Sources

Everything the God-Image research rests on.

The research page makes eight claims about what the psychology of religion has actually found. Each one is below with the paper it came from, what that paper did, and a link you can follow without going through me. Where a claim is mine rather than the paper’s, it says so in plain words. That distinction is the only thing on this page that matters.

One claim on this site is mine, not theirs.

“Seventy-three instruments, and not one asks.” Sharp and colleagues catalogued and critiqued seventy-three measures of God representation. Their paper does not report that none of them asks about the gender of God — that count is mine, made by going through their list. Cite them for the seventy-three. Cite me for what is missing from it, and hold me to it.

A parts list is evidence of what a builder stocked. It is not evidence of what they thought they were building.

The claim

How a person pictures God predicts their psychological functioning more strongly than how religious they are.

A meta-analysis pooling 123 samples from 112 primary studies — 348 effect sizes, 29,963 adolescent and adult participants. Open access.

Stulp, H. P., Koelen, J., Schep-Akkerman, A., Glas, G. G., & Eurelings-Bontekoe, L. (2019). God representations and aspects of psychological functioning: A meta-analysis. Cogent Psychology, 6(1), 1647926.
doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2019.1647926

The claim

Seventy-three separate instruments have been built to measure how people represent God — three decades of instrument design.

55 self-report measures, 7 performance-based, 4 structured interview, 7 implicit. See the flag above for what this paper does not say.

Sharp, C. A., Davis, E. B., George, K., Cuthbert, A. D., Zahl, B. P., Davis, D. E., Hook, J. N., & Aten, J. D. (2021). Measures of God representations: Theoretical framework and critical review. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 13(3), 340–357.
doi.org/10.1037/rel0000257

The claim

A punitive God-image tracks with more anxiety, social anxiety, paranoia and obsessive symptoms. A benevolent one, with fewer.

Survey of American adults, N = 1,426.

Silton, N. R., Flannelly, K. J., Galek, K., & Ellison, C. G. (2014). Beliefs about God and mental health among American adults. Journal of Religion and Health, 53(5), 1285–1296.
doi.org/10.1007/s10943-013-9712-3

The claim

For people who experience God as remote, praying more is associated with worse mental health, not better.

Online survey of U.S. adults, N = 1,629. The association reverses for people who experience God as close: there, more prayer tracks with fewer symptoms. The direction depends on who they think is listening.

Bradshaw, M., Ellison, C. G., & Flannelly, K. J. (2008). Prayer, God imagery, and symptoms of psychopathology. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47(4), 644–659.
doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2008.00432.x

The claim

Believers were measurably slower and less accurate when required to affirm that the Spirit has no body.

Reaction-time experiments. Stated theology and underlying intuition come apart under time pressure — the intuition about a person with a body is still running underneath the doctrine.

Barlev, M., Mermelstein, S., Cohen, A. B., & German, T. C. (2019). The embodied God: Core intuitions about person physicality coexist and interfere with acquired Christian beliefs about God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus. Cognitive Science, 43(9), e12784.
doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12784

The claim

People affirm an abstract theology and then, in the act of understanding a story, convert it back into a person.

The original demonstration of the split between what people say God is and what they picture when they have to follow a narrative.

Barrett, J. L., & Keil, F. C. (1996). Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology, 31(3), 219–247.
doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1996.0017

The claim

Loneliness increases belief in personal divine agents rather than decreasing it.

A three-factor theory of when and why people attribute a mind to something that has not got one.

Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886.
doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.864

The claim

The one instrument that does ask about gendered God imagery has been used once — to study attitudes about mothers working.

Not a criticism of the study, which does what it set out to do. The point is the size of the literature beside it.

Shah, S. A., Bartkowski, J. P., & Xu, X. (2016). Gendered God imagery and attitudes toward mothers’ labor force participation: Examining the transposable character of religious schemas. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 55(3), 540–557.
doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12279

How to check this.

Every line above carries a DOI. Paste it after https://doi.org/ and it resolves to the publisher’s record of that exact paper — not to a summary, not to a blog, and not to me. Two of these are open access and open in full. The rest will show you the abstract, the sample size and the authors, which is enough to tell whether I have represented them fairly; a public library or a university account will get you the rest.

If I have a paper wrong — the number, the finding, the direction of an effect — tell me and I will correct it here with the correction visible, not quietly.

A citation you cannot follow is decoration. The point of naming a source is that somebody can go and disagree with me using it.

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