Bioethical views and spiritual life among mainland Chinese Christians

Abstract

The research problem of this study is “what bearing do spiritual life and church involvement have on the views about bioethical issues of Christians in mainland China?” These bioethical views are (a) In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), (b) Sex Selection, (c) Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis and Selection of Embryos (PGD), (d) Savior Sibling, (e) Cloning, and (f) Stem Cell Therapy. The research question is “Does the spiritual life of mainland Chinese Christians affect their bioethical views that have been mediated by their participation in church activities and services?” The objective of the study is to examine (a) the correlation between Christians’ spiritual life and their participation in church activities and services; (b) the correlation between Christians’ participation in church activities and services and their views about bioethics; (c) the correlation between Christians’ spiritual life and their views about bioethics; and (d) the correlation between Christians’ spiritual life and their bioethical views that have been mediated by Christian participation in church activities and services. This research utilized an experimental design of quantitative methodology. After 20 weeks, 415 respondents were collected via a simple random sampling. According to the research framework design, correlation analysis, linear regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, and path analysis via SEM have been utilized. The results concluded that (a) the spiritual life of Christians affected their participation in church activities and services; (b) Christian participation in church activities and services affected their views about sex selection and cloning; (c) individual Bible reading and prayer behavior, which represents the spiritual life of the Christians, had an influence on their views about IVF; and (d) Christian participation in church activities and services as the mediating variable did not directly affect the correlation between Christian spiritual life and their views about six bioethical topics. Finally, the research added (a) the frequency of ethical teaching and (b) personal savior history that have been analyzed by multiple regression modeling via SEM. The results indicated that the personal savior history of Christians affected their views on IVF. Conversely, the frequency of ethical teaching did not affect these six bioethical views