PROJECT: Development and Validation of a Negative Subscale of the Experience of Abandonment by God for the Study of Spiritual Crises among Practicing Orthodox Christians
FUNDING: The project is funded by St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University (PSTGU) and the Living Tradition Foundation for the period 2025–2026.
DURATION OF THE PROJECT: 2025 – 2026
PROJECT COORDINATOR: Vasily A. Tazin
ABOUT THE PROJECT
This project investigates the experience of abandonment by God among practicing Orthodox Christians and aims to develop a psychometric instrument for assessing its negative, crisis-related dimension.
Empirical research on religiosity has traditionally focused on the positive aspects of religious experience, including the perceived closeness of God, feelings of divine support, the strengthening of faith, prayer, and active participation in religious life. Nevertheless, the spiritual lives of believers may also include painful experiences such as abandonment by God, spiritual dryness, the apparent silence of God in prayer, inner emptiness, doubt, and the loss of previously experienced religious certainty.
Within the Orthodox Christian tradition, these experiences are regarded as an important yet complex aspect of spiritual life. They may be interpreted as spiritual trials that foster humility, patience, and spiritual maturity. At the same time, they may develop into profound spiritual crises accompanied by despair, anxiety, and depressive symptoms.
Despite the significance of these experiences, systematic empirical research within the Russian Orthodox context remains extremely limited. Existing instruments either assess religiosity as a general construct or primarily measure its positive dimensions. In particular, S. Glaz Abandonment by God Scale, originally developed in the Catholic context, measures experiences of divine abandonment but largely captures their adaptive aspects, such as maintaining hope, believing that the experience is temporary, searching for meaning, and trusting in the eventual return of God’s presence.
Negative manifestations of abandonment by God—including feelings of complete abandonment, spiritual disorientation, hopelessness, inability to pray, and fear of losing one’s faith—remain insufficiently represented in existing psychological and sociological instruments. Addressing this methodological gap constitutes the central objective of the present project.
The project is based on the assumption that the negative dimension of abandonment by God is not merely the absence of positive religious experience, but rather an independent construct representing a distinct aspect of spiritual crisis that requires separate conceptualization and measurement.
The primary objective of the study is to develop and validate a Negative Subscale of the Experience of Abandonment by God Scale, thereby extending the existing methodological tools available for research on religiosity and spiritual crises. To achieve this goal, the project includes a comprehensive psychometric evaluation of S. Glaz’s original scale, the development of new questionnaire items, expert assessment of their content validity, and empirical validation of the proposed negative subscale.
SEMINARS
Invited Participants: Elena V. Prutskova, Grigory I. Kopeyko, Olga A. Borisova, Anna G. Alekseeva, Valeriya Yelagina, Kirill Markin, Veniamin Lidsky, Vasily A. Tazin, Yuri Slastya, and Mikhail Baikov.
Seminar № 1. September 12, 2025
The Experience of Abandonment by God and Approaches to Its Measurement, Including S. Glaz’s Scale
Seminar № 2. December 24, 2025
The Ambiguous Relationship Between Religiosity, Anxiety, Depression, and Stress
Seminar № 3. April 28, 2026
Expert Evaluation of the Negative Subscale Items: Strategies and Challenges in the Empirical Validation of a Negative Measure of the Experience of Abandonment by God
Seminar № 4. May 24, 2026
Discussion of Project Outcomes: Manuscript Structure, Target Journals, and Strategies for Disseminating Research Finding
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