Affiliation:
1. The Wright Institute Berkeley, California
Abstract
This study was designed to investigate the comparative ego development, religious orientation, and doctrinal beliefs of three Protestant groups: life-long fundamentalists (n=25), fundamentalist converts (n=25), and nonfundamentalist converts (n=25). Subjects from the Southern Baptist Church (fundamentalists) and United Methodist Church (nonfundamentalists) were used. Three instruments were employed: the Wiggins Content Scale of Religious Fundamentalism from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Loevinger's Washington University Sentence Completion Test of Ego Development, and Allport's Religious Orientation Scale. The fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist groups were doctrinally different; however, the groups did not differ in levels of ego development. The two fundamentalist groups scored higher on Allport's measure of intrinsic religious orientation. Methodological suggestions were made for future research of fundamentalists.
Subject
General Psychology,Religious studies