Abstract One thousand and seventy?nine pupils aged between 13 and 16 years, from years three through five of Protestant and Catholic secondary schools in Northern Ireland, completed a survey of moral issues, together with a scale of attitude towards Christianity and a range of indices of religious behaviour. These data are employed to develop and to establish criteria of reliability and validity for a scale of traditional Christain moral values. Tentative scale norms indicate that pupils in Catholic schools hold more (...) strongly to traditional moral values than pupils in Protestant schools, that girls hold more strongly to traditional moral values than boys, and that the acceptance of traditional moral values declines between the third and fifth years of the secondary school. (shrink)