Effect of Humanism on Religiosity with the Mediatory Role of Ethics and Spirituality

Abstract

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to explore why some people are more religious. More importantly, is it due to external factors like culture and values, or some innate factors like humanism is influencing it. We also tried to explain how innate values like humanism make people more religious. For this, we proposed a theoretical framework conceptualizing the effect of spirituality and ethics in humanism religiosity nexus. We propose Humanism factors such as Self-sacrifice, attraction to public participation, and compassion, affect religiosity directly as well through increasing the ethical values. Moreover, humanism along with ethical values make an individual more spiritual. This is reflected in the feelings of belief in god, search for meaning, and feeling of security. This spiritual enlightenment would enforce correspondent religious beliefs and worship. It also influences other factors of religiosity like emotional involvement and mutual disclosure of affairs. Hence, this paper is to examine the impact of humanism on religiosity keeping spirituality and ethics as a mediating variable. All sub variable has studied individually to understand the different aspects of these variable and combined effect of all sub-variables is focused to meet the accuracy level from all aspects.

Design\methodology – A well-structured framework is developed, and PLS-SEM is used to generate results by using SmartPLS3. Data is collected through the primary data collection technique based on questionnaires is conducted. 1000 questionnaires were distributed out of which 356 responses were received. All the respondents were leaders of different well-performing organizations of Pakistan including managers, assistant managers, directors, assistant directors’ CEOs, and team leaders.

Findings – The result showed that human factors like attraction to public participation (APP), and Self-sacrifice seems to affect ethical values. Ethics would in turn increase spiritual factors of the search for meaning and feeling of security. Spiritual factors like belief in God seems to positively affect all three dimensions of religiosity. The feeling of security also impacts emotional involvement positively, whereas the search for meaning has a significant and positive effect on mutual disclosure of affairs. All humanism factors also seem to affect the spiritual factor of search positively and significantly. Compassion along with APP also seems to enforce belief in God, similarly, APP along with self-sacrifice seems to increase the feeling of security. Ethics also seems to influence religious factors like emotional involvement, and mutual disclosure of affairs directly and positively. However, humanism factors like compassion and Self-sacrifice seem to have a negative but significant impact on belief and worship, and emotional involvement respectively.