Aktuelles aus Theologie und Religionsforschung

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.