On Beyond Goldman: Religious Thinking and the 1970s *

The research very early focused upon the development of Religious Thinking itself: the projective pictures Ronald J. Goldman used were bypassed in favour of three biblical miracle stories, plus criterion-referenced responses. One can learn considerably more about the construct Religious Thinking now in the late 1970s than one could during the 1960s. The Finnish edition of Thinking about the Bible, as distinct from the shorter North American editions, included a Piagetian moral puzzle. Thus, while scores on the Scales of Religious Thinking could be calculated, it is also possible to compare North American Episcopalian students and Finnish students on their responses to that particular puzzle, which probes one aspect of what Piaget long ago termed a sense of justice. For this sample of North American students, then, Religious Thinking grew or progressed in a step-wise manner toward increasingly ‘higher’ levels of Abstract Stage Religious Thinking across the nine school grades 4–12.