Abstract
Does God listen and respond to prayers? This project provided initial validation for a brief measure of perceived divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. As part of a larger project on religious/spiritual struggles among U.S. undergraduates, we used Sample 1 (n = 400) for exploratory factor analysis and Sample 2 (n = 413) for confirmatory factor analysis and initial validity testing. A two-factor model with four items per factor provided acceptable fit. On average, participants reported more divine engagement than disengagement. They endorsed items about God listening more than those about God responding. Divine engagement showed strong positive associations with religiousness and positive-valence variables involving God. Divine disengagement showed strong positive associations with variables suggesting divine struggle or distance. Importantly, both subscales also showed evidence of incremental validity: Divine engagement predicted positive-valence God variables (e.g., secure attachment, collaborative religious coping, gratitude to God, and awareness of God) even when controlling for religiousness and positive God concepts and attitudes. Divine disengagement predicted more spiritual struggles and more negative-valence and distance-related God variables (divine struggle, anxious and distant attachment, and self-directing religious coping) even when controlling for doubt about God’s existence, negative God images, anger/disappointment toward God, and concern about God’s disapproval. In short, this brief new measure shows promise as a tool to assess beliefs about God’s responsiveness to prayer.
Highlights
When people pray, do they believe that God is listening and answering? In human relationships, a sense that the other person is hearing and responding to us is an important predictor of attachment security (Cassidy and Shaver 2016) and relationship satisfaction (Kuhn et al 2018)
After performing the preliminary item-level analyses described in Section 3, we turned to our primary analyses for Sample 1: an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the divine engagement/disengagement items
In trying to understand the broad picture of a person’s perceived relationship with God, might perceptions of divine engagement and disengagement have any distinct predictive power, even when we control for other specific, known predictors of these broad relational measures? To address these questions of incremental validity, we performed a rigorous set of tests: we examined whether perceptions of divine engagement and disengagement would predict any unique variance in several variables related to perceived relationships with God, even when controlling for several other basic Godoriented variables that could be expected to predict considerable variance in the relationally-focused God variables
Summary
Do they believe that God is listening and answering? In human relationships, a sense that the other person is hearing and responding to us is an important predictor of attachment security (Cassidy and Shaver 2016) and relationship satisfaction (Kuhn et al 2018). Many people do see themselves as having a two-way, relationally engaged bond with God (Davis et al 2013; Hall and Fujikawa 2013), one in which God speaks to them (Luhrmann 2012), helps to meet attachment needs (Granqvist et al 2010), intervenes in their lives (Degelman and Lynn 1995; Exline et al 2017; Ray et al 2015), and collaborates with them in solving problems (Pargament et al 1988; Wilt et al 2019) Our aim for this project was to provide initial validation data for a new, brief measure of perceived divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. This point has been well documented in recent years in research on topics such as attachment to God (Beck and McDonald 2004; Granqvist et al 2010; Kirkpatrick 2005; Rowatt and Kirkpatrick 2002), object-relations approaches involving
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