Abstract
Researchers have argued for some time that emotions play a significant role in religious life. The purpose of this study is to focus on a religious emotion—awe of God—that has received relatively little attention in the literature. A latent variable model was developed to assess the following core relationships: (1) people who attend worship services more often will be more likely to experience awe of God; (2) greater awe of God will promote a greater sense of congregational cohesiveness (i.e., the belief that fellow church members share common values and beliefs); (3) individuals who participate in cohesive congregations will be more likely to feel they belong in the place where they worship; and (4) a greater sense of belonging in a congregation will be associated with a stronger sense of religious meaning in life. Analysis of data provided by a nationwide sample of middle-aged and older adults provides support for each of these relationships.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Although we did not discuss the relationship between church attendance and congregational cohesiveness it is, nevertheless, estimated in the model. We specify that church attendance promotes greater congregational cohesiveness, but other researchers may argue that greater cohesiveness invites greater attendance. Measures of identical measures of church attendance and congregational cohesiveness were available in the Wave 1 and Wave 2 data. This made it possible to estimate a longitudinal model that contains two key relationships. The first is the effect of Wave 1 church attendance on Wave 2 congregational cohesiveness controlling for congregational cohesiveness at Wave 1. The second key relationship has to do with the effect of Wave 1 congregational cohesiveness on Wave 2 church attendance controlling for church attendance at Wave 1. The findings reveal that church attendance at the baseline interview is significantly associated with change in congregational cohesiveness over time (β = .145; p < .001) while congregational cohesiveness at the baseline is not associated with change in church attendance over time (β = .068; ns.). These analyses provide some evidence that the relationship between church attendance and congregational cohesiveness is specified correctly in our model.
The findings indicate that compared to women, men go to worship services less often (r = −.104; p < .001). Moreover, the data suggest that compared to women, men are less likely to experience awe of God (r = −.106; p < .001).
References
Baumeister, Roy F., and Mark R. Leary. 1995. The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin 117: 497–529.
Carrier, Herve. 1965. The sociology of religious belonging. New York: Herder and Herder.
Carstensen, Laura L. 1992. Social and emotional patterns in adulthood: Support for socioemotional selectivity theory. Psychology and Aging 7: 331–338.
Collins, Randall. 1993. Emotional energy as the common denominator of ritual action. Rationality and Society 5: 203–230.
Cottingham, John. 2005. The spiritual dimension: Religion, philosophy and human value. New York: Cambridge University Press.
DeShon, Richard P. 1998. A cautionary note on measurement error correlations in structural equation models. Psychological Methods 3: 412–423.
du Toit, Mathilda, and Stephen du Toit. 2001. Interactive LISREL: User’s guide. Lincolnwood, IL: Scientific Software International.
Durkheim, Emile. 1915/1995. The elementary forms of religious life. New York: Free Press.
David, Hayward R., and Neal Krause. 2014. The effects of belonging to an alcohol-proscribing religious group on the relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and mortality. Social Science and Medicine 101: 1–8.
Easterbrook, Matt, and Vivian L. Vignoles. 2013. What does it mean to belong? Interpersonal bonds and intragroup similarities as predictors of felt belonging in different types of groups. European Journal of Social Psychology 43: 455–462.
Edwards, Jonathan. 1746/2004. The religious affectations. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust.
Emmons, Robert A. 2005. Emotion and religion. In Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, ed. R.F. Paloutzian, and C.L. Park, 235–252. New York: Guilford.
Enders, Craig C. 2010. Applied missing data analysis. New York: Guilford.
Erikson, Eric. 1959. Identity and the life cycle. New York: International University Press.
Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging Working Group. 1999. Multidimensional measurement of religiousness/spirituality for use in health research. Kalamazoo, MI: John E. Fetzer Institute.
Graham, Jesse, and Jonathan Haidt. 2010. Beyond beliefs: Religions bind individuals to moral communities. Personality and Social Psychology Review 14: 140–150.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Vintage Books.
Hogg, Michael A. 2005. Uncertainty, social identity, and ideology. In Advances in group processes, ed. S.R. Thye, and E.J. Lawler, 203–230. New York: Elsevier.
Hogg, Michael A., Dominic Abrams, Sabine Otten, and Steve Hinkle. 2004. The social identity perspective: Intergroup relations, self-conception, and small groups. Small Group Research 35: 246–276.
Hood, Ralph W., Peter C. Hill, and Bernard Spilka. 2009. The psychology of religion: An empirical approach. New York: Guilford.
Hu, Li-tze, and Peter M. Bentler. 1999. Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling 6: 1–55.
Keltner, Dacher, and Johnathan Haidt. 2003. Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion 17: 297–314.
Krause, Neal. 2002a. Church-based social support and health in old age: Exploring variations by race. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences 57B: S332–S347.
Krause, Neal. 2002b. A comprehensive strategy for developing closed-ended survey items for use in studies of older adults. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences 57B: S263–S274.
Krause, Neal. 2007. A longitudinal study of social support and meaning in life. Psychology and Aging 22: 456–469.
Krause, Neal. 2008. Aging in the church: How social relationships affect health. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.
Lambert, Nathaniel M., Tyler F. Stillman, Joshua A. Hicks, Shanmukh Kamble, Roy F. Baumeister, and Frank D. Fincham. 2013. To belong is to matter: Sense of belonging enhances meaning in life. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39: 1418–1427.
Marsden, George M. 2003. Jonathan Edwards: A life. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Maslow, Abraham H. 1954. Motivation and personality. New York: Harper.
Otto, Rudolf. 1923/1958. The idea of the holy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rime, Bernard. 2007. The social sharing of emotion as an interface between individual and collective processes in the construction of emotional climates. Journal of Social Issues 63: 307–322.
Roberts, Robert C. 2007. Spiritual emotions: A psychology of Christian virtues. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Rosow, Irving. 1976. Status and role change through the life span. In Handbook of aging and the social sciences, ed. R.H. Binstock, and E. Shanas, 457–482. New York: Van Nostrand Reinghold.
Schieman, Scott, Alex Bierman, and Christopher G. Ellison. 2010. Religious involvement, beliefs about God, and the sense of mattering among older adults. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49: 517–535.
Semin, Gun R. 2007. Grounding communication: Synchrony. In Social psychology: A handbook of basic principles, ed. A.W. Kruglanski, and E.T. Higgins, 630–649. New York: Guilford.
Theissen, Gerd. 2001. Sociology of early Palestinian Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Thomas, William I., and Dorothy S. Thomas. 1928. The child in America: Behavioral problems and programs. New York: Knopf.
Tillich, Paul. 1987. The essential Tillich: An anthology of the writing of paul Tillich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tornstam, Lars. 2005. Gerotranscendence: A developmental theory of positive aging. New York: Springer.
Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Stephen Reicher, and Margaret S. Wetherell. 1987. Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Van Cappellen, Patty, and Vassilis Saroglou. 2012. Awe activates religious and spiritual feelings and behavioral intentions. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 4: 223–236.
von Scheve, Christian, and S. Ismer. 2013. Toward a theory of collective emotions. Emotion Review 5: 406–413.
Widaman, Keith F. 2012. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. In APA handbook of research methods in psychology, vol. 3, ed. H. Cooper, 361–389. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Acknowledgments
This research was support by a Grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Institute on Aging (RO1 AG009221).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Krause, N., Hayward, R.D. Awe of God, Congregational Embeddedness, and Religious Meaning in Life. Rev Relig Res 57, 219–238 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-014-0195-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-014-0195-9