Milton Rokeach received a Ph.D. from Berkley in 1947 and served as Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University for many years. His best known work include The Open and Closed Mind (1960) and Beliefs, Attitudes and Values: A Theory of Organization and Change (1968). He received the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award of the American Psychology Association in 1984. This article appeared in Psychology Today, April 1970, pp. 33 - 58.
All Organized religions assume that religion teaches man distinct values that he might not otherwise have—moral values that guide him, in his everyday relations with his fellow man, toward higher, nobler or more humane levels than he might reached without religion. But is it true? Do the religious have distinct moral values that set them apart from the less religious? And if so, do these values help or hinder a genuine concern for the well-being of other members of the human race?
Many research studies have shown that there are significant differences in beliefs and attitudes between Jews, Catholics and Protestants, and even between various Protestant denominations. Most disturbing are findings that show that the religiously devout are on the average more bigoted, more authoritarian, more dogmatic and more antihumanitarian than the less devout. Such findings are disturbing from a religious standpoint because they point to a social institution that needs to be reformed. They are disturbing from an anti-religious standpoint because they point to a social institution that deserves to be destroyed.
Value Systems. I wanted to see if these value differences indeed existed between the religiously devout and non-devout, and to see how religious values were related to social compassion. In April 1968 I examined the value systems of well over 1,000 adult Americans ranging in age from 21 to 80. The sampling and data collection were handled by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, a national polling organization. The national sample was selected to represent all adult ages, social classes and parts of the country.
The instrument used was the Rokeach Value Survey, a simple two-part scale that has proved to be a reliable measure of values. In previous research I have found that it regularly gives distinctively different value profiles for men and women, whites and blacks, hippies and non-hippies, artists and businessmen, scientists and policemen, and pro- and anti-Wallace groups.
The first part of the survey consists of 18 goals or terminal values such as a comfortable life and a world atpeace which the subject is asked to "arrange in order of their importance to YOU, as guiding principles in YOUR life."
Rank-ordering 18 items in ones head is a nearly impossible task, so we printed the values on special gummed labels that could be moved about the page while one was deciding on his rankings.
Means. Of course, people sometimes agree on their goals in life, hut they differ on the best means of reaching them, so second part of the survey lists 18 means or instrumental values, such as courageous and honest, which subjects are also asked to rank according to their preference.
I split the value profiles into nine subgroups identifying themselves as nonbelievers, Jews, Catholics and six Protestant denominations: Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists and Baptists. The ranks used are averages. A value ranked one was the value most highly prized of 18 values by the average member of a given religious group. The second-most-cherished value was ranked two, and so on, with the value considered least important by the group being given the rank of 18. These profiles not only help us identify those values that are distinctly religious but also show the typical value profile of the average American nonbeliever, the average American Jew and the average American Christian.
It was immediately evident that all of the groups are similar in some respects. They all generally agree that such end-goals as a world at peace, family security and freedom are the most important, and an exciting life, pleasure, social recognition and a world of beauty are the least important. As for the means of reaching these goals there were other across-the-board agreements. Every group in the survey agreed that the most important means value is being honest, and all approved of being ambitious and responsible, but they all placed least value on being imaginative, intellectual, logical or obedient. These similarities describe a typical American value pattern that might well be different from, say, a typical Russian value pattern.
Nonbelievers. But the profiles of the several religious groups also differ from one another. Jews generally place relatively higher value than Christians on such goals as equality, pleasure, family security, inner harmony andwisdom and they prefer means that emphasize personal competence — being capable, independent, intellectualand logical. The average nonbeliever value profile is similar in many respects to that of the average Jew. Both put relatively less emphasis than Christians on such Boy Scout social values as being clean, obedient and polite.
The similarity between Jews and nonbelievers may mean that Jews are generally less religious than Christians, but it should also be recognized that Jewish people have strong ethnic-cultural identification and are likely to say "Jewish" when asked their religion, even if they are not religious and never attend synagogue.
Other differences appear between various Christian groups. Baptists ranked moral values -- salvation and being clean,forgiving and obedient -- relatively higher than the other Christian groups. And they ranked a sense of being broadminded, capable and logical relatively lower.
On the other extreme, Episcopalians ranked moralistic values generally lower than the Baptists did and personal-competence values higher. Of all the Christian groups considered here, Episcopalians are obviously the most different from the Baptists and generally speaking most similar to the Jews. But this does not mean that Jews and Episcopalians are indistinguishable. Episcopalians ranked salvation and forgiving higher than Jews, and Jews valued a world at peace, equality and pleasure more highly than Episcopalians did, implying that the Jews are somewhat more liberal, peace-loving and fun-loving than Episcopalians. Also, the Jews consistently rank the personal-competence values somewhat higher and the moralistic values somewhat lower than all Christian groups do, including the Episcopalians.
Christians. When we back off from the data far enough to look at the forest rather than the trees, two values --salvation and forgiving -- stand out above all others as most distinctively Christian. While Jews and nonbelievers ranked salvation last, Christian groups generally ranked it considerably higher—third on the average for Baptists and anywhere from ninth to 14th for the remaining Christian groups. Forgiving was low-ranked—l5th or 16th—by Jews and nonbelievers but on the average somewhere between third and eighth by the several Christian groups.
This typical picture of the Christian value system held up even when we used such other definitions of religiousness as frequency of churchgoing and perceived importance of religion in one’s daily life. Salvation was ranked third by those who attended church every week, but it dropped linearly to 18th for those who never attended; forgivingwas ranked second by the weekly churchgoers and decreased linearly to 11th for those never attending. With perceived importance of religion as the criterion of religiousness, salvation was ranked first for those reporting religion as very important in their everyday lives, but last—l8th—for those who said religion was unimportant. The comparable findings for forgiving were sixth for those who said religion was important and 13th for those reporting it as unimportant in their everyday lives.
Sociologists might argue that the differences are not so much a result of religious upbringing as of social-class differences. But when the various religious groups were matched for income and race (about 16 per cent of the sample was black) and then compared with each other, the value differences remained generally the same.