Spiritual Surrender

Suffering is part of the human condition, and people often turn to their faith to make sense of this experience. Active religious coping has been related to positive psychological outcomes in individuals facing adversity. However, not all sources of suffering can be resolved. Spiritual surrender is one form of religious coping relevant in these unresolvable situations and has been studied in the areas of addiction, grief and loss, and illness related trauma. Despite the importance of this religious coping practice and its positive impact on wellbeing, spiritual surrender is rarely examined and has been quantified with mixed results. We propose an emic, Christian, conceptualization of spiritual surrender that integrates theological perspectives with religious coping scholarship; then we present three studies describing the development of a new measure. With these studies, we establish and confirm the factor structure of the Christian Spiritual Surrender Scale and evaluate its construct validity in online samples of Christians who indicated they experienced suffering. Moderation analyses indicated that spiritual surrender ameliorated the negative relationship between severity of the negative life event and one’s satisfaction with life, but not the relationship to one’s positive or negative feelings. We conclude that Christian spiritual surrender represents a unique and distinct religious coping practice that has not been robustly captured in previous measures and is associated with well-being in the face of adversity.