God Loves Me, This I Know: Demographic Variation in Belief in Divine Love & Punishment Across 22 Countries

Prior research documents beliefs about the benevolent and authoritarian attributes of God. However, most of the investigations of God representations have been conducted in Western contexts. Less is known about how the experience of Divine Love and Divine Punishment might differ across cultures and across demographic groups within those cultures. Consequently, this study presents an in-depth, descriptive, cross-national exploration of feeling loved by God and feeling punished by God across 22 countries and key demographic groups, including age, gender, marital status, employment status, religious service attendance, education, and immigration status. We found that participants felt loved by God to a far greater extent than being punished by God in every country and in every demographic category. Being mindful of potential interpretation challenges due to varying cultural contexts, our results suggest that recent theories in the psychology of religion may need updating, modification, or complementary theoretical explanations. This work also lays a foundation for longitudinal investigations into sociocultural antecedents and outcomes of belief in divine love and divine punishment.