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religious right.) Liberals are more in favor of change away from traditional institutions, and among these are society’s mainstream religions. (The exception is Judaism, which has traditionally supported liberal causes since Jews themselves have historically been a part of oppressed groups in virtually all cultures in which they have found themselves.) Thus, the liberal, radical thing to do is to change your religious attitudes, which usually means either becoming less religious, or adopting marginalized religious beliefs, as in the counterculture’s embracing of fringe cults in the 1960s and 1970s, or the adoption of New Age spiritual movements in the 1980s and 1990s.

This connection between religion and politics is corroborated by other studies. For example, during the greatest religious revolution in history—the Protestant Reformation—Sulloway, for example, found that supporters “were more likely to be young, laterborn, lower class, and low in professional status,” characteristics that today we would use to describe political liberals. And in a fascinating study on the religious attitudes and voting patterns of members of the 96th United States Congress, sociologists found that what they termed the most “legalistic” and “self-concerned” congressmen were the most conservative, whereas the “people-concerned” and “nontraditional” congressmen were the most liberal. For example, legislation favoring civil liberties received nearly three times the votes from the nontraditional/liberal congressmen as it did from the legalistic/ conservative congressmen. David Wulff, summarizing a sizeable body of literature on the subject, showed that this tendency extends to the population as a whole. Measuring “piety” as a function of religious affiliation, church attendance, doctrinal orthodoxy, and self-rated importance of religion, “researchers have consistently found positive correlations with ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, social distance, rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and specific forms of prejudice, especially against Jews and blacks.” That is to say, greater religiosity was associated with higher scores for these personality traits—traits that are the very antithesis of political liberalism.

Since personality plays an important role in many human beliefs, we examined a number of characteristics to see if there was any influence on religiosity. What is personality? Personality is the unique pattern of relatively permanent traits that shapes an individual’s thoughts and actions. We might contrast personality traits with situational states, that is, merely temporary reactions to environmental circumstances. Personality is our core being—the stuff of which we are made. It may be flexible, where we react differently in different situations, but it is only flexible within certain parameters determined by an interactive combination of nature and nurture, genes and environment, biology and psychology. The most popular theory today is known as the Five Factor Model. The “Big Five” personality dimensions include: Openness to experience (imaginative, idealistic, adventurous), Extraversion (friendly, warm, sociable), Agreeableness (forgiving, tender-minded, sympathetic), Conscientiousness (efficient, organized, ambitious), and Neuroticism (anxious, moody, defensive). Sulloway and I measured these five dimensions using a scale of 1 to 9 on adjectives describing each dimension. For example, to measure your agreeableness you would rank yourself from tender-minded (1) to tough-minded (9); or for openness you would rank yourself from unadventurous (1) to adventurous (9). Each of the five dimensions had two questions and scales.

The most consistent finding related to religious intensity involved openness. A higher ranking on the openness dimension was associated with lower levels of religiosity and higher levels of doubt. Moreover, openness was significantly correlated with change in religiosity, with higher openness scores being associated with lowered piety, as well as lower rates of church attendance. There was a modest association