Subprojects

Some might feel God’s forgiveness is unconditional. Others might feel they have to repent to be forgiven in some way. These could depend on the type or quality of the offense (someone might feel some offenses are forgiven unconditionally and others must be repented in some way). Often the theological underpinnings of these perspectives are ignored. The proposed research will examine how people within and across religions perceive the conditionality or unconditionality of divine forgiveness. Beginning with a brief analysis of various religious viewpoints in Judaism and Christianity (which people within and across any religion can espouse), we propose a set of multimethod, rigorous studies and experiments to understand conditional divine forgiveness. We will rigorously measure perceptions of conditional divine forgiveness and perform a well powered survey study of perceptions of conditional divine forgiveness in US Jews and Christians. We also plan to experimentally manipulate perceptions of divine forgiveness via manipulations of God’s omnipotence and forgivingness; compare Jews and Christians cross-culturally (between the US and Israel); see how a religious holiday (in this case, Yom Kippur) that is focused on divine forgiveness changes people’s views; and finally examine the (possibly moderated) links between divine forgiveness and well-being as well as divine forgiveness and political ideology. Our team consists of a leading psychologist of religion, a Jewish education scholar, and a quantitative/measurement expert. We will disseminate our work through conference presentations and open access publications and to religious communities, committed throughout to best open science practices. We hope to make people aware of and possibly even change lay people’s and scientists’ views of how divine forgiveness is perceived and its effects on well-being.

Catholicism represents the belief system of approximately one billion people, most of whom are Spanish speaking. Catholic individuals seek divine forgiveness (DF) through the ritual of confession, an interpersonal process involving not only the penitent (person seeking forgiveness) and the divine, but also the confessor (who is entitled to communicate absolution from sin and convey forgiveness on behalf of the divine). The interpersonal relationship with the confessor therefore has the added potential to either contribute to or inhibit experiencing DF and influence the processes of self-forgiveness (SF). This project will explore numerous questions, including: What penitent variables (trait, situational, dispositional) influence the experience of DF through confession? Does the relationship with the confessor facilitate or hinder the experience of being forgiven by oneself and by God? How are DF and SF related in Spanish-speaking Catholic penitents following confession? Do DF and SF as facilitated through confession relate to well-being and flourishing? The proposed work applies the theoretical framework proposed by Fincham and May to understand the processes leading to DF and SF in a unique sample of Catholic priests and penitents. Using a mixed methods research design, we propose to collect three data sources of penitents and confessors, including qualitative interviews and longitudinal and dyadic data. The research team comprises scholars around the globe with multidisciplinary backgrounds, including several Catholic priests, creating a strong interdisciplinary approach. In addition to journal articles, research reports and other scholarly products, the project will offer an online conference and practice guide to disseminate key findings to scholarly and practice audiences.

We explore how much the motive behind an offense matters for U.S. Christians’ perceptions and experiences of divine forgiveness. We outline three reasons why divine forgiveness may fundamentally differ from interpersonal forgiveness. First, God’s direct insight into people’s true motives may lead people to be more confident that someone—including oneself—will receive divine forgiveness when they are confident that their motives are good. Second, the heightened importance that people believe God places on moral values and character may lead people to believe that the goodness of one’s motives is particularly important when seeking divine forgiveness. Third, God’s insight into and emphasis on motive may lead people to introspect more about the underlying motivations for their offenses when seeking divine forgiveness; furthermore, this reflection will spur greater personal growth and psychological wellbeing. We also outline individual differences likely to influence these effects, including views of God as authoritarian or benevolent, attachment to God, and perceptions of the severity and harmfulness of an offense. Here, we systematically investigate the importance of motives for divine forgiveness among U.S. Christians, examining how the elements of insight, importance, and introspection may differ for one’s self vs. other people, and between the perspectives of the giver vs. receiver of divine forgiveness. We propose a suite of studies that incorporate multiple methods, including both qualitative and quantitative investigations, cross-sectional and experimental designs, and implicit and explicit measures. Finally, we center the perspective and experiences of our participants through comprehensive interviews that will guide the trajectory of this program of research.

South Africa is one of the most religious places in the world: 94% of adults surveyed nationally identify as religious/spiritual, and 74% of adults consider religion important to them. After three decades, South Africa still grapples with apartheid’s legacy of poverty and social inequality. This project opens a new frontier in Divine Forgiveness research by investigating how Divine Forgiveness might promote intergroup forgiveness, that is, forgiving others who belong to different social (e.g., racial) groups. By studying Divine Forgiveness in the demanding ‘laboratory’ of South Africa’s post-apartheid, multi-faith, multi-denominational, multi-cultural society, we aim to identify how intergroup forgiveness might, via emotions and behaviors with respect to other groups, contribute to the country’s positive social transformation. The project uses a range of research methods, including focus groups and surveys amongst church congregations and religious leaders, a national survey using a representative sample of South African adults, a 14-day daily diary study during Lent, and experiments manipulating variables believed to either increase or decrease Divine Forgiveness. Together, these studies will explore Divine Forgiveness in relation to past and present transgressions, and its possible links to future intergroup relations amongst: (1) historically advantaged and disadvantaged groups; (2) various faiths and intra-faith denominations; and (3) amongst both student and adult samples from the four main South African population groups. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers will investigate: (a) the nature and potential limits of Divine Forgiveness; (b) the predictors of Divine Forgiveness and how people perceive Divine Forgiveness over time; and (c) outcomes (i.e., the potential benefits and/or potential costs) of Divine Forgiveness within the post-conflict South African context.

Research is just beginning to uncover the importance of divine forgiveness (DF) in people’s lives and well-being. Our project aims to dig deeper into DF and understand how people seek forgiveness from God when they believe they’ve committed a transgression. We’ll be testing a particular model, the Seeking-Experiencing DF Model (Fincham & May, 2022), and draw on ideas from stress and coping, and meaning-making theories. Our project comprises two sequential studies. In the first study, we’ll create and adapt ways to measure the seeking of DF, asking people to reflect back on instances where they sought forgiveness for major wrongdoings. In the second study, we’ll follow people over time to learn more about the Seeking-Experiencing DF Model. First, we’ll ask participants about their beliefs, their relationship with God, and how forgiving and compassionate they are. Then, a month later, we’ll ask if they’ve done something they felt was wrong in the past month. If they say yes, we’ll invite them to share more and ask additional questions over the next three months. In this study, we aim to understand what kinds of things people feel they did wrong, how they feel about it (like guilt or sadness), and how they try to seek forgiveness from God and feel whether they’ve received it. We’ll also check how their beliefs and compassion change during this time. By asking these questions across time, we hope to better understand the process of seeking divine forgiveness. This project will advance our understanding of DF and will also help us improve how we study DF in the future.

More than half of the world’s population is theistic (i.e., Christian, Muslim, Jewish) and potentially seeks and experiences forgiveness from God or Allah for their transgressions. Among these, Christians predominate, making up roughly one-third of the world’s population. In this research, we explore state forgiveness, that is, the experiences of Christians when receiving forgiveness from God for a specific wrongdoing. In our three-study project, we use a mixed method design, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, and multiple data collection approaches, both surveys and interviews, in a wide range of cultures. We conceptualize religion and spirituality as occurring within a relational triad consisting of God, self, and others. This Relational Spirituality perspective foregrounds the relationships among divine, self, and other forgiveness, and provides a powerful lens for cultural analysis. We aim to (1) describe the Christian experience of receiving God’s forgiveness for a specific transgression across cultures, (2) develop a scale to quantify experiences of forgiveness from God that is useful cross-culturally, and (3) identify factors that function as barriers and facilitators to receiving divine forgiveness in multiple cultures. In addition, we aim to examine whether sacramental confession as a religious community, for example, as practiced in the Catholic Church, alters experiences of God’s forgiveness. Ours is the first multicultural project on divine forgiveness and among the first to examine the relational triad cross-culturally using mixed methods. By our findings, we hope to enrich the empirical literature and support individuals who might benefit from experiencing God’s forgiveness.

The experience of being forgiven by God holds great importance in all major monotheistic religions and in the everyday lives of many people of faith. Unfortunately, a relevant impediment to research is the current lack of valid and reliable measures for assessing divine forgiveness within and across religions. Based on this, the present project intends to develop and validate a self-report scale to measure the tendency of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim believers to feel forgiven by God. The newly developed measure will capture the divine forgiveness complexity, its uniqueness when confronted with similar experiences, common features across monotheistic religions, and religion-specific patterns. The development and validation process will involve approximately 1,250 community adults who believe in God and live in Italy, Israel, and Turkey — that is, in countries subject to similar European and Mediterranean influences and where there is a clear prevalent religion (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, respectively) — and will follow several steps from a clear conceptualization of divine forgiveness to the test of psychometric properties of the scale within and across religions. The availability of a well-validated measure of dispositional divine forgiveness will provide new cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence on divine forgiveness and its correlates and outcomes (e.g., self-forgiveness, interpersonal forgiveness, divine mercy, religiosity, personality traits, self-transcendent values, guilt and shame feelings, intergroup gratitude and forgiveness, hedonic and eudaimonic well-being), useful not only to stimulate new avenues of research but also to facilitate interreligious dialogue and interactions. The research findings, including the developed scale, will be disseminated among scholars and professionals through publications, conference presentations, and seminars. The dataset will be made readily available to the scientific community in a public open-access repository. A blog/website/social media page will be created to share the research results with laypeople to make the project an ongoing conversation and increase its social impact.

In this project we will develop a self-report measure of divine forgiveness. To do this we will conduct four studies designed to answer the research question: How is a person’s experience of divine forgiveness quantified? Across three representative samples from the world’s three major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) Study 1 will use a prototype analysis to identify the central and peripheral features of divine forgiveness. Study 2 will draw on the findings of the prototype analysis, existing measures of forgiveness (in other domains), significant monotheistic texts (e.g., the Bible, Quran, and Tanakh), and expert review, to develop a bank of candidate items for the Divine Forgiveness Questionnaire (DFQ). With data from a representative sample, we will then refine the item bank to a brief measure of divine forgiveness. Using a large sample, Study 3 will test the equality of the DFQ across seven demographic groups (gender, age, ethnicity, education, employment, marital status, and religion) in order to test the stability of the new measure. In Study 4, across three samples, we will estimate the predictive validity of the DFQ. We will test if DFQ scores can predict [a] worldview (atheist vs religious); [b] physiological and emotional responses to cues of God’s judgement; and [c] outcomes over time. Adhering closely to open science principles, all studies will be pre-registered, all research materials and data will be made publicly available, and all studies will be published in high-impact open access journals.

Forgiveness is about relationships. Divine forgiveness, specifically, has the potential to transform not only individuals themselves, but their relationships with God as well as with other people. Research is accumulating on individual outcomes of divine forgiveness, such as increased well-being and physical health; however, less research has focused on the relational outcomes of forgiveness. We address this gap by examining three types of relational and moral consequences of thinking about divine forgiveness. First, we explore potential emotional consequences of divine forgiveness, such as gratitude, awe, guilt and shame. Second, we examine some consequences divine forgiveness might have on people’s thoughts, such as humility and self-forgiveness. Third, we investigate consequences divine forgiveness might have on people’s behaviors, including positive behaviors such as forgiveness of other people, gratitude, and helping, but also negative behaviors such as excusing immorality. We propose a pilot test and four experiments to examine these potential consequences of experiencing divine forgiveness. The pilot test will help us design an intervention that facilitates thinking about divine forgiveness. Experiment 1 will be an online study looking at how thinking about divine forgiveness affects emotions and thoughts. Experiment 2 will be an in-person study that examines how the experience of divine forgiveness affects people’s forgiving behaviors toward another person who treats them unfairly in a laboratory setting. Experiment 3 will investigate how the experience of divine forgiveness affects people’s grateful behaviors toward another person who helps them. Experiment 4 will look at the circumstances under which the experience of divine forgiveness might allow people to excuse their own antisocial behavior toward someone who needs help. In all four experiments, the experience of divine forgiveness will be compared to the experience of forgiveness between people, to see if there is something psychologically distinctive about the experience of receiving forgiveness from the divine.

Forgiveness and attachment are the nexus of spirituality for monotheistic religious believers throughout the world. In such cases, traditions can place sacred value on cultivating and maintaining a personal connection with God and other people across the life span. However, research has not rigorously examined the nature, expressions, and functions of divine forgiveness (DF) in theistic relational spirituality. Focusing on Christian adults in Mobile, AL, and Wheaton, IL, this project will address five research questions: (1) How do theistic believers think about, perceive, and experience DF?; (2) When and how do people determine they have been forgiven by God?; (3) What are the temporal associations between DF and key indices of psychospiritual functioning?; (4) What cognitive and affective changes result from DF?; and (5) How do differences in religious attachment influence perceptions or experiences of DF? In Phase 1, we will conduct an online survey assessing DF (traditional self-report and vignette-based approaches), religious attachment, and other psychospiritual factors. In Phase 2, we will examine the reciprocal interplay between DF and psychospiritual functioning with a representative group of survey respondents via an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approach. In particular, these participants will complete EMA measures four times per day over a 3-week period assessing specific episodes of DF and their present-moment sense of being forgiven by God, positive emotion, negative emotion, moral struggles, self-compassion, connectedness with God and other people. In Phase 3, a subset of participants will complete an adapted version of the Religious Attachment Interview that has been designed to further illumine how individual differences in religious attachment might influence perceptions and experiences of DF. Drawing upon a range of methods to analyze the data from these three phases, this study will generate foundational knowledge regarding the nature, expressions, and functions of DF in theistic relational spirituality.