Estimated reading time: 10–12 minutes

What You Will Learn

• How spirituality is understood within the VIA Classification of Character Strengths.
• How spirituality can relate to religion without being identical to religious affiliation.
• Why spirituality, meaning, gratitude, awe, and hope are related but distinct concepts.
• What research suggests about spirituality and psychological well-being.
• Why spiritual beliefs can support some people during adversity without eliminating distress.
• How spirituality may interact with other VIA character strengths.
• How to explore spirituality without assuming that one form of belief or practice suits everyone.

What Is Spirituality?

Within the VIA Classification of Character Strengths, spirituality is one of 24 character strengths and is conceptually grouped under the virtue of Transcendence. In the original classification, spirituality concerns coherent beliefs about higher purpose, meaning, and one's place within a larger scheme. Depending on the person, this may involve religious faith, a sense of sacredness, existential beliefs, connection with humanity, or a broader understanding of life and purpose. Such beliefs can influence what someone finds meaningful and how they understand their place in life.

Spirituality is also not a fixed identity category. A person can express all 24 VIA strengths to varying degrees, and a lower score in spirituality does not indicate a deficiency in meaning, morality, or depth. Someone may find profound purpose in relationships, creativity, justice, scientific inquiry, caregiving, or community without identifying as spiritual. Conversely, a person who places spirituality high in their strengths profile may still experience doubt, conflict, uncertainty, or periods when spiritual beliefs feel less accessible.

The VIA construct also overlaps with other psychological concepts without being identical to them. Meaning in life, purpose, religiosity, spiritual well-being, transcendence, and existential orientation are related but distinct constructs. A person can have a strong sense of purpose without spiritual belief, just as someone can describe themselves as spiritual while struggling with meaning or direction. Maintaining these distinctions matters because research findings about one construct should not automatically be attributed to another.

Spirituality and Religion: Related but Not Identical

Religion and spirituality frequently overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Religion usually includes organized systems of beliefs, practices, rituals, traditions, communities, and institutions. Spirituality can exist within those systems, but it can also refer more broadly to experiences of transcendence, sacredness, existential meaning, or connection beyond the individual self. For many people, religion provides a powerful structure through which spirituality is experienced. Prayer, scripture, communal worship, ritual, moral teachings, pilgrimage, and religious community can provide continuity, identity, belonging, and interpretive frameworks for important life events. These elements may become especially significant during illness, grief, family transitions, or uncertainty.

Others may locate spiritual experience outside organized religion. They may describe moments in nature, contemplation, art, philosophy, service, or connection with humanity as spiritually significant. These experiences should not automatically be equated with religion, nor should every reflective or meaningful experience be labeled spiritual if the person would not describe it that way. This distinction is important because spirituality is personal and culturally embedded. Psychological frameworks should not impose a spiritual interpretation on someone who does not use that language. Nor should they treat religious belief as merely one psychological technique among many. For believers, faith may be a central worldview, identity, and relationship with the sacred rather than simply a tool for reducing stress or improving well-being.

What Research Can and Cannot Say About Spirituality and Well-Being

Research on spirituality uses different definitions and measures, so it helps to ask exactly what a study examined. A 2024 meta-analysis by Annette Bouwhuis-Van Keulen and colleagues compared religiously or spiritually integrated therapies with standard treatments in mental health care. Its findings favored the integrated approaches on some outcomes, but the research concerns therapeutic programs with particular participants and settings. It does not establish that increasing a VIA spirituality score produces the same effects, or that spiritual practice is a substitute for appropriate care.

These findings should not be simplified into the claim that spirituality makes people mentally healthier. Religious and spiritual experiences can be supportive, neutral, or distressing. Some people experience spiritual struggle, guilt, fear, alienation from a religious community, conflict about beliefs, or a sense of abandonment by the sacred. The psychological effects depend on the form spirituality takes, the person's interpretation, their community, the circumstances, and many other factors. Research also cannot easily separate spirituality from factors such as social support, worldview, cultural belonging, meaning, routine, or community participation. A religious community, for example, may provide emotional support and practical assistance, while religious belief may provide a framework for interpreting hardship. These pathways are different, even though they may occur together.

Spirituality, Meaning, and Purpose

Meaning is central to many forms of spirituality, but the concepts are distinct. Frank Martela and Michael Steger distinguish three aspects of meaning in life: coherence, the sense that life makes sense; purpose, having valued aims and direction; and significance, feeling that life has worth. This is a conceptual framework for understanding meaning, rather than a test of spiritual maturity. Family, work, creativity, service, culture, or faith can all provide contexts in which people experience these dimensions. Spirituality may provide one framework through which meaning is understood. Religious traditions may offer narratives about human existence, moral responsibility, suffering, death, community, and ultimate purpose. Nonreligious forms of spirituality may emphasize connection with nature, humanity, consciousness, or values that extend beyond individual achievement.

For some people, these frameworks help organize experience. They can provide language for asking questions such as: What matters most to me? What responsibilities do I have toward others? What gives my life continuity when circumstances change? How do I understand experiences that are beyond my control? Such questions may deepen reflection even when they do not lead to simple answers.

Meaning should not, however, become another demand placed on people during hardship. Someone who is grieving, traumatized, or overwhelmed does not need to discover a lesson, purpose, or spiritual message in what happened. Meaning may emerge later, or it may not. Recovery, survival, grieving, and rebuilding can all be legitimate outcomes without requiring personal transformation.

Spirituality During Adversity

Spiritual beliefs and practices can become especially important during adversity because they may offer continuity when circumstances feel unstable. Some people turn to prayer, religious community, meditation, ritual, sacred texts, spiritual counsel, or contemplation. Others draw on beliefs about hope, human dignity, interconnectedness, or a larger purpose. Research on meaning making, including Crystal Park's integrative review, distinguishes trying to understand an event from arriving at an understanding that helps someone live with it. Repeatedly searching for a reason is not automatically beneficial. A person may need time, companionship, practical assistance, or room to grieve before reflective questions feel useful. Spirituality can offer resources within that process without eliminating fear, anger, or uncertainty.

Spiritual struggle is also real. A person may ask why suffering occurred, feel abandoned by God, question previously stable beliefs, or experience tension with a religious community. Such struggles are not evidence of weak character or failed spirituality. They can be part of the lived experience of belief, especially during periods when previous assumptions no longer fit what has happened.

Awe, Gratitude, and Spiritual Experience

Awe, gratitude, and spirituality can occur together, but they describe different things. Awe is an emotion that may arise when an experience feels vast or challenges your usual understanding; it is not itself one of the 24 VIA strengths. Appreciation of beauty and excellence is the related VIA strength, while gratitude is a separate strength concerned with recognizing and appreciating what has been received. A person can feel awe in nature or gratitude toward a friend without interpreting either experience spiritually.

For someone else, the same experiences may be deeply connected with faith or a sense of the sacred. Prayer may combine gratitude, hope, and spiritual commitment, while a work of art may invite appreciation without any spiritual interpretation. The person's own understanding matters more than the label an observer assigns. Keeping these distinctions clear lets spirituality retain its meaning without using it to explain every moving or positive experience.

Exploring Spirituality in Everyday Life

Exploring spirituality can begin with what already feels meaningful to you. There is no single practice that fits every worldview, and these suggestions are opportunities for reflection rather than a proven program for increasing a VIA score. Choose a form of attention or participation that you can approach honestly. You may prefer a familiar religious practice, a conversation, a quiet walk, or writing about an important commitment. A useful starting point is reflection on meaning rather than a prescribed spiritual activity. Ask where you experience connection, significance, or a sense that life extends beyond immediate tasks and achievements. For a religious person, the answer may involve prayer, worship, scripture, or service within a faith community. For someone else, it may involve nature, philosophical reflection, family traditions, art, or contribution to others.

It can also be useful to examine whether your beliefs are supporting or constraining you. Do they help you relate to uncertainty with greater depth, or do they create pressure to interpret every hardship positively? Do they encourage compassion while allowing appropriate boundaries? Do they provide belonging, or are there areas of conflict that deserve attention? Spiritual reflection becomes more psychologically useful when it allows complexity rather than requiring certainty.

Finally, spirituality does not need to be optimized. There is no requirement to make every moment meaningful, search constantly for transcendence, or turn difficult experiences into spiritual lessons. Sometimes meaning emerges quietly through ordinary commitments, relationships, rituals, and moments of attention. Sometimes spiritual life includes silence, doubt, ambiguity, and unanswered questions.

Spirituality and Other Character Strengths

Within the VIA framework, spirituality may interact with other strengths, but these relationships should not be described as automatic. Hope, gratitude, kindness, love, humility, perspective, and appreciation of beauty may appear alongside spiritual experience, yet each remains a separate strength with its own definition. For example, spirituality and hope may both shape how someone understands the future, but hope concerns expectations and pathways toward desired outcomes rather than spiritual belief itself. Gratitude may be expressed through prayer, but gratitude can also occur without religion. Perspective may help someone place personal difficulties within a broader context, while humility may encourage openness to limits in one's own understanding.

Different strengths may also moderate one another. Spiritual conviction combined with humility may leave more room for uncertainty and dialogue. Spiritual commitment combined with kindness may shape service toward others. Judgment may help someone examine whether a belief or practice is serving them well. These combinations are useful as reflective possibilities rather than fixed psychological formulas.

Underuse, Overuse, and Optimal Use

Underuse may mean neglecting a source of meaning that you personally value, or repeatedly making choices disconnected from your stated convictions. It should not be inferred from someone's religion, lack of religion, or lower VIA ranking. Overuse can appear when a spiritual explanation is imposed on every difficulty, uncertainty is treated as failure, or beliefs are used to dismiss another person's suffering. These are ways of applying a strength that deserve reflection, rather than diagnoses of someone's faith.

Optimal use gives valued beliefs a place in daily conduct while allowing questions, practical responsibility, and respect for others. Someone might draw comfort from prayer and also ask for concrete help with a demanding situation. They might express a conviction clearly while listening to a person whose worldview differs. Humility can leave room for limits in understanding, and kindness can guide how beliefs affect other people. A useful question is whether your practice helps you live your values with greater care and honesty.

Giving Meaning a Place in Ordinary Life

Choose one commitment that reflects what you believe matters, and consider how to express it in an ordinary action this week. You might make time for prayer, keep a promise, visit someone who feels isolated, or return to a question you have avoided. Notice whether the action helps your values become more visible in how you live. You do not need an extraordinary feeling or a complete explanation of life's difficulties for the action to matter. Spirituality, for those who value it, can include patient attention to meaning as well as conviction, ritual, and unanswered questions.

References

• Bouwhuis-Van Keulen, A. J., Koelen, J., Eurelings-Bontekoe, L., Hoekstra-Oomen, C., & Glas, G. (2024). The evaluation of religious and spirituality-based therapy compared to standard treatment in mental health care: A multi-level meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Psychotherapy Research, 34(3), 339–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2023.2241626
• Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2015.1137623
• Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301
• Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Oxford University Press.
• VIA Institute on Character. (n.d.). Spirituality. https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths/spirituality