Julie Exline, the Armington Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, is the principal investigator on a $1.4 million research project funded by The John Templeton Foundation. Photo Credit: Mike Sands
Shortly before she joined Case Western Reserve’s psychology faculty in the fall of 2000, Julie Exline collaborated on two studies that laid the groundwork for much of her subsequent research. Both dealt with religious and spiritual dimensions of human experience—a topic that had received little attention from psychologists during most of the 20th century.
The first study explored the emotional benefits of expressing forgiveness, and the barriers that make forgiving difficult. The results were published in a book co-edited by Kenneth Pargament, a professor at Bowling Green State University whose work has helped generate a resurgence of interest in the psychology of religion and spirituality. Pargament examines how religious beliefs, concepts and values influence people’s responses to challenges in their lives. Often, he has shown, religion provides comfort and hope, especially when it motivates acts such as forgiveness. But at other times, it can be a source of struggle.
The second study, picking up on this theme, looked at the relationship between religious and spiritual struggle and mental illness. In a sample of college students, Exline and her colleagues found that feelings of alienation from God, and interpersonal conflicts over religion, were associated with depression. In another sample, consisting of patients seeking psychotherapy, the study found that people who believed they had committed an unpardonable sin were more likely to be suicidal than those who did not harbor such guilt.
Exline wasn’t surprised to see a correlation between certain forms of struggle and psychological disorders. “Negative things tend to go together,” she explains. But her research raised a host of further questions. For instance, are feelings of alienation from God best understood as a cause of depression, or as a symptom of depression? How do people cope with religious and spiritual struggle, and what are its long-term effects on their emotional and physical well-being?
Today, Exline is one of the most prolific and esteemed investigators of such questions. She has published nearly 80 papers and book chapters, many of them devoted to aspects of struggle. And she’s the principal investigator on a three-year, $1.4 million project, funded by The John Templeton Foundation, that she is conducting with Pargament and three other researchers. The goals of the project are to identify factors that predict the occurrence of religious and spiritual struggle, trace the course of these struggles over time and see whether they can lead to personal growth.
When she speaks of religious and spiritual struggle, Exline is referring to a variety of situations in which “something in a person’s current belief, practice, or experience is causing or perpetuating distress.” For example, some people undergo a crisis of faith in response to a traumatic event—the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, a natural disaster. They have trouble reconciling their belief in the existence or benevolence of God with the suffering an event has caused. But Exline says that less severe stressors also disturb people’s religious and spiritual lives, generating inner conflicts and negative emotions such as anger, guilt or sadness.
In much of her previous work, Exline concentrated on anger toward God—a feeling that can arise not only in response to trauma or profound loss, but also in response to “garden-variety disappointments.” Such anger is not a rare occurrence; in one national study, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they were sometimes angry at God. Placing this finding in perspective, Exline notes that only about 2.5 percent of the subjects reported frequent, intense anger. “It’s not as though everyone is going around raging at God,” she says. “But a good proportion of people experience this as part of life. They have insight into it and say, ‘Yes, I have felt that way before.’”
Nonetheless, as Exline began studying and speaking about the topic, she sometimes felt that she was breaking a taboo. At conferences where she presented her results, some audience members would act as though “lightning were about to strike.” Exline was amused by this response, but she also found it significant. Her research has shown that people angry at God are often reluctant to acknowledge their feelings or discuss them with others; the taboo holds them back. But keeping silent only makes their struggle harder to endure. Exline has found that subjects benefit when they disclose their anger, so long as they receive an empathetic response. On the other hand, those who repress their anger, or who meet with condemnation when they do speak up, have more difficulty coping.
Exline has identified characteristics associated with anger toward God, such as a sense of entitlement and a perception of God as cruel or distant. She has learned that people resolve their anger in different ways; some emerge with a stronger or more resilient faith, while others turn away from religion. For this reason, Exline studies atheists as well as believers, recognizing that members of both groups may have experienced anger toward God or other forms of religious and spiritual struggle.
From right: Exline is a research mentor to postdoctoral scholar Joshua Wilt and graduate students Joshua Grubbs, Alex Uzdavines and Steffany Homolka. Photo by Mike Sands.
Much of the research on struggle has assessed people’s beliefs or psychological states at a single point in time. But there have also been longitudinal studies that followed the trajectory of struggles and tried to assess their impact on mental and physical health. For the Templeton project, Exline and her colleagues have launched three longitudinal studies, each involving a different population, that will gather data over periods ranging from three months to four years.
In the first study, the researchers are recruiting a diverse, national sample of American adults. In the second, they are following first-year students from three universities—one private (Case Western Reserve), one public (Bowling Green) and one religious (Biola University in California). In the third, they are focusing on military veterans receiving mental health treatment at the Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston.
The three studies differ both in the characteristics of their participants and, to some extent, in their methods. For instance, while all three populations will complete online surveys, the veterans will also take part in clinical interviews, and the research team will obtain their permission to review their medical histories. One aim of the VA study is to learn whether religious and spiritual struggle among former soldiers is linked with post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse or mood disorders. Not all the veterans in the study will have seen combat. As a group, however, they are more likely than the other populations to have experienced trauma.
University students are of interest to the researchers, Exline says, because they are at a developmental stage where many factors can give rise to struggle. As students attain independence from their families, encounter new ideas and make decisions about their futures, their religious and spiritual identities can change, and so can their views of what counts as a moral or meaningful life.
During the first year of the Templeton grant, Exline and her colleagues created a survey, the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale, that they will administer to participants in all three studies. Other questionnaires will elicit information about the respondents’ demographic characteristics, personality traits, and mental and physical health. The researchers will be looking for variables that predict vulnerability to struggle, and for others that serve as buffers against it. They also hope to identify personal characteristics and coping strategies that influence a struggle’s course and outcome.
The Templeton project will yield a series of papers reporting findings from the three studies. In addition, Exline is writing an article summarizing the research literature to date, and she will collaborate with Pargament on a book, the first of its kind, on the psychology of religious and spiritual struggle. The literature review and the book are intended to reach an international audience that includes not only other researchers but also clinical psychologists and religious professionals. Meanwhile, Exline has begun sharing findings from earlier studies, as well as personal reflections, in a blog called “Light and Shadow: Challenges in Religious and Spiritual Life,” hosted by Psychology Today.
“Throughout my career,” Exline says, “I’ve been interested in understanding and helping other people work through struggles that they have around religion and spirituality.” Now, she hopes that the Templeton project will advance knowledge about the psychology of struggle and place this knowledge in the hands of practitioners, both religious and secular, who are committed to “fostering healing and growth.”