A mixed-methods study of communing with and complaining to the divine: Imagined conversations with god among undergraduates reporting religious and spiritual struggles.

Abstract

Religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles pertain to matters of ultimate significance, such as moral dilemmas, religious doubts, and perceived conflict with God. Because people cannot offer absolute or objective solutions to such struggles, some turn to God for guidance and support. In a mixed-methods study of undergraduates from three U.S. universities (N = 976), we examined open-ended descriptions of imagined conversations with God during r/s struggles, and we tested whether conversation patterns differed for people focusing on divine struggles (n = 290) versus nondivine struggles (n = 680). Qualitative coding suggested that a variety of positive themes were common in expressions to God (e.g., gratitude) and imagined responses from God (e.g., unconditional love), whereas negative themes (e.g., questions about suffering; imagined abandonment) were uncommon. Examples of themes and conversation patterns are provided and interpreted. Scores derived from qualitative codes achieved evidence of reliability, and quantitative correlational analyses showed that more positive expressions generally associated with more positive imagined responses; however, people focused on divine struggles had more negative conversation patterns than those focused on nondivine struggles. In all, conversation themes and patterns were consistent with the view that people perceive God in relational terms and that one’s perceived relationship with God may be disrupted when focusing on divine struggles. Based on these findings, we suggest that providers working with clients reporting r/s struggles may explore imagined conversations with the divine to obtain potentially useful information about clients’ perceived relationships with God and facilitate greater understanding and resolution of these struggles.

Approach, disengagement, protest, and suppression: Four behaviors toward God in the context of religious/spiritual struggle.

“…Prior work on religious coping (Pargament et al, 1998(Pargament et al, , 2000 has examined a variety of behaviors toward God, as has some work on attachment and object relations involving God (Hall, 2015;Hall & Edwards, 2002) and imagined conversations with God (Wilt et al, 2021). Our aim here was to complement this work by examining four specific behavioral responses toward God: approach, disengagement, protest, and suppression.…”

“…For example, the Spiritual Assessment Inventory (Hall & Edwards, 2002) asks about continued engagement with God in the face of anger, and the Brief RCOPE (Pargament et al, 1998) and RCOPE (Pargament et al, 2000) mention voicing anger to God. A recent mixed-methods study (Wilt et al, 2021) focused on imagined conversations with God in the context of r/s struggles, highlighting a wide array of themes that included help-seeking and gratitude expressions as well as conflict and disengagement. Our aim in this project was to build on this body of work by creating a self-report tool to assess four behaviors toward God in an r/s struggle context: approach, disengagement, protest, and suppression.…”

Conversations with God: How Are Religion and Spirituality Used to Make Sense of Forgiveness?

“…Earlier research has found that forgiveness has a self-soothing effect (Sandage & Jankowski, 2010 ), which supports the current findings. Individuals see God in relational terms (Wilt et al, 2021 ). Further, people perceive God and Jesus differently; Jesus may be seen as warmer and less fierce than God, although people might gain more from God than from Jesus (Cummings et al, 2017 ).…”