Development and Validation of the Where-being of God Scale

The nature and attributes of God1 have been the subject of much research over the past 50 years. However, there has been insufficient research on individuals’ diverse beliefs about the location of the person or presence of God (or the Divine)—a concept we refer to as the Where-being of God. Here, we report on the development and validation of a measure of U.S. Christians’ and SBNRs’ representations of the Where-being of God: Transcendent, Internal (Immanent and Indwelling), Emergent, and Sacramental. Generally, Christians scored higher than SBNRs on Transcendent, Evangelicals scored higher on Internal, Catholics scored higher on Sacramental, and Catholics and SBNRs scored higher on Emergent compared with the other groups. However, each representation was differentially predicted by individual differences in existing measures of religion and spirituality, and differentially correlated with various character strengths, ethical frameworks, and conditions for obtaining God’s forgiveness. More research is needed to investigate the generalizability of our findings and, possibly, to expand our novel Where-being measure to include other conceptualizations of the location of the presence of the Divine.