Religious openness hypothesis: III. defense against secularism within fundamentalist and biblical foundationalist ideological surrounds

Abstract

In Christian samples, Faith and Intellect Oriented Reflection correlate positively in Iran but negatively in the United States. The hypothesis of this investigation was that this American effect reflects reaction to a secularism that is influential in the United States but not in Iran. In a sample of American undergraduates (N =425), a Defense against Secularism Scale correlated negatively with Intellect Oriented Reflection, measures of religious openness, and Openness to Experience while also correlating positively with Faith Oriented Reflection and various indices of fundamentalism. Defense against Fundamentalism fully or partial mediated negative linkages of Faith Oriented Reflection and fundamentalism with Intellect Oriented Reflection. Procedures statistically controlled for Biblical Foundationalism in order to create a Religious Fundamentalist Ideological Surround and vice versa. Within a Religious Fundamentalist Surround, Defense against Secularism appeared to operate as a defensiveness that dictated rejection of reason. Within the Biblical Foundationalist Surround, it instead seemed to serve as acknowledgement of a perceived empirical reality that encouraged defense of the faith. These data further confirmed the religious and psychological openness of American Christians while also demonstrating that perceptions of secularism may obscure that openness.Religious and other social rationalities operate within an ideological surround (Watson, 1993, 2011; Ghorbani, Watson, Saeedi, Chen, & Silver, 2012).This claim assumes that what is rational within social life is defined by conformity with norms around which a community is organized. Traditional religious communities organize their thought and practice around norms defined by some shared vision of God. Modern scientific communities conform to norms defined by some prominent reading of nature. These norms are incommensurable. In other words, nature and God operate as gods within a surround because nothing extra-communal can serve as a higher god capable of adjudicating between these two standards for those who maintain ultimate commitments to one or the other. Incommensurable rationalities can, but need not be incompatible in what they recommend. Some thought and practice will be compatible, but much will be irrelevant across surrounds. Maintenance of boundaries will, nevertheless, be critical for ensuring the viability of any ideological surround (Hood, Morris, & Watson, 1986). Incommensurable rationalities will, consequently, make sociological adjustments that defend their boundaries within pluralistic cultural life (e.g., Watson, 2014). To say that social rationalities function within an ideological surround, therefore, is to say that they operate within a normative, incommensurable, and sociological frame of reference (MacIntyre, 1978, 1988).Based upon this Ideological Surround Model of social life, the Religious Openness Hypothesis argues that traditional religions have their own community-specific potentials for defining religious and psychological openness (Watson, Chen, Ghorbani, & Vartanian, 2015). This suggestion argues against any tendency to imply that traditional religions might be described as wholly reactionary or narrow-minded (perhaps, e.g., Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Batson, Shoenrade, & Ventis, 1993). The alternative suggestion is that religious, and indeed all viable, social rationalities must maintain two forms of openness (Tekke, Watson, Ismail, & Chen, 2015). Intra-traditional openness will allow a community to use its own thought and practice to better understand its own norms. Developments in the exegetical analysis of texts, for example, might help a religious community achieve deeper insights into its own social rationality. Extra-traditional openness will instead nurture the sociological viability of a community by integrating compatible but also by rejecting incompatible insights from other culturally influential social rationalities. …

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