The Nonreligious – Nonspiritual Scale (NRNSS): Measuring Everything from Atheists to Zionists

Although hundreds of measures of personal religiousness and spirituality exist, none are capable of reliably and validly assessing individuals who identify as nonreligious and nonspiritual. There is a need to develop a valid and reliable measure of (non)religiousness and (non)spirituality. This article discusses these problems, and presents the development and initial validation of a 17-item Nonreligious-Nonspiritual Scale (NRNSS) across three studies. The NRNSS exhibited high internal consistency (α > .94) and high test-retest reliability (r = .92). Two exploratory and one confirmatory factor analysis of the NRNSS supported the hypothesized two-factor solution: (a) institutional religiousness and (b) individualistic spirituality. The NRNSS also demonstrated convergent validity through theoretically-expected correlations with established measures of religiousness and spirituality (the Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Religiosity, Humanistic Morality, and Traditional Religious Morality scales). In summary, the NRNSS may work as an initial attempt to address the limitations of other scales for capturing how religious/nonreligious/nonspiritual individuals are.