The project

Central research questions

The present project aims to develop and validate a new self-report scale measuring dispositional divine forgiveness (i.e., the tendency to perceive oneself as forgiven by God for being a sinner) within and across the three main monotheistic religions, namely Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

In developing the scale, we will pay special attention to: its content validity across religions, its ability to tap different facets and dimensions of the construct, distinguish pseudo-divine forgiveness from genuine divine forgiveness, and its length (i.e., number of items) that we aim to limit without loss in psychometric quality.

To validate the scale, we will test its dimensionality, measurement invariance across groups, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, construct and criterion validity.  All these qualities ensure the proper functioning of a measuring tools. We will be particularly attentive to measurement invariance and equally good validity of the scale across the three  monotheistic religions, whose doctrines, practices, and rituals regarding divine forgiveness sometimes differ. This will allow us to explore divine forgiveness and its correlates in different religious and cultural contexts, as well as make valuable comparisons to identify “universal” aspects and religion-specific patterns of divine forgiveness.

Background and significance of the questions

Similar to human forgiveness, divine forgiveness can be assessed at different levels of specificity, namely as a disposition or as a transgression-specific experience. Dispositional divine forgiveness is the general tendency to feel forgiven by God for one’s sinful nature without referring to a particular event, while transgression-specific divine forgiveness is the feeling of having been forgiven for a specific sin or transgression (Fincham, 2022). Research on human forgiveness has shown that compared to dispositional forgiveness, transgression-specific forgiveness assessment is more susceptible to psychometric weaknesses because of recall biases and difficulties in controlling for the many factors affecting a specific offense, which obscures its association with religion (McCullough & Worthington, 1999; Tsang et al., 2005). Given that similar assessment issues are likely to occur with divine forgiveness, we decided to focus on the development and validation of a dispositional scale of divine forgiveness.

The need to develop a new psychometrically robust scale of dispositional divine forgiveness arises from several relevant limits of the few measures conceived thus far by nascent psychological research on divine forgiveness.

1. First, the existing measures are too brief and simplistic to capture the complexity of the construct, likely resulting in poor content validity.

2. Second, existing divine forgiveness measures have not been adequately validated.

3. Third, existing divine forgiveness measures were not created to assess divine forgiveness in different religions; therefore, they are unsuitable for comparisons across religions.