What Makes a ''Good'' Christian?
Researchers at the Boston University (BU) School of Theology have launched a new survey in hopes of finding an answer to the old question: What makes a “good” Christian?
The extensive Internet-based public survey was designed to develop instruments that will accurately assess the connection between faith and other facets of life.
According to BU assistant professor and lead researcher Rev. Marsha Cutting, Ph.D., at least 150 instruments have been used in research to measure ''religiosity'' -- the quality of being religious. A lot of these scales, however, do not reflect their full diversity within Christianity, said Cutting.
“The people in the conservative and evangelical churches have done most of the hard work of developing the scales and so logically enough, the scales reflect that point of view,” Cutting said. “But there are other parts of the church that they [scales] don’t reflect as well. Our concern is to try and see what we can do to come up with something that will be applicable to the full range of people within the churches.”
The study began in the fall of 2004 with a review process of all existing scales, explained Cutting, consisting of careful examination as to by whom these scales became standardized.
“Probably a majority of them were normed on university students, who aren’t necessarily a very well representative group of people as a whole,” said Cutting, who is joined by several graduate-level students from BU and Boston College. “In addition, the scales have traditionally failed to account for variances in the age, geographical, social class and educational backgrounds of study participants.”
With these concerns in mind, the group devised a 59-question survey where respondents state their feeling on the importance of each action, task, practice or principle to being a “good” Christian in today’s world.
“We are hoping to use the results of the survey to learn what a broad cross section of people see as the ideals, concepts, beliefs and actions of a ‘good’ Christian,” said Cutting.
"Faith really plays a critical role in people’s lives as well as physical and mental health." But, I think it’s hard to document that when we don’t have good instruments.”
To participate in the survey, visit www.religiosityscalesproject.com.
