The theme of this study is to investigate two broad categories of modalities of faith in family life: first, what they value or seek, and how they relate to God or to others and the second theme is to see how these modalities of faith make a difference in the meanings and purposes of family life, and family relationships.
Different Modalities of Faith Due to Ideologies
There have been numerous studies that focused on the difference of value inclinations. Some of them conceptually associated these differences with, or empirically found an association with, ideologies, religious denominations, or cultures. What people value and seek, in other words their valued objects are considered to reflect their ideological and religious, cultural, or metaphysical worldviews that lie behind their values and goals (Haidt et al., 2009; Scott & Bergin, 1997).
In the domain of religious communities, such ideological differences exist across and within religious denominations in the United States, and these differences, rather than denominations, explain various psychological and behavioral differences better. For example, progressive and orthodox groups in a single religious community showed different value inclinations and orders among ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity (Jensen, 1998).
The same argument applies to the domain of families. Hunter (1991) wrote in his book Culture Wars, that family is a field in which the differences of these religious-ideological structures are salient. A study of 120 religious families with two ideological groups found distinctly different inclinations among five groups of virtue (McAdams, Albaugh, Farber, Daniels, Logan & Olson, 2008).
Relatedly, when people value God or others, the way people relate to them (e.g. by making a self-sacrificial commitment to them or seeking benefits from them), in other words, relational attitudes, should also reflect their ideologies and worldviews. For example, value dimensions of self-enhancement and self-transcendence (Schwartz, 1992) in the domain of self-others/society relationships varied according to cohorts, materialism, or parental/peer values.
Current Study
The current study undertakes a qualitative analysis of the narratives of religious families which were collected in Dollahite’s study (). These narrative data did not include the identification of the participants’ ideologies. Thus the current study does not focus on ideologies themselves but on modalities of faith (valued objects and relational attitudes) as concepts manifested in the interviews that are considered to be based on a more metaphysical substructure of the interviewees such as ideologies. Questions under consideration are: Do they focus on God, others, or self? Do they seek support/benefit or sacrifice themselves? I anticipate that the analysis of these tendencies and their combinations will yield some structural patterns. The classification of different patterns of modalities of faith is the first purpose of this study.
Then I will attempt to see how these patterns make a difference in their felt meanings and purposes in their faith and family, as well as the states of their relationships. Although value inclinations have been studied, how these inclinations are related to different meanings and purposes in life is understudied (Haidt et al., 2009). The current study will respond to their call for such qualitative studies. In the following literature review, I will describe in detail the two features of the modality of faith that I consider to be important to structural analyses of narratives of faith/morality.
Literature Review
Modality of Faith 1: Valued Objects
Valued objects include object of worship/valuation/association, moral authority/reference, goals/strivings/purposes/ideals, or moral orders/principles. These can take the form of personal beings, virtues such as care, fairness, and purity, domains and dimensions of focus such as verticality or horizontality (), or this/other-worldliness. These value objects and orders/priorities among them are considered to be influenced by cultural (e.g. Oishi) or ideological (Hunter) ethos. I align with Hitlin’s (2003) assertion that these value commitments and personal value structures form the core of personal identity. Thus analysis of valued objects and related value standards should serve as basics to understanding the meanings in people’s lives.
Autonomy, community, and divinity
Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, and Park (1997), after statistically clustering moral discourses of 47 Indian informants, organized their moral values into ethics of autonomy, community, or divinity (they call them the big three). Other Western thinkers and researchers also came to similar triadic views: William James (1890)—the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self; Paul Tillich ()—autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy; Dean (2010)—self, other, and God; Hansen (2007) self-esteem, group-esteem, and God-esteem.
This triadic classification provides a helpful framework for understanding moral orders or value inclinations of individuals or cultures. For example, using Shweder et al.’s (1997) framework, Jensen (1998) formed a coding scheme for qualitative analysis and analyzed a Baptist sample in the United States that contained progressive and orthodox groups. She found group differences in the focused ethics: autonomy (progressive group), and divinity (orthodox group). Both referred to ethics of community, but the content was different.
Valued objects and value orders/priorities have often been conceptualized and studied in the form of dichotomous dimensions. The triadic broad scheme of autonomy, community, and divinity comprehend three dichotomous dimensions that have been used to study value orientations. First is that of autonomy versus community: personal-collective satisfaction (Oishi) or personal-collective value priority (Akiba & Klug, 1999), both studied as cultural differences; individual-collective moral authority or moral projects which views divided an American religious denomination (Kniss, 1997).
The second dichotomous dimension that the Shweder et al.’s scheme comprehends is that of divinity versus community: intrapersonal religious commitment, i.e. personal religious beliefs and practices, interpersonal religious commitment (Worthington et al., 2003); vertical transcendence (e.g. sacrifice for God)-horizontal transcendence (e.g. sacrifice for others) (Goodenough, 2001, Kalton, 2000).
The last is autonomy versus divinity. Jensen (2004) included in the ethics of autonomy justifications on an individual’s rights, needs, feelings, and wellbeing. The ethics of divinity included not only doing what is pleasing to God or complying with spiritual order but also avoiding degradation from divinely-oriented virtues. This domain also has been found to be influenced by ideologies. For example, one study found that though valuation of care and justice (ethics of autonomy in Jensen’s classification) was not associated with orthodoxy—implying that both the progressive and the orthodox value these. Governing private conduct as a dimension of religiosity was highly correlated (r =.51, p<.05) with orthodoxy (O’Connell, 1975, see Haidt & Graham, 2007; Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009; McAdams et al., 2008 for similar results).
According to Hunter (1991), the progressive incline to commit to autonomous moral authority (in the form of rationalism, subjectivism, emphasis on personal experience, pragmatism centered on one’s own emotional needs), whereas the orthodox tend to show their commitment to external, definable, transcendent moral authority. This argument is backed by empirical results like Jensen’s (2004) study above in which the progressive’s first language was autonomy and the orthodox’s was the divine.
Transcendence
However, mere mentions/references of “God” do not seem to always mean the transcendence of similar quality. For example, in Murray-Swank, Mahoney, and Pargament’s study, the increase of the same “sanctification of parenting,” or perceptions of one’s parenting role as having divine character or significance, yielded different tendencies in parenting approaches among the high and low biblical conservatism groups (2006). The authors attributed the difference to “substantive religious and spiritual beliefs for parenting” (p.285), in other words, “different views on who God is and what God expects of them as parents” (p.274).
In fact, people’s images of God have been proved to vary considerably (Murray-Swank et al., 2006). Thus, ideally, there are some additional dimensions that discriminate ideologies such as external, transcendent authority. Hunter (1991) described, or more broadly, the dimension of transcendence may be important to be included in the analysis in order to form sample clusters of more homogeneous meanings. Some examples of such transcendence include scriptural authority and otherworldliness (as opposed to fulfillment in this life) which Hoge (1976) empirically found to differentiate groups within a U.S. religious denomination.
Overall orders
Unlike the dichotomous schemes, in the three-fold scheme, the overall value inclinations are expressed in the orders among the three groups of valued objects, or the three ethics. In Jensen’s study (1998) of a U.S. religious community, the progressive group emphasized ethics of autonomy first but often balanced it with the ethics of the community. In contrast, the orthodox group referred to the three ethics in the order of divinity, community, and autonomy. This orthodox moral order pattern matched with other studies’ findings (Ammerman, 1987; Roof & McKinney, 1987). Haidt and his colleagues found similar order (Haidt & Graham, 2007).
They expanded Shweder et al.’s (1997) three ethics to five virtues and repeatedly found that the progressive group focused on care and fairness (welfare and rights of individuals; both belong to ethics of autonomy; see Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). The orthodox group focused on in-group, authority, and purity (they belong to either the ethics of community or divinity), in addition to moderate but lesser valuation of care and fairness than the progressive.
McAdams et al. (2008) found the same results among religious families. Thus some generalized tendencies of value orders among autonomy, community, and divinity have been observed according to the people’s progressive or orthodox ideologies. The current study will add relational attitudes (as explained in the next section) as another dimension of analysis to this line of studies, and explore if the relationships and the meanings in family life will be variant depending on the family members’ modalities of faith.
Modality of Faith 2: Relational Attitudes
How people relate to God and others, in other words, interactional styles or relational attitudes, should also reflect their ideologies and worldviews. This dynamic aspect will elaborate the static information of modality of faith expressed by the categories of the valued objects. By focusing on the directions of the relatedness, these attitudes can be classified into two broad categories: self-enhancement and self-sacrifice.
Self-enhancement means seeking or receiving benefits or supports from God or others. It does not limit the scope to power, achievement, or hedonism as in Schwartz’s (1992) study, but also include security, stimulation, and preferential self-direction. Self-sacrifice originally means “the surrender of something valued for the sake of an ideal, belief or goal” (Terkel & Duval, 1999, p.239). But here, as a counter-directional concept to self-enhancement, it includes more broadly, all the acts of giving to, offering to, benefiting, or complying with other objects.
Similar concepts have been introduced by some researchers. Schwartz (1992) identified 10 values after cross-cultural studies and conceptualized self-enhancement and self-transcendence as two of the four higher order value types that cover the 10 values. However, in his concepts, self-transcendence was limited to universalism and benevolence whose value objects were nature and people (God is left out); similarly, some domains of value such as security of self, or choosing own goals (self-direction) were left out from self-enhancement. Yankelovich (1982; see also Sample, 1990) described a historical, tidal shift in the U.S. from valuing self-denial to self-fulfillment in the last century. In Sample’s conceptualizations, self-fulfillment is associated with an inner direction to self and self-denial with outer directions to other beings, mostly family (1990).
I contend that differentiating relational directions will give information as to the dimension of one’s means-end views between God and self, or others and self, which makes difference in one’s meanings of the acts and the relationships.
For example, Jensen’s coding scheme of ethics of community and divinity contain both self-enhancing entries (e.g. punishment avoidance, reward seeking, well-being of body as God’s temple, interest in own soul) and self-sacrificing entries (e.g. other’s interest, duty, ends of social group) not separated (2004). However, valuing other beings or connections with them for own social benefits (security, comfort, respect and so on) should give different meanings to one’s valuations and faith from valuing other beings for their welfare. Thus, identification of the inclinations among valued objects (e.g. ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity) alone may not be adequate for the analysis of meanings.
Self-enhancement
Yankelovich’s (1982) concept of self-fulfillment does include self-centeredness and self-indulgence, and the current study also includes them. In addition to that, however, self-enhancement occurs in the spiritual realm as well, not necessarily meaning self-centeredness in the ordinary sense. For example, God’s grace, solace, or forgiveness (elements of self-enhancement) are valued in wide range of people including the progressive, middle, or orthodox groups, though particularly emphasized in the mainline, progressive group (McCullough et al., 1998). In any group, one who engages in religious acts of self-sacrifice may simultaneously appreciate these given gifts of self-enhancement.
Furthermore, according to Sample (1990), some people in the cultural middle group tend to engage in searching to fill the hungers of the spirit, or searching for completion in God. Such spiritual or religious self-enhancement may involve giving up some sorts of self-centered needs in non-spiritual domain. Such spiritual self-enhancement needs to be differentiated from non-spiritual self-enhancement due to the differences of the meanings. Similarly, there are evidences that strong religious commitment can be compatible with self-actualization (Watson, Morris, & Hood, 1990), a kind of self-enhancement. Thus Watson et al. (1990) contended that the meanings of self-enhancement may vary according to ideological surroundings (e.g. spiritual/religious or not) of the “self” we refer to.
In that sense, combining the analysis of relational attitude with that of valued objects has an advantage in clarifying the meanings of the people’s acts, because the categorical delineation of the valued objects can limit the sphere of the presupposed “self.” For example, in Shweder et al.’s (1997) triadic schema, the ethics of autonomy presupposes “the self as individual preference structure,” and the ethics of divinity presupposes “the self as a spiritual entity” (p.138). Jensen’s coding scheme based on the Shweder et al.’s framework separates selfhood within physical or psychological domain (autonomy) from that within spiritual domain (divinity) (1992).
Self-sacrifice
Dollahite, Layton, Bahr, Walker, and Thatcher (2009) described self-sacrificing nature of religious youth. Their sacrifice was for the divine, family, or for others. Some were striving for “hereafter” (Kochuyt, 2004, p. 154) that transcends here and now sacrificing things therein, pertaining to self. Obedience, submissiveness, commitment to, or prioritizing God or others to self are also included in self-sacrifice due to their offering and yielding nature. The most ultimate forms of giving, self-sacrificing, and yielding characteristic of agency toward God are self-surrender, consecration, and dedication to the Supreme Being (Aden, 1992; Weaver, Roy, 1993).
These attitudes of self-enhancement and self-sacrifice should affect the subjective meanings of their faith and family life. Thus, this study will build on the studies using the triadic scheme of autonomy, community, and divinity by adding to it transcendence as a sub-dimension of divinity and relational attitudes as another point of analysis. This more elaborated strategy of analysis of modalities of faith should more functionally differentiate worldviews and perspectives, yielding further psychological and structural explanations of the subjects’ described meanings.