Religiosity, moral attitudes and moral competence: A critical investigation of the religiosity-morality relation

Abstract

The present study investigates the relation between the religiosity dimensions which Wulff (1991) described (Exclusion versus Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal versus Symbolic) and both moral attitudes and moral competence. The Post-Critical Belief Scale (Duriez, Fontaine, & Hutseabut, 2000) was used as a measure of Wulff’s religiosity dimensions, and the Moral Judgment Test (Lind, 1998) was used to measure both moral attitudes and moral competence. Results from a middle adolescent sample ( N = 338), a university sample ( N = 336) and an adult sample ( N = 336) suggest that whereas the Literal versus Symbolic dimension shows substantial relations with moral attitudes and moral competence, the Exclusion versus Inclusion of Transcendence dimension is unrelated to both of them. This suggests that, although there is no intrinsic relationship between religiosity and morality, the way people process religious contents is predictive of the way they deal with moral issues.