5 - Religion and personality

Abstract

This chapter examines the links between personality and religion, both in terms of what the study of personality can contribute to the scientific study of religion and what possible insights into personality structure and functioning that an acknowledgment of the religious side of life can offer. A complete understanding of the role of personality in religious experience and in the expression of religious impulses requires an extended discussion of how personality is conceptualized by contemporary personality psychologists. It is only after this that the interplay between personality and religion, at the levels of both theory and method, can be effectively approached. The chapter presents an articulated framework for the understanding of human individuality and its application to research on religious and spiritual constructs within personality. It was proposed that knowing a person requires being privy to information at three distinct levels or domains of personality description: (a) comparative dispositional traits, (b) contextualized personal concerns, and (c) integrative life stories. Each level contains different constructs and a different focus and is accessed through different assessment operations. The three levels of personality structure can be used to organize current knowledge and to suggest future directions for research on religion and personality.