The religious profile of pupils in Northern Ireland. Journal of Empirical Theology, 3, 35-50.

Items of the REJECTION OF CHRISTIANITY SCALE

Please print a number from l to 5 to indicate how you feel about it. Use the following scale to indicate how you feel about each item:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Not certain
• Agree
• Strongly agree

1. Religion is out of touch with my experience and interests.
2. I cannot believe in a personal God.
3. I do not believe that there is any life after death.
4. The clergy are completely out of touch with young people today. In the past religion has done more harm than good to mankind.
5. I see too much innocent suffering to believe in a good God who is all powerful. The church should not dictate a way of living and a moral code for everyone.
6. Religious education in school is uninteresting and ineffective. Sermons in church are a boring waste of time.
7. Money and enjoyment are more important to me than religion.
8. If God does exist, I want evidence to help me believe.
9. I find it hard to accept that the miracles of Jesus really happened. Going to church is a dull, meaningless ritual.
10. Most religious people are hypocrites who do not practice what they believe. I get no satisfaction from going to church on Sundays.
11. The resurrection is unbelievable because people do not come back from the dead. God is something which people create for themselves.
12. The church has not helped me get any satisfactory ideas about God. The church is out of date and has no attraction for me.
13. The universe is entirely governed by chance.