The Christian Orthodoxy<\/a> (CO) Scale, developed by J. Timothy Fullerton and Bruce Eunsberger in 1982, is a psychometric instrument designed to measure individual acceptance of central, orthodox theological tenets fundamental to traditional Christianity. Grounded historically in the ecumenical affirmations of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, the scale captures an individual’s cognitive endorsement of bedrock Christian doctrines across diverse denominations, including Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and mainline or evangelical Protestantism. The standard full-length scale comprises 24 self-report items\u2014balanced symmetrically with 12 positively keyed statements and 12 negatively keyed statements to mitigate acquiescence response bias\u2014evaluated along a 7-point Likert-type agreement continuum ranging from -3 (Strongly Disagree<\/em>) to +3 (Strongly Agree<\/em>), with an explicit neutral midpoint (0). A psychometrically validated 6-item short form was subsequently established by Hunsberger in 1989. Psychometrically, the CO Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha<\/a> coefficients routinely documented between .97 and .98, and mean inter-item correlations ranging between .57 and .70 across heterogeneous normative cohorts totaling over 2,200 participants. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses robustly sustain a strictly unidimensional factor structure, demonstrating that diverse doctrinal statements (e.g., the Trinity, the virgin birth, Christ’s resurrection, divine creation, biblical inspiration, and efficacy of prayer) cohere onto a single, dominant cognitive factor. Criterion, convergent, and known-groups validity evidence shows profound positive associations with public religious attendance (r<\/em> = .62), private devotional prayer (r<\/em> = .70), and scriptural trust (r<\/em> = .77), alongside robust discrimination between religious apostates (M<\/em> = 61.8) and persistent religious adherents (M<\/em> > 111.0). This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the CO Scale, encompassing its theoretical foundations, structural mechanics, normative values, scoring paradigms, and research utility<\/span>.<\/p>\n Christian Orthodoxy Scale, religious beliefs, psychometrics, Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, unidimensionality, religious psychology, apostasy, theological orthodoxy, Bruce Hunsberger, scale validation<\/p>\n The Christian Orthodoxy Scale was constructed by J. Timothy Fullerton and Bruce Hunsberger. Initial development and validation studies were carried out through the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo<\/a> and Wilfrid Laurier University<\/a> in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n Bruce Hunsberger, Ph.D.<\/strong> (1944\u20132003) was an internationally distinguished psychologist of religion, Professor of Psychology, and long-time Department Chair at Wilfrid Laurier University. A recipient of the William James Award from Division 36 (Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality) of the American Psychological Association (APA)<\/a>, Dr. Hunsberger published landmark research examining religious socialization, apostasy, fundamentalism, prejudice, and the cognitive complexity of religious thinking. J. Timothy Fullerton, Ph.D.<\/strong> collaborated extensively with Hunsberger on early empirical assessments of religious socialization, church switching, and belief stability during emerging adulthood.<\/p>\n The primary psychometric objective of the Christian Orthodoxy Scale is to quantify the cognitive-ideational dimension of religious commitment within a Christian frame of reference. Prior to the development of the CO Scale, existing psychometric inventories measuring religiosity were frequently compromised by multidimensional confounding, denominational idiosyncrasy, or conflation between religious *belief* (ideology) and religious *style* (such as intrinsic\/extrinsic orientation or rigid fundamentalism). Fullerton and Hunsberger (1982) sought to engineer a psychometrically pure, strictly unidimensional instrument capable of evaluating adherence to the shared theological core that historically transcends specific denominational cleavages.<\/p>\n The theoretical rationale rests on historical ecumenism: despite centuries of theological disputes regarding ecclesiastical authority, sacraments, liturgical aesthetics, and soteriological nuances, a core baseline of doctrinal consensus unites historical Christianity. These tenets\u2014formalized during the early ecumenical councils and synthesized in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds\u2014represent the “bedrock” boundary markers of Christian identity. The CO Scale addresses the vital research need to isolate this core content of belief from surrounding psychosocial factors.<\/p>\n In empirical and applied research settings, the CO Scale fulfills several crucial functions:<\/p>\n The construct assessed by the Christian Orthodoxy Scale is the cognitive-affective acceptance of fundamental, classical Christian theological affirmations. Unlike behavioral indices that assess ritual frequency (e.g., church attendance, fasting, scripture study) or functional constructs that evaluate religious motivation (e.g., Gordon Allport’s intrinsic versus extrinsic orientations), the CO construct focuses on subjective doctrinal assent.<\/p>\n Although the scale operates empirically as a strictly unidimensional instrument, its 24 items systematically sample across multiple interconnected theological sub-domains that define classical Christian orthodoxy:<\/p>\n Crucially, Fullerton and Hunsberger demonstrated that these distinct theological domains do not generate discrete behavioral factors; rather, in the psychology of believers, they function as a tightly woven theological tapestry. Adherence to one foundational proposition strongly predicts adherence to the others, forming a coherent belief schema.<\/p>\n The theoretical underpinning of the Christian Orthodoxy Scale is situated within cognitive and multidimensional models of religiosity, notably influenced by the sociological frameworks of Charles Glock and Rodney Stark (1965) and the cognitive psychological traditions of social attitude measurement.<\/p>\n Glock and Stark<\/a> posited that religiosity cannot be treated as a monolithic variable; rather, it manifests across at least five distinct dimensions:<\/p>\n Fullerton and Hunsberger deliberately focused the CO Scale on Glock and Stark’s ideological dimension<\/em>. They argued that many previous psychometric inventories conflated belief with ritual behavior, emotional engagement, or institutional loyalty. By isolating the cognitive dimension, the CO Scale allows researchers to treat theological belief as an independent variable and evaluate how doctrinal assent causally relates to religious behaviors, emotional experiences, and psychological outcomes.<\/p>\n A vital theoretical development involving the CO Scale was advanced by Bruce Hunsberger in collaboration with Bob Altemeyer and other researchers. In social psychology, an ongoing debate centered on whether intense religious adherence inevitably fostered racial prejudice, authoritarianism, and cognitive rigidity. Earlier measures of “religious fundamentalism” often blurred the boundary between orthodox theological tenets and closed-minded, defensive cognitive styles.<\/p>\n By establishing the CO Scale as a measure of theological *content*, Hunsberger and colleagues (e.g., Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Kirkpatrick, 1993) demonstrated that Christian Orthodoxy represents what one believes, whereas Religious Fundamentalism measures the *dogmatic, militant certainty* with which one holds those beliefs. While the two scales are substantially correlated in practice, they show different patterns of association with dependent variables: religious fundamentalism typically correlates positively with social prejudice, ethnocentrism, and low integrative complexity, whereas orthodox Christian belief itself often correlates weakly, negatively, or insignificantly with racial and ethnic prejudice once fundamentalism and authoritarianism are statistically controlled.<\/p>\n The Christian Orthodoxy Scale possesses extensive, multi-method psychometric validity documented across several decades of empirical administration.<\/p>\n Known-groups validation provides exceptionally compelling evidence for the construct validity of the CO Scale. Fullerton and Hunsberger (1982) examined scale performance across a diverse validation cohort of 2,297 individuals drawn from Canadian high schools, universities, and community samples, segmented into distinct denominational and ideological categories:<\/p>\n The statistical divergence between religious dropouts (apostates) and believers yielded an effect size exceeding d<\/em> = 2.0, confirming that the scale differentiates precisely between individuals who have disaffiliated from religious belief systems and those who remain doctrinally committed<\/span>.<\/p>\n The CO Scale correlates strongly with external, overt markers of religious commitment. Fullerton and Hunsberger (1982) established significant bivariate correlations between the CO Scale and several behavioral and cognitive criteria:<\/p>\n Subsequent psychometric investigations have established discriminant validity between the CO Scale and non-creedal psychosocial constructs. Kirkpatrick (1993) demonstrated that while Christian Orthodoxy, Religious Fundamentalism, and Intrinsic Religious Orientation share variance, the CO Scale uniquely measures adherence to specific creedal propositions. Similarly, Pancer et al. (1995) and Pratt et al. (1992) revealed that high scores on Christian Orthodoxy do not uniformly depress cognitive complexity across non-religious domains, demonstrating that theological assent does not reflect a generalized cognitive deficit.<\/p>\n The Christian Orthodoxy Scale exhibits outstanding internal consistency across diverse empirical populations.<\/p>\n In the seminal 1982 validation study by Fullerton and Hunsberger across ten independent normative subsamples (including high school students, university undergraduates, parents, apostates, and an Australian cross-cultural replication sample), the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the 24-item scale were systematically documented at .98 across nine groups, and .97 in the tenth group. Such values indicate exceptional homogeneity among scale items.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the mean inter-item correlation coefficients across these diverse validation cohorts ranged from .57 to .70. This range reflects substantial internal coherence without redundancy, confirming that the 24 items represent a unified construct.<\/p>\n To reduce survey fatigue and facilitate integration into large-scale multi-scale batteries, Hunsberger (1989) developed an abbreviated 6-item short form (CO-Short). Despite reducing the scale length by 75%, the 6-item short form retained exceptional reliability, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently between .93 and .95 in validation cohorts. The bivariate correlation between the full 24-item scale and the 6-item short form routinely equals or exceeds r<\/em> = .97, illustrating near-perfect measurement equivalence<\/span>.<\/p>\n Across the normative groups reported by Fullerton and Hunsberger, female respondents scored higher than male respondents across 7 of the 10 believer groups (excluding the apostate sample), consistent with broader empirical trends observed in the sociology of religion regarding female religious commitment. Internal consistency metrics remained equally robust (.97 to .98) across both male and female subsamples, indicating that the scale items function invariantly across sexes.<\/p>\n A key contribution of Fullerton and Hunsberger’s (1982) investigation was resolving the empirical question of whether religious belief constitutes a multidimensional structure requiring distinct subscales, or a single overarching cognitive construct.<\/p>\n The authors subjected the 24 items to Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/a> using principal component and principal axis extraction methods across their multi-thousand participant database. Inspection of the resulting eigenvalues and scree plots revealed a prominent, solitary unrotated factor. In every analyzed sample:<\/p>\n These empirical findings confirmed that while theological propositions can be conceptually subdivided into distinct scholastic categories (e.g., Christology, Pneumatology, Hamartiology, Bibliology), psychological adherence to these tenets operates in a strongly unified manner. Individuals do not selectively endorse the virgin birth while discarding the resurrection or the Trinity; instead, belief in historic Christian tenets forms an integrated cognitive network.<\/p>\n Subsequent psychometric examinations using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/a> across cross-national and cross-denominational populations have continually supported the single-factor specification. Model fit indices for the unidimensional structure consistently yield Comparative Fit Indices (CFI) and Tucker-Lewis Indices (TLI) exceeding .90, validating the construct’s structural integrity across Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Protestant samples.<\/p>\n (Note: Fullerton and Hunsberger also permitted an expanded 9-point format from -4 [Very strongly disagree] to +4 [Very strongly agree], which demonstrates equivalent psychometric properties).<\/em>\n <\/li>\n The full 24-item Christian Orthodoxy Scale was published in 1982 in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion<\/em>, followed by the 6-item short form in 1989. The scale is copyrighted by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR)<\/a> and the authors.<\/p>\n The scale was placed into the academic public domain for scientific, non-commercial research, academic investigations, educational demonstrations, and clinical research purposes. No licensing fees or royalties are required for non-profit academic scholarship, provided proper bibliographic attribution is given to Fullerton and Hunsberger (1982) and Hunsberger (1989). Commercial applications, integration into proprietary digital platforms, or distribution in for-profit assessment environments require formal copyright clearance from the publisher (Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the SSSR).<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
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Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Glock and Stark’s Multidimensional Model<\/h3>\n
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Differentiating Content from Cognitive Style<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Known-Groups Validity<\/h3>\n
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Convergent and Criterion Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
Reliability of the 6-Item Short Form<\/h3>\n
Sex Differences and Demographic Invariance<\/h3>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Analytic Findings<\/h3>\n
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Confirmatory Structural Invariance<\/h3>\n
Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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-3 becomes 1<\/span>;
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-2 becomes 2<\/span>;
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-1 becomes 3<\/span>;
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0 (or missing) becomes 4;
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+1 becomes 5<\/span>;
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+2 becomes 6<\/span>;
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+3 becomes 7<\/span>.\n <\/li>\nReversed Score = 8 - Rescaled Score<\/code> (e.g., a rescaled score of 7 becomes 1; a rescaled score of 1 becomes 7). The 12 negatively worded items requiring reverse scoring are:
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Items 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 22, and 23.<\/strong>\n <\/li>\n
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Score Range:<\/strong> Minimum possible score = 24 (extreme theological unorthodoxy \/ thorough secular skepticism); Maximum possible score = 168 (absolute, unreserved theological orthodoxy). A score of 96 represents exact theological neutrality<\/span>.\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n\n
Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n