Aktuelles aus Theologie und Religionsforschung
Deutsch-amerikanische Forschung über religiös-weltanschauliche Entwicklung kann fortgesetzt werden
Mit Studien zur Dekonversion (2002-2007) und zur Bedeutung von „Spiritualität“ (2009-2014) haben Professor Heinz Streib und sein Team die deutsch-amerikanische Forschungskooperation der Universität Bielefeld mit Professor Ralph W. Hood und seinem Team in der Psychologie der University of Tennessee at Chattanooga aufgebaut. Mit intensiven Interviews und umfangreichen Fragebogen wurden Veränderungen und Migrationsprozesse im religiösen Feld beleuchtet. In anschließenden Studien (2014-2017; 2018-2021) konnten diese biographisch-rekonstruktiven religionspsychologischen Studien in Längsschnittuntersuchungen weitergeführt werden, wie exemplarisch das soeben erschienene Buch Deconversion Revisited zeigt.
Mit Drittmitteln von insgesamt ca. 1,2 Millionen Euro ermöglichen nun die John Templeton Foundation (USA) und die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft die Weiterführung der bereits etablierten Forschung in die Jahre 2022 bis 2024. Dabei wird das Sample vergrößert und die längsschnittliche Untersuchung um eine Welle erweitert. Die Untersuchung verspricht auch Ergebnisse darüber, wie sich religiös-weltanschauliche Entwicklung auf die Veränderung des Gottesbildes bzw. der Vorstellungen von Transzendenz auswirkt. In einem zweiten Fokus geht das Projekt der Frage nach, inwiefern religiös-weltanschauliche Entwicklung einen Beitrag zur Reduktion von Vorurteilen und Xenophobie leisten kann.
New grants for faith development research
New grants from the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) enable the research teams at Bielefeld University, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to continue with our longitudinal investigation of faith development in the years 2022 to 2024. Here is an Executive Summary:
The questions that this project will have the potential to answer is, whether, how, why, and when in their lifetime individuals are changing their religion and worldview. We interpret such changes as migrations between developmentally ordered religious styles and religious types. While in our current project we could demonstrate that there is faith development and initially identify predictors and outcomes, this project has a focus on two particularly interesting outcomes of faith development: (a) changes in people’s images of God and, in more general and inclusive terms, their symbolization of transcendence, and (b) their changes in prejudice and, with reference to the philosophy of the Alien, their responses to the Strange. We assume that faith development results in a narrative identity that affords a wise and humble response to the Strange we call xenosophia. This research is a contribution to answer these and other key questions using longitudinal data from Germany and the U.S.A. that were gathered in previous and current multi-method projects, which were based on faith development interviews (FDI) and questionnaire data (which include measures for personality, well-being, religious schema, mysticism, etc.).
This new project phase continues this research into a fourth wave of field work and will add another n = 460 (50% US and 50% German) longitudinal re-interviews with the FDI. This will furnish longitudinal analyses with sufficient statistical power. In addition, we survey general population samples of n = 1,250 in both U.S.A. and Germany using our questionnaire, which now includes scales for intellectual humility, God images, and questions for xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and other prejudice. Thus, we may be able to relate our questions of religious change to a larger population context, and demonstrate the contribution of faith development research to psychological investigation in domains such as wisdom, God images, and prejudice.
New Book: Deconversion Revisited
Streib, H., Keller, B., Bullik, R., Steppacher, A., Silver, C. F., Durham, M., Barker, S. B., & Hood Jr., R. W. (2022). Deconversion Revisited. Biographical Studies and Psychometric Analyses Ten Years Later. Brill Germany/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666568688
This book is Open Access and available here.
Abstract. Deconversion Revisited is the follow-up book to Deconversion (2009), which examined disengagement processes from a variety of religious backgrounds in the USA and in Germany. After more than ten years, 45 participants were reinterviewed with the Faith Development Interview (FDI).
With this new book we are revisiting the question of religious change after more than a decade since our original study on Deconversion (Streib, Hood, Keller, Csöff, & Silver, 2009). Back then, we were able to analyze the survey data of twelve hundred participants from the USA and Germany as well as conducting personal interviews with 272 of them. This previous study brought surprising findings to light such as the importance of ‘spirituality’ as self-description of deconverts, their considerably higher stages/styles in faith development, and the great variety of paths they took when migrating within the religious field. A variety we captured in a typology of four types in terms of how their searches were narrated: pursuit of autonomy, life-long quests and late revisions, barred from paradise, and finding a new frame of reference.
In this new book, we document how a selection of these stories continued. What has changed since the first interview? Are the deconverts still “more spiritual than religious”? How did their faith development continue? Does the typology of four types still fit? After more than ten years, we reinterviewed 45 participants from the original deconversion study with the Faith Development Interview (FDI). During the FDI the participants have shared their subjective retrospectives on their faith development and their lives for the second time now. This enables us to investigate changes in structures of faith development, as well as content and narratives. We explore the narrative identities of our participants by taking an in-depth perspective: We studied the development of ten selected longitudinal case studies that present the lifespan from early adulthood to old age. Thus the study published in this book is one of only a few longitudinal studies on deconversion in the past ten years. It demonstrates that deconversion is a dynamic biographical process that eventually has long-term, slowly changing causes and consequences.