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showing signs of “naïve credulity”. Some of the people in this
group may embrace religious fundamentalism but those who
are nearer the centre may not be particularly conservative. Like
people falling in the previously mentioned quadrant, people in
the quadrant “Literal Disaffirmation” (or Literal Exclusion)
also interpret religious language in a literal way. However these
persons reject what is written or said in the Bible and other
religious texts. These people tend to be more intellectual and
this group would embrace those who lose sight of the possibil-
ity that religious words and ideas may refer to truths which
must be understood metaphorically. The group of people who
fall within the quadrant “Reductive Interpretation” (or Sym-
bolic Exclusion) also denies the existence of the transcendental
however they go beyond this denial and claim a privileged per-
spective on the meaning of religion’s myths and rituals. Finally,
the quadrant which Wulff termed “Restorative Interpretation”
(or Symbolic Inclusion) is made up of people who believe in
the existence of a transcendental realm but, unlike people in the
Literal Inclusion quadrant who take religious language for
granted, they search for the symbolic meaning of religious ob-
jects and ideas. They are usually complex, socially sensitive,
insightful and relatively unprejudiced “post-critical” people, in
the sense that they try “to encompass and transcend the criti-
cism of religion formulated by people like Freud and Marx in
order to find a symbolic meaning in religious language which
has personal meaning” and thereby try “to go beyond the criti-
cism on religion”. For a more detailed discussion of the four
approaches the reader is referred to Wulff (1997).
The Post-Critical Belief Scale
Building on the work of Wulff, Hutsebaut (1996) constructed
a 33-item scale called the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS)
which was designed to access a person’s approach to Christian
religion. Principal component analysis of the PCBS yielded a
two dimensional solution dividing the two dimensional space
into four quadrants which corresponded very well with Wulff’s
classification. The PCBS was subjected to tests to assess its
construct validity. Duriez, Fontaine and Hutsebaut (2000) found
that the subscales provide accurate measures of Wulff’s four
approaches to religion while Fontaine, Duriez, Luyten and Hut-
sebaut (2003) have shown that when individual differences in
acquiescence are corrected for, two components that can be
interpreted in terms of Inclusion vs. Exclusion of Transcen-
dence and Literal vs. Symbolic are sufficient to explain the
relation between the PCBS items. Duriez, Soenens and Hutse-
baut (2005) proposed a shortened version of the scale with 18
short items. This version correlates strongly with the version
proposed by Fontaine et al. (2003), with the correlation coeffi-
cients between scores on the long and the short scales greater
than 0.90 (Duriez, Soenens, & Hutsebaut, 2005).
In this shortened scale put forward by Duriez et al, each of
the 18 items is a simple statement and the respondents are
asked to indicate whether they agree or not with each statement
on a Likert Scale. The items try to measure the four typologies
of Wulff: Literal Inclusion (for example, the statement, “Only a
priest can answer important religious questions”); Literal Ex-
clusion (for example, “In the end, faith is nothing more than a
safety net for human fears”); Symbolic Exclusion (for example,
“There is no absolute meaning in life, only giving directions,
which are different for every one of us”); and Symbolic Inclu-
sion (for example, “The Bible holds a deeper truth which can
only be revealed by personal reflection”).
The works Duriez et al., 2000a and 2000b, especially the
former, provided the idea for this study. In these works the
researchers studied the relation between religion and racism.
They were dissatisfied with measures such frequency of church
attendance as indicators of religiosity, especially when investi-
gating the relation between religiosity and other variables. They
therefore turned to the PCBS. They concluded that while pre-
vious measures of religiosity were not sophisticated enough to
account for attitudes towards complex topics such as racism,
xenophobia and prejudice, scores on the PCBS were a better
attempt at reconciling a person’s religiosity and the person’s
attitudes towards such topics.
In this study we attempt to find out whether the shortened
PBCS is valid in a culture which is different from that in which
previous work using it has been carried out.
The PCBS is already an established scale, validated in some
populations, and it relates to a theoretical construct of Wulff.
The main motivation of our work rests on these facts and on the
research of Duriez et al. (2000a, 2000b) where it has already
been successfully used to compare religious beliefs with some
attitudes such as racism and prejudice.
In our work, the shortened PCBS together with 34 other
questions related to religious behaviour and attitudes was ad-
ministered to a random sample of students of the University of
Malta. One aim was to investigate how effective this scale is in
bringing out Wulff’s typology in a staunchly Catholic country
like Malta where over 98% of the population are baptized in the
Roman Catholic Church (World Factbook, 2008) although only
51% attend Church services regularly (Discern, 2006). It is
found that even in this sample, Principal Component Analysis
brings out Wulff’s four categories. Subsequently we proceed to
investigate how membership of one of Wulff’s categories of
religious belief is related to three areas of religious attitudes and
behaviour: 1) dogma and faith, 2) religious behaviour and 3)
sexual norms and practices. Discriminant Analysis is used in
order to study these possible associations.
Methodology
Sample
The population of students at the University of Malta is just
over 10,000. To collect the data, a questionnaire was sent to a
random sample of 650 students made available by the Univer-
sity Registrar. These students came from all the Faculties, In-
stitutes and Centres of the University. The response rate was
65% (n = 421). Both undergraduate and postgraduate students
were included but since the number of postgraduate respon-
dents was small and since these respondents were older, they
were not included in this study. Moreover respondents who
failed to answer more than three of the PCBS questions were
excluded. This way, we worked with a sample of 350 respon-
dents of which 137 were male (39%) and 213 were female re-
spondents (61%). The mean age of the participants was 20.5
years; in fact, 332 students (95%) were between 17 and 23
years of age. The majority of students (91%) were Catholic,
while the other 9% said they were either Christian, or embraced
other religions or had no religion. Most students (n = 332) were