Running head: BELIEVING, BONDING, BEHAVING, AND BELONGING

When approaching religion from a cross-cultural psychological perspective, one faces questions regarding the universals and the specifics of religions across cultural contexts. On the basis of previous theorization and research, we propose a model that posits four basic dimensions of religion and individual religiosity that are partially distinct although interconnected: believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging. These dimensions are presumably universally present across religions and cultural contexts and delimitate religion from other similar constructs. They reflect distinct psychological processes (cognitive, emotional, moral, and social), respective goals, conversion motives, types of selftranscendence, and mechanisms explaining the religion-health links. However, across cultural and religious groups, these dimensions may differ in content, salience, and ways in which they are interconnected or emphasized, leading to various forms of religiosity, including functional and dysfunctional ones. Within each dimension, there is additional universality (in structure) and cultural variability (in salience) regarding the way religious cognitions, emotions, morality, and identity are processed. This Big Four religious dimensions model may be a powerful tool for studying universals and cultural specifics of the psychological dimensions of religion. Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging 3 Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging: The Big Four Religious Dimensions and Cultural Variation One is often impressed by the immense variability in religious expressions across historical periods, cultures, groups, and individuals. There have been dozens of religions and hundreds of independent religious groups in human history. However, about 72% of today’s world population seems to belong to four major religions, i.e. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (Barrett, 2001). As is the case with many psychological constructs (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005), it seems reasonable to presume that there should be both universals and cultural specifics to religion and individual religiosity. At first glance, to the point that some aspects of human psychology and specific psychological processes are common to human species (Lonner, 1980; Brown, 1991), universals should also be present in religion across historical, cultural, and religious contexts. At second glance, the very specific forms, predictors, and outcomes of religion and personal religiosity should vary as a function of cultural (e.g., ethnicity, language, civilization zone), historical (e.g., wars, empires, nations, specific events), ecological (e.g., climate, geography), and socioeconomic (e.g., degree of democratization, social equality, wealth) factors, as well as factors specific to religious and denominational differences (e.g., theology, institutional structures, spiritual traditions). Religion as a Unified but Multi-Dimensional Construct One of the issues psychological research has constantly dealt with in the last decades has to do with determining the major components, dimensions, or forms of religion and individual religiosity. Of course, one may treat religion as a unidimensional construct. Religion is what humans do in reference to what they consider as (an external) transcendence; and religiosity is the corresponding individual differences construct, with people differing Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging 4 with respect to the presence and intensity of such a tendency. There is indeed strong evidence for the presence of a higher-order factor of religiosity, i.e. positive versus negative disposition toward religion, the different religious dimensions being in fact importantly inter-related (Tsang & McCullough, 2003). This is especially the case with data coming from the general population, including both religious and non-religious people. Moreover, treating religiosity as a unidimensional construct has provided solid findings, often constant across studies, religions, and cultural contexts (Saroglou & Cohen, in press, for a review). However, beyond evidence for overarching unidimensionality, there is also evidence that religion is a multi-facet reality and that religiosity can also be conceived as a multidimensional construct (Hill, 2005). This is more evident when focusing on religious people. Distinguishing between different religious aspects, dimensions, or forms provides nuanced information on how religion works in individuals’ lives (Hill, 2005). Furthermore, as it will be argued here, it promises to be useful for the detection and understanding of the psychological specifics of religion and religiosity across different religious and cultural contexts. There is a large array of religious aspects and dimensions that can be distinguished following a variety of classification criteria (for previous classifications of dimensions and corresponding measures, see: Hall, Meador, & Koenig, 2008; Hill, 2005; Hill & Hood, 1999). Sociologists of religion have typically distinguished between beliefs, practices (or behavior), and affiliation (or identification) (Voas, 2007), a practice that has been adopted in large international studies (see Billiet, n.d.). In psychological research, it has been found that people differ with respect to their motivations to be religious, which may be either intrinsic or extrinsic (Allport & Ross, 1967), life trajectories and underlying processes leading to religion (religious socialization versus emotion-based conversion; Granqvist & Hagekull, 1999), social-cognitive styles of dealing with religious ideas (symbolic thinking, religion-as-quest, Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging 5 fundamentalism, orthodoxy: Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993; Fontaine, Duriez, Luyten, & Hutsebaut, 2003; Hood, Hill, & Williamson, 2005), degree of (in)dependence from established religious traditions and institutions (modern spirituality versus traditional religiosity; Zinnbauer & Pargament, 2005), and the emotional quality of being religious and using religion (e.g., positive versus negative religious coping styles; Pargament, 1997). These classifications denote specific psychological processes. Because these processes can reasonably be suspected to be universally present, it cannot be excluded that these religious dimensions may be found across various religious and cultural contexts. At the same time, important culture-related issues are raised. For instance, the distinction between the intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations has been found among Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists (see Flere & Lavrič, 2008, for a review). However, the content validity and the cross-religious/cultural validity of the existing measures of these orientations have been seriously questioned (Cohen, Hall, Koenig, & Meador, 2005; Ghorpade, Lackritz, & Moore, 2010; Neyrinck, Lens, Vansteenkiste, & Soenens, 2010). Moreover, extrinsic religion may be less or not relevant in highly secularized societies where being religious can mostly be thought as an intrinsically-motivated attitude. Similarly, although it has been argued that spirituality may be a universal dimension of human existence (Dy-Liacco, Piedmont, Murray-Swank, Rodgerson, & Sherman, 2009), methodological and theoretical problems arise when studying spirituality, for instance, among the Chinese (Shek, 2010). How can an individual be autonomous in spiritual issues when belonging to a collectivistic society? Other aspects—and corresponding measures—of religion, as identified and studied in psychological research, are more religiously/theologically-oriented. They focus, for instance, on specific God concepts, specific religious practices, religious maturity, and faith development (see Hill & Hood, 1999, for a review). They can thus be importantly marked by Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging 6 a specific religious and cultural tradition and may not be transposable to other religious and cultural contexts. Finally, other religious dimensions and corresponding measures (see also Cutting & Walsh, 2008, for more recent measures) mix aspects of religiosity itself with possible outcomes or correlates of religion (e.g., “spiritual well-being”, “religious social support”, “sanctification” of different life domains). A Model of Big Four Religious Dimensions For psychological research, especially in the field of cultural and cross-cultural psychology, there is a need to distinguish between basic dimensions of religion/religiosity that (a) are psychologically-informed (point to psychological constructs and processes), (b) are not unique to particular religious traditions and do not simply translate theological positions, (c) can serve to study both universals and specifics across religions and cultures, and (d) offer discriminant validity between each other, implying (at least partially) distinct psychological processes, predictors, and consequences. In the present work, we will argue that a good candidate to fulfill these objectives is a model which distinguishes between four components of religion (I: beliefs; II: rituals/emotions; III: moral rules; and IV: community/group), corresponding psychological dimensions (believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging), and psychological functions (looking for meaning and the truth; experiencing self-transcendent emotions; exerting selfcontrol to behave morally; and belonging to a transhistorical group that solidifies collective self-esteem and ingroup identification). Of course, taken alone, none of the above elements is new. However, our specific argument will be that the above four dimensions (a) are basic components delimitating religion from proximal constructs; (b) translate major distinct dimensions of individual religiosity; (c) can be conceived, across religious and cultural Believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging 7 contexts, as religious universals, both in terms of presence and functional equivalence; and (