Value Priorities and Religiosity in Four Western Religions

Theological, sociological, and psychological analyses of religion suggest that religiosity associates positively with values that enhance transcendence, preserve the social order, and protect individuals against uncertainty, and negatively with values that emphasize self-indulgence and favor intellectual or emotional openness to change. On this basis, an integrated set of hypotheses was generated to relate religiosity to the importance that individuals attribute to 10 basic types of human values across religious groups. Hypotheses were largely confirmed in educated adult samples of Israeli Jews (n = 635), Spanish Roman Catholics (n = 478), Dutch Calvinist Protestants (n = 217), and Greek Orthodox (n = 400). Hypotheses also were largely confirmed in a representative West German sample (n = 1,807) with different measures of religiosity and values. The pattern of correlations was robust across subsamples divided by age, gender, education, and income, and for Lutheran Protestants and Roman Catholics.