Leitmotifs in Life Stories: Developments and Stabilities of Religiosity and Narrative Identity

Faith Development Interviews offer great insight into people's ways of (non-)religious meaning-making, and of looking at their life and relationships. Ramona Bullik portrays nine longitudinal case studies in a mixed-methods design with narrative analysis granting insight into the developments and stabilities in the interviews. The focus on religious married couples allows to carve out the role of faith and the changing view on the spouse and the joint life. The portraits of three non-religious women show how meaning is made outside the frame of organized religion. Individual survey data are put into relation with a larger sample, answering the claim for idiothetic research

How Religious Styles Develop: Longitudinal, Cross-cultural and Multi-method Research with Faith Development Interviews. Wave III Hypotheses for the JTF-funded Project ”Faith Development Revisited“

Streib H, Chen Z, Keller B, et al. How Religious Styles Develop: Longitudinal, Cross-cultural and Multi-method Research with Faith Development Interviews. Wave III Hypotheses for the JTF-funded Project ”Faith Development Revisited“. OSF . 2019

A Faithful Journey: Following a Married Couple’s Religious Trajectory over the Adult Lifespan

Bullik R. A Faithful Journey: Following a Married Couple’s Religious Trajectory over the Adult Lifespan. Religions. 2022;13(8): 673.This article addresses the question of how religious narrative identity and subjective religiosity change over the course of 15 years. The cases portrayed are deconverts who have changed their religious affiliations multiple times. It was carved out what led to their deconversion and what remains as a core of their faith after they have turned away from organized religion for good. Interviews were conducted at three time points and were analyzed using content analysis. It became clear that the needs and expectations of the two individuals differ highly, as well as the reasons for turning away from a religious community; yet, what could be identified as a common core in this joint faithful journey is their need to live their religiosity, now in a private setting

Development in Religious and Non-Religious Biographies from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Bullik R, Özisik S, Steppacher A. Development in Religious and Non-Religious Biographies from a Cross-Cultural Perspective. Journal of Empirical Theology. 2020;33(1):65-82.How do people perceive their own religious, spiritual or atheist biography? This is a question that our research team has been focusing on for nearly two decades. Our developmental perspective critically, but constructively relates to Fowler’s (1981) Faith Development Theory, as described in Streib’s (2001) approach of religious styles, paying tribute to the fact that development is not, in most cases, a linear upward process. By combining Fowler’s structural evaluation method with approaches to content analyses, this paper will show the merit of these qualitative methods when looking at (religious) development in different surroundings. For that purpose, we present case studies with different cultural backgrounds. Their different trajectories and possible commonalities will be shown on a structural as well as on a content level. This approach enables us to reconstruct movement within the religious field and will show how this is displayed on a subjective, biographical level

“...the follower of a different faith is someone to learn from”—Curiosity and Xenosophia of Robert T.

Streib H, Bullik R. “..the follower of a different faith is someone to learn from”—Curiosity and Xenosophia of Robert T. In: Streib H, Klein C, eds. Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2018: 297-312.This chapter presents the case of Robert T. who, in the context of the ty-pology of biographical trajectories toward xenosophia in our Bielefeld Study on Xenosophia and Religion in Germany, represents the type of trajectory toward xenosophia which is based primarily on the individual and on intellectual curiosi-ty. While raised in the Catholic Church, Robert today also affiliates with Buddhism. High scores on centrality of religion and clear preference for openness to change characterize a person who is not only highly religious and spiritual, but in-tellectually open for encounters with a wide range of other religions and worldviews, and is practically engaged in inter-religious dialog and inter-religious peace work

Profiling Atheist World Views in Different Cultural Contexts: Developmental Trajectories and Accounts

Keller B, Bullik R, Klein C, Swanson SB. Profiling Atheist World Views in Different Cultural Contexts: Developmental Trajectories and Accounts. PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY. 2018;10(3):229-243.In the current study, we look at atheist or secular identities in different religious landscapes: In the U.S., the majority of the population indicates a belief in God. In West Germany, one third of the population reports no religious affiliation and a quarter identifies as "not religious," and in East Germany most of the population explicitly identifies as atheist. Drawing on atheist worldview and identity literature from multiple disciplines, and using quantitative and qualitative data obtained in the U.S. and Germany during the "Bielefeld-based Cross-Cultural Study on the Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality," we examine self-identified atheists. First, self-identified atheist participants are portrayed quantitatively based on constructs expected to highlight differences between atheists and other "nones" and religious or spiritual persons: openness, a personality trait (NEO-FFI) documented to be higher in nonbelievers, positive relations a dimension of eudaimonic well-being as indicator of social integration, generativity, concern for the welfare of future generations, and experiences of transcendence or "mysticism." Second, four case studies are presented that illustrate the wide range of distinct atheist beliefs, biographical experiences and ideological positions by examining individuals' subjective definitions of "religion" and "spirituality" and personal interviews. The semistructured Faith Development Interview (FDI; Fowler, 1981) examines vettical and horizontal transcendence. By drawing on examples from our interviews, we show different descriptions of one's atheist worldview or "faith" in autobiographical remembering and reasoning. Thus we work from a nomothetic toward an idiographic comparative perspective

“…it’s important … to open your senses for situations, for people, for circumstances.”—Developing a Habitus of Tolerance of Complexity and Openness for the Alien—Nina F.

Bullik R, Keller B, Streib H. “…it’s important … to open your senses for situations, for people, for circumstances.”—Developing a Habitus of Tolerance of Complexity and Openness for the Alien—Nina F. In: Streib H, Klein C, eds. Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2018: 313-330.This chapter presents the case of Nina F., a young woman who has expe-rienced feelings of alienness, as she and her family moved intercontinentally three times. These feelings of being the alien and, as Nina says, "the odd one out" occurred primarily when she was an adolescent and had to deal with, among other things, the challenge of not speaking the same code that the other teenagers used, even though she spoke the same language. These experiences led to her current attitude of accepting and even welcoming alienness, of letting herself benefit from new encounters, and also of experiencing a certain independence concerning relationships. In the context of the typology of biographical trajectories toward a culture of welcoming in our Bielefeld Study on Xenosophia and Religion in Germany, Nina represents the type of trajectory which is based primarily on interpersonal relations

“I still hold that against Him—if he does exist. I can’t get my act together.” Carola, Moving from Middle to Young Old Age

Bullik R, Steppacher A, Keller B. “I still hold that against Him—if he does exist. I can’t get my act together.” Carola, Moving from Middle to Young Old Age. In: Streib H, Keller B, Bullik R, et al., eds. Deconversion Revisited. Biographical Studies and Psycho-metric Analyses Ten Years Later. Research in Contemporary Religion. Vol 33. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; 2022: 209-234

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes toward Abrahamic Religions. Comparison of Direct and Indirect Assessment

Klein C, Bullik R, Streib H. Implicit and Explicit Attitudes toward Abrahamic Religions. Comparison of Direct and Indirect Assessment. In: Streib H, Klein C, eds. Xenosophia and Religion. Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2018: 231-253.In this chapter, we consider the problem that many measures of religiosity and prejudice are at risk to be affected by socially desirable responding. Indi-rect measurement procedures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) provide an opportunity to assess also pre-reflective, impulsive parts of attitudes avoiding the risk of socially desirable responding. Hence, three Single-Category IATs (SC-IATs) have been used in the Bielefeld Study on Xenosophia and Religion in order to assess implicit attitudes toward the three Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam among a subsample of N = 272 persons. Participants on average displayed a slightly positive implicit attitude toward Christianity while Judaism and Islam were evaluated almost completely neutrally. While there are significant implicit-explicit correlations for attitudes toward Christianity and Islam, there is no such association for Judaism; maybe because Judaism has been a less salient category among the predominantly Christian, but partly also Muslim participants. While some measures of religiosity (centrality of religiosity and the religious schemata ttt and ftr) showed to be correlated with social desirability, the religious schema xenos showed no association with social desirable responding, but turned out to be a significant predictor of lower Islamophobic prejudice both on the ex-plicit and implicit level of cognition. Consequences and limitations of the described findings are discussed