The Interplay between post-critical beliefs and self-consciousness

Abstract

D. Wulff (1991) developed a notion of post--critical beliefs as a proposal for the description of religion in the light of the progress of secularization and socio--cultural changes. According to his theory, we can situate(place) potential attitudes toward religion in a two--dimensional space. The vertical dimension stands for Inclusion vs. Exclusion of Transcendence, and the horizontal one---for the way an individual interprets religious content: Literal vs. Symbolic. In this way, the two dimensions determine four quadrants, each reflecting a potential attitude towards religion, operationalized by D. Hutsebaut (1996) in the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS) as: Orthodoxy, External Critique, Relativism and Second Naiveté. The research presented in this paper is our attempt at finding an answer to the question whether the religious attitudes determined by Wulff are related to self--consciousness types. We tested 159 adult individuals by means of the PCBS scale by D. Hutsebaut and the Self--consciousness scale (O--Z scale) by Z. Zaborowski and Z. Oleszkiewicz. The results of these tests are that the reflective type of self-consciousness correlated positively with Orthodoxy and Second Naiveté and negatively with External Critique and Relativism. © 2012, Versita. All rights reserved.