More spiritual than religious: Concurrent and longitudinal relations with personality traits, mystical experiences, and other individual characteristics.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2022 Zhuo Job Chen, Richard G Cowden, Heinz Streib 13 citations
People who identify as more spiritual than religious form a notable and growing segment in North America and Europe. Two complementary studies examined how four religious/spiritual self-identity groups—more religious than spiritual, more spiritual than religious, equally religious and spiritual, and neither religious nor spiritual—differ across sociodemographic traits, personality, well-being, generativity, mystical experiences, and religious schemata. Study 1, a cross-sectional analysis of 3,491 German and U.S. adults, and Study 2, a longitudinal analysis of 751 adults assessed about three years later, both found strong evidence that the more spiritual than religious group is particularly associated with mysticism.