hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
According to the Religious Openness Hypothesis, a negative relationship between Faith and Intellect Oriented Religious Reflection in American Christians reveals a defensive fundamentalist response to Western secularization that inhibits religious and psychological openness. The present study offered one test of that hypothesis by examining Christians living in Iran, a formally theocratic society where defensiveness toward secularization should not be prominent. A sample of 250 Iranian members of the Armenian Apostolic Church responded to the Christian Religious Reflection Scale along with indices of religious openness as made evident in self-reported mystical experience and of psychological openness as assessed by measures of Openness to Experience, Need for Cognition, and Integrative Self-Knowledge. Faith and Intellect Oriented Reflection correlated positively in Iranian Christians and displayed at least some linkages with mystical experience and psychological openness. These data supported the Religious Openness Hypothesis.
