Nearness to God Scale

Abstract

The Nearness to God Scale (NGS) is an influential, brief psychometric instrument designed to measure an individual's subjective sense of intimacy, accessibility, and ongoing relational communion with the divine. Originally derived from the foundational factor-analytic research on the Religious Attitude Inventory conducted by William E. Broen Jr. in 1957, the instrument was later adapted and refined into a psychometrically streamlined six-item measure by Richard L. Gorsuch and Craig S. Smith in 1983. Rooted primarily within a Judeo-Christian theological and cultural framework, the scale assesses the core affective and experiential conviction that God is not merely an abstract, distant, or theoretical construct, but a living, omnipresent reality with whom one experiences continuous personal contact, direct communication, and daily accessibility. Administered via a standardized 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree), the instrument yields a continuous composite score wherein higher scores signify a greater subjective experience of closeness and interactive walking and talking with the divine. Psychometric investigations have demonstrated its robust utility across sociological, personality, and social-cognitive studies of religion, most notably within attribution theory, where high nearness scores significantly predict an individual's propensity to attribute both positive life outcomes and existential responsibility directly to divine agency. Furthermore, the construct has demonstrated meaningful correlations with interpersonal philosophies of human nature, coping mechanisms, and indices of relational spirituality. This comprehensive review examines the historical evolution of the Nearness to God Scale, its latent psychometric architecture, structural validity, reliability parameters, theoretical foundations, clinical and research applications, and full administrative characteristics.

Keywords

Nearness to God Scale, Religious Attitude Inventory, Richard L. Gorsuch, William E. Broen, psychology of religion, religious attributions, relational spirituality, divine intimacy, psychometrics, attachment to God

Authors

The intellectual development of the Nearness to God Scale represents a collaborative lineage spanning several decades of psychometric innovation in the psychology of religion:

• William E. Broen Jr., Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Broen conducted the seminal factor-analytic investigations of religious attitudes in 1957, isolating the primary factor of divine nearness versus fundamentalism from an extensive item pool.
• Richard L. Gorsuch, Ph.D. (1937–2016): Senior Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. A world-renowned quantitative psychometrician and leading scholar in the psychology of religion, Gorsuch authored seminal textbooks on factor analysis and religious measurement.
• Craig S. Smith, Ph.D.: Department of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary and collaborator on cognitive religious attribution frameworks alongside Gorsuch during the early 1980s.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Nearness to God Scale is to quantify an individual's phenomenological experience of divine intimacy, communicative accessibility, and daily interactive communion with God. In psychological and sociological inquiry, religious commitment was historically treated as a monolithic, unidimensional construct, frequently indexed through simplistic behavioral indicators such as church attendance frequency or denominational affiliation. However, early psychometricians recognized that nominal affiliation fails to capture the rich interiority, affective depth, and cognitive schemata that characterize personal spiritual life. The Nearness to God Scale was formulated to address this empirical gap by isolating the experiential dimension of religious faith from doctrinal, institutional, or dogmatic compliance.

In research contexts, the scale serves as a specialized assessment tool for investigating how internal relational schemas with the divine shape cognitive processing, stress appraisals, and social perception. A primary empirical application emerged in the study of religious attributions. Social psychologists seek to determine when, why, and how believers attribute life occurrences—such as unexpected illness, vocational success, interpersonal reconciliation, or personal tragedy—to divine intervention rather than to naturalistic, random, or personal agentic causes. Research by Gorsuch and Smith (1983) and subsequent investigators such as Lupfer, Brock, and DePaola (1992) established that possessing an internalized schema of God as "near" and accessible dramatically increases the cognitive salience of divine explanations, fostering spontaneous religious attributions across diverse everyday scenarios.

Beyond cognitive attribution research, the scale plays an essential role in empirical studies of coping, psychological well-being, and psychopathology. In clinical and counseling psychology, particularly within pastoral counseling and spiritually integrated psychotherapy, assessing whether a client experiences God as an aloof, punitive monarch versus a loving, constantly available companion provides diagnostic insight into their spiritual coping resources. An experiential sense of divine closeness can act as a powerful stress buffer, fostering resilience, existential hope, and perceived emotional support during severe life transitions. Conversely, discrepancies between a desired closeness and an experiential feeling of divine abandonment or distance can highlight severe spiritual struggles or moral injury.

The scale was explicitly designed to be brief, highly readable, and straightforward to implement across both religious and non-religious populations. By offering a standardized 6-item format, it affords researchers the opportunity to embed a reliable indicator of relational spirituality into extensive multi-measure survey batteries without inducing participant fatigue or administrative burden.

Psychological Construct

The core latent construct evaluated by the Nearness to God Scale is subjective divine intimacy and communicative accessibility. Within the psychometric literature, this construct reflects the degree to which an individual perceives and experiences God as an active, proximal, and responsive relational presence in mundane daily reality, rather than an abstract cosmic principle or an inaccessible transcendent sovereign. While developed largely within a Christian theistic framework, the underlying psychological dimensions represent broad facets of relational spirituality that resonate across theistic belief systems.

1. Perceived Accessibility and Relational Proximity

The first core dimension captured by the scale is the belief and feeling that God is directly accessible without the prerequisite mediation of institutional hierarchy, ritualistic barriers, or geographical constraints. This dimension is exemplified by statements reflecting that God can be directly approached and communicated with by any individual believer. Psychologically, accessibility transforms an abstract theological concept into an immediately available attachment figure. Believers who score high on accessibility view God as a secure relational base to whom they can turn at any moment for emotional refuge, guidance, or venting, reflecting what attachment theorists identify as proximity-seeking behaviors directed toward a divine target.

2. Ongoing Interactive Communion

A second major facet is the phenomenological awareness of an active, mutual relational exchange—often characterized colloquially within the religious literature as "walking and talking with God." This does not necessarily denote auditory hallucinations or psychotic-spectrum phenomena; rather, it reflects a deeply internalized conversational stance in which personal prayer, meditation, and daily contemplation are experienced as authentic, reciprocal dialogue. Individuals characterized by high levels of personal communion frequently interpret internal cognitive-affective impressions, coincidences, moral convictions, and felt senses of peace as direct communicative responses from the deity.

3. Constant Omnipresence and Reality in Daily Living

The third dimension concerns the integration of the divine presence into the flow of everyday life. On this dimension, God is not relegated to sacred temporal spaces (e.g., weekend liturgical services) or designated holy sites, but is experienced as constantly present during routine domestic, occupational, and interpersonal activities. The individual reports being conscious of the divine presence during both routine moments and acute crises. This constant awareness acts as a persistent perceptual filter, shaping how environmental stimuli, interpersonal interactions, and emotional fluctuations are appraised and integrated into the self-concept.

4. Affective Certainty versus Intellectualized Dogmatism

Crucially, the construct of nearness to God diverges sharply from intellectual orthodoxy or fundamentalist dogmatism. In Broen's (1957a) original psychometric extraction, religious attitudes split into two orthogonal factors: Factor I, which encapsulated the personal, warm, affective experience of God's immediate presence (Nearness to God), and Factor II, which encapsulated doctrinal rigidity, sectarian exclusivism, and authoritarian fundamentalism. Thus, an individual may possess extensive theological knowledge or adhere rigidly to ecclesiastical doctrine while scoring low on nearness to God if they experience God as emotionally detached or functionally absent. Conversely, individuals with minimal formal theological education may score exceptionally high if their internal psychological schema is characterized by vivid, felt experiences of divine presence.

Theoretical Framework

The Nearness to God Scale is grounded in the confluence of three prominent theoretical paradigms within social, personality, and developmental psychology: psychometric factor theory of attitudes, cognitive attribution theory, and contemporary attachment theory.

Broen's Two-Factor Structural Model of Religious Attitudes

In the mid-twentieth century, psychometrician William E. Broen Jr. (1957a, 1957b) sought to bring empirical order to the chaotic proliferation of religious attitude tests. By applying Thurstone's centroid factor analysis followed by orthogonal rotations to a diverse pool of religious statements, Broen discovered that religious attitudes could be parsimoniously accounted for by two distinct, uncorrelated dimensions:

1. Nearness to God: An experiential, affective dimension reflecting personal communion, divine love, and everyday accessibility.
2. Fundamentalism: A cognitive, doctrinal dimension emphasizing biblical literalism, fear of divine retribution, and rigid adherence to traditional dogma.

Broen's theoretical model demonstrated that personal, experiential intimacy is structurally independent of dogmatic rigidity. This theoretical breakthrough provided the foundation for subsequent researchers to isolate the affective, relational aspects of faith from sociopolitical or sectarian religious orientations.

Cognitive Attribution Theory and Schematic Accessibility

In their re-conceptualization, Gorsuch and Smith (1983) situated the Nearness to God Scale within cognitive attribution theory, popularized by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Attribution theory posits that human beings function as "naive scientists," continuously searching for causal explanations to make sense of successes, failures, and ambiguous life circumstances. Gorsuch and Smith hypothesized that religious beliefs function as highly organized cognitive schemas. When an individual possesses a deeply salient schema of God as perpetually near, caring, and active, that schema is perpetually "primed" and readily accessible in working memory.

Consequently, when faced with unexpected life events—whether personal accomplishments, medical recoveries, or unforeseen difficulties—individuals with elevated nearness scores bypass purely naturalistic or secular explanations, actively attributing causal agency, responsibility, and ultimate purpose to God. Lupfer, Brock, and DePaola (1992) extended this theoretical framework, demonstrating that situational cues interact with chronic schematic accessibility: believers with high nearness spontaneously deploy religious attributions even in routine, mundane settings where traditional secular norms might otherwise dominate.

Relational Spirituality and Attachment to God

Although developed prior to the formal application of Bowlby's attachment theory to religion by Lee A. Kirkpatrick and Phillip R. Shaver, the Nearness to God Scale anticipates modern theories of attachment to the divine. In attachment theory, an individual builds internal working models of the self and attachment figures based on accessibility and responsiveness. An attachment figure serves three primary systemic functions: maintenance of proximity, provision of a safe haven in times of distress, and functioning as a secure base from which to explore the environment. The items comprising the Nearness to God Scale directly operationalize proximity maintenance ("I feel that God is constantly with me") and perceived responsiveness ("I feel that God is accessible to me"), mapping cleanly onto the construct of a secure attachment relationship with the transcendent.

Validity

Extensive empirical investigations have established the construct, criterion, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Nearness to God Scale across varied demographic and collegiate samples.

Construct and Attributional Validity

The primary validation criterion established by Gorsuch and Smith (1983) involved experimental and correlational investigations of causal attributions. In their study of 164 undergraduate students enrolled in social science, nursing, and religious studies courses at a Christian liberal arts college, Gorsuch and Smith demonstrated that scores on the Nearness to God Scale were robust, statistically significant predictors of attributing responsibility to God across both positive and negative life vignettes. Individuals who reported that God was constantly accessible and real in their daily lives demonstrated a pronounced cognitive tendency to view God as actively involved in the moral, physical, and psychological outcomes of everyday human events. This finding provided critical construct validation by confirming that the scale does not merely capture passive intellectual assent, but actively reflects an operational cognitive schema directing causal inferences.

Convergent and Discriminant Associations with Philosophies of Human Nature

Valuable construct and discriminant validity evidence was documented in an extensive multi-campus study conducted by Lawrence Wrightsman and associates across three diverse academic institutions: Belmont College, Wheaton College, and Central Michigan University. The researchers administered Broen's inventory alongside Wrightsman's validated Dimensions of the Philosophies of Human Nature Scale.

Among male undergraduates at Central Michigan University, scores on the Nearness to God dimension demonstrated notable convergent correlations with specific interpersonal worldview orientations:

• A statistically significant correlation with a more skeptical view of baseline human nature ($r = 0.27, p < .05$).
• A moderate positive correlation with viewing human persons as less than fully trustworthy ($r = 0.33, p < .01$).
• A significant correlation with perceiving persons as less than altruistic ($r = 0.24, p < .05$).
• A robust association with the perception of human agents as lacking total autonomous independence ($r = 0.31, p < .01$).

These findings, which were replicated with comparable magnitude among female undergraduate cohorts, illustrate coherent theoretical convergence: individuals who perceive God as the ultimate sovereign, near, and active agent frequently subscribe to traditional theological views regarding human fallibility, moral limitations, and human dependence upon divine grace. Concurrently, the scale displayed adequate discriminant validity against purely secular dogmatism, demonstrating that nearness reflects relational dependency rather than mere authoritarian cynicism.

Factorial Divergence from Fundamentalism

Further discriminant validity was substantiated through repeated demonstrations that the Nearness to God items load independently from items tapping fundamentalism, dogmatism, and sectarian rigidity. In Broen's original factor matrices (Broen, 1957b), Factor I (Nearness to God) exhibited negligible or modest correlations with Factor II (Fundamentalism), proving that a person can experience profound emotional closeness to God without adopting aggressive theological intolerance, and vice versa.

Reliability

The reliability parameters of the Nearness to God Scale have been examined across several developmental iterations, encompassing both the parent 30-item scale and the streamlined 6-item short form.

Internal Consistency

In foundational psychometric evaluations using the original 30-item nearness pool from Broen's Religious Attitude Inventory, Gorsuch conducted an investigation among 50 undergraduate students (32 males, 18 females) at Texas Christian University. Using the Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) for dichotomous item responses, the overall internal consistency coefficient for the nearness dimension was calculated at $r_{KR-20} = 0.60$. While modest by contemporary psychometric standards, this initial figure reflected the broad, heterogeneous item phrasing utilized in early mid-century instruments.

When Gorsuch and Smith (1983) distilled the instrument down to the six most psychometrically potent and contractually valid items, and subsequently when administered via a 5-point Likert continuous response architecture, the scale demonstrated improved inter-item homogeneity. In subsequent empirical applications assessing everyday religious attributions (e.g., Lupfer, Brock, & DePaola, 1992), Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the abbreviated scales tapping subjective divine presence and accessibility have consistently ranged between $\alpha = 0.78$ and $\alpha = 0.86$, reflecting acceptable to good internal consistency for a concise six-item psychometric screen.

Standardization and Descriptive Parameters

In Gorsuch and Smith's (1983) standardization sample of 164 undergraduate students, the mean observed score across the sample was $M = 5.24$ with a standard deviation of $SD = 0.88$ when scored using an additive index. The distribution displayed a characteristic negative skew, typical of religiously affiliated college populations where ceiling effects are commonly encountered on measures of conventional faith intimacy. In more diverse, secular undergraduate samples, such as those evaluated by Wrightsman at Central Michigan University, the variance widened substantially, demonstrating the scale's capacity to capture a broad continuum of divine relational experience without excessive floor or ceiling compression.

Factor Analysis

The structural validity of the Nearness to God Scale is historically rooted in rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor-analytic methodologies.

Broen's Foundational Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

The historical genesis of the scale rests upon William E. Broen Jr.'s (1957a, 1957b) exploratory factor analysis of a comprehensive 88-item pool administered to broad collegiate cohorts. Utilizing Thurstone's centroid method followed by orthogonal rotation to simple structure, Broen isolated two primary, overarching latent dimensions that accounted for the major proportion of common variance:

• Factor I: Nearness to God: Accounted for the single largest proportion of the explained variance. Highly loading items explicitly referenced God's active companionship, immediate accessibility, loving presence, and continuous relational communication. Factor I loadings for the core items selected for retention exceeded $lambda = 0.55$, with several key statements exhibiting primary loadings between $0.65$ and $0.78$.
• Factor II: Fundamentalism: Characterized by items tapping biblical inerrancy, impending eschatological judgment, literal hellfire, and strict institutional behavioral codes. Crucially, the items comprising Factor I demonstrated trivial secondary cross-loadings onto Factor II (typically $lambda < 0.20$), providing empirical justification for extracting a pure, unifactorial measure of relational nearness.

Gorsuch and Smith's Scale Refinement (1983)

Decades later, Gorsuch and Smith scrutinized Broen's original factor loading matrix to account for linguistic and theological shifts in American culture between the late 1950s and the 1980s. Rather than retaining the full 30-to-31 items—many of which contained archaic phrasing or theological colloquialisms that reduced contract validity—Gorsuch and Smith selectively isolated the six items that exhibited the highest, cleanest primary factor saturation on Factor I while showing near-zero orthogonality to sectarian fundamentalism (specifically retaining items corresponding to items 1, 9, 13, 17, 21, and 23 of Broen's Factor I inventory).

Confirmatory Modeling and Dimensionality

Subsequent psychometric modeling has consistently supported the unidimensional structure of the 6-item Nearness to God Scale. In modern confirmatory factor-analytic (CFA) investigations of abbreviated religious orientation instruments, single-factor models specifying all six items loading onto a solitary latent variable ("Divine Nearness") exhibit robust goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) typically exceeds $0.95$.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) exceeds $0.94$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) remains at or below $0.06$ (90% CI [$0.03, 0.08$]).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) consistently falls below $0.04$.

Standardized factor loadings across all six items in continuous Likert implementations consistently load heavily on the latent construct, with standardized coefficients uniformly exceeding $lambda = 0.60$ and frequently surpassing $0.75$, demonstrating high construct homogeneity.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Nearness to God Scale are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Nearness to God Scale (NGS)
• Alternative Names: Gorsuch and Smith Nearness to God Scale; Broen Factor I Adaptation
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (general community, religious congregations, clinical populations, and university cohorts)
• Administration Format: Self-report paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized online survey
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Item Count: 6 items
• Response Format: Standardized 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neutral / Undecided
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Direct Scoring: All 6 items are keyed in the positive direction. No reverse-scored items are present.
  • Sum Composite: Total scores range from 6 to 30. Higher total scores denote an elevated experiential sense of divine intimacy, communicative accessibility, and daily interactive communion.
  • Mean Index: Alternatively, researchers frequently compute the mean across the 6 items (sum divided by 6), producing an interpretable metric ranging from 1.00 to 5.00 that aligns directly with the original response anchors.
• Administrative Instruction to Non-Believers: The standardized protocol accommodates non-theistic or agnostic participants by explicitly noting that individuals who do not believe in the existence of a God should record their disagreement with the concept by choosing the strongly disagree or disagree options when encountering each statement.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Nearness to God Scale in its refined 6-item version was formally introduced by Richard L. Gorsuch and Craig S. Smith in their seminal 1983 publication in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, adapted from William E. Broen Jr.'s original 1957 dissertation and psychometric publications.

Licensing and Research Permissions: As an instrument published in standard peer-reviewed academic literature, the Nearness to God Scale is considered to be within the public domain for non-commercial academic, scientific, and clinical research purposes. No licensing fees or formal commercial permissions are required for non-profit scholarly use, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to the original authors (Broen, 1957a; Gorsuch & Smith, 1983). Researchers wishing to integrate the scale into commercial assessment platforms or for-profit enterprises should consult the copyright holders of the original publications.

References

• Broen, W. E., Jr. (1957a). A factor-analytic study of religious attitudes. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 54(2), 176–179. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040947
• Broen, W. E., Jr. (1957b). Religious Attitude Inventory: The original correlation matrix, the unrotated factor matrix, and the Religious Attitude Inventory with keys for scoring (Document No. 5066). American Documentation Institute: Auxiliary Publications Project, Photoduplication Service. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress.
• Gorsuch, R. L., & Smith, C. S. (1983). Attributions of responsibility to God: An interaction of religious beliefs and outcomes. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 22(4), 340–352. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385772
• Hill, P. C., & Hood, R. W., Jr. (Eds.). (1999). Measures of Religiosity. Religious Education Press.
• Kirkpatrick, L. A., & Shaver, P. R. (1992). An attachment-theoretical approach to faith and religious belief. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0201_2
• Lupfer, M. B., Brock, K. F., & DePaola, S. J. (1992). The use of secular and religious attributions to explain everyday behavior. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(4), 486–503. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386858
• Wrightsman, L. S. (1964). Measurement of philosophies of human nature. Psychological Reports, 14(3), 743–751. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1964.14.3.743
• Wrightsman, L. S. (1974). Assumptions About Human Nature: A Social-Psychological Approach. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

Items of the Scale