Humbling Yourself before God: Humility as a Reliable Predictor of Lower Divine Struggle

Abstract

Personality factors such as low agreeableness and psychological entitlement are often highly predictive of spiritual struggle. Our aim was to examine trait humility as a potential predictor of lower levels of divine struggles—struggles focused on emotions or ideas about God. Specifically, we proposed that humility would correlate negatively with two forms of divine struggle: anger at God and religious fear and guilt. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a cross-sectional analysis with undergraduates (160 men, 152 women). Results indicated that humility was indeed negatively related to both forms of divine struggle. For anger at God, both in general and in reaction to a specific event, these findings were very robust, maintaining significance even when other related personality factors (e.g., psychological entitlement, agreeableness, trait anger) were held constant. For religious fear and guilt, humility was only marginally significant when controlling for such variables. In sum, humility does appear to function as a trait-level negative predictor of divine struggles.