Religious involvement and humility

Abstract

Although researchers are beginning to pay more attention to the virtue of humility, there are relatively few studies on the factors that make people more humble. The purpose of this study is to address this issue. A conceptual model is developed that contains the following hypotheses: (1) people who go to church more often will receive more spiritual support from fellow church members, (2) individuals who receive more spiritual support at church will develop greater trust in God, (3) those who trust God more will enter into a closer relationship with God, (4) as people develop a closer relationship with God they will experience a deeper sense of awe of God, and (5) individuals who are in awe of God will be more likely to feel more humble. Cross-sectional data from a recent nationwide survey of middle-aged and older adults (N = 1154) provide support for each of these relationships.

Keywords:

• religion
• humility
• awe
• trust in God

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Institute on Aging [RO1 AG014749].

Notes

1. A series of tests were conducted to see if suppression effects arose in any of the mediated relationships. Jose (2013) defines suppression effects by posing the following question: ‘Can the strength of the basic relationship increase when the mediating variable is included?’ (p. 70, emphasis in the original). We will use the relationship between church attendance and humility to illustrate how tests for suppression effects were conducted. The model in Figure 1 was re-estimated after variables that mediate the relationship between church attendance and humility were constrained to be zero. The resulting estimate of the relationship between church attendance and humility was then compared with the data in Table 3. Based on the definition provided by Jose (2013), we found no evidence suppression effects in our data.