Spirituality and psychological well-being: an attention to the agnostics and undecided

This chapter analyzes the relationship between spirituality and psychological well-being. We focused on agnostics and undecided people who lie between theists as certain believers and atheists as certain non-believers. Agnostics are defined as people who consciously suspend any judgment on the existence of God as an entity outside of the experimental verification and declare as “unknowable” everything that cannot be submitted to an empirical observation. Undecided people are defined as persons who declare that they are unsure if God exist. Both agnostics and undecided people have been overlooked by previous research that has mainly focused on theists or atheists, who might represent the extremes of a continuum of spirituality. Such a categorization does not consider existential certainty and uncertainty and their consequences for a person’s mental well-being. Our research question was: do the agnostics and the undecided report lower levels of psychological well-being compared to theists and atheists? We collected data of more than 1,000 participants from the general population (male and female). Our findings indicated that agnostics and undecided people reported significantly lower levels of happiness and perceived mental well-being than both theists and atheists, independent of gender and age. We cannot draw firm conclusions regarding the cause of the differences found because our study had a cross-sectional and non-longitudinal design. However, existential uncertainty seems to play a role in a person’s perception of psychological well-being.