When people pray to God, do they believe that God is actually listening to their prayers? Some people do, and they might even believe that God goes a step further, providing guidance or trying to speak to them. In other cases, though, people might experience God as being silent: not speaking to them and perhaps not even paying attention or hearing their prayers. Our aim in this project was to develop a brief (8-item) measure of people’s perceptions of divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. We also performed initial validity tests in an undergraduate sample. Results suggested that this new, brief measure showed good, though preliminary evidence of reliability and validity. The measure predicts variables related to relational quality with God and divine struggle, even when controlling for other variables related to how people see and relate to God.

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Exline, J. J., Wilt, J. A., Harriott, V. A., Pargament, K. I., & Hall, T. W. (2021). Is God listening to my prayers? Initial validation of a brief measure of perceived divine engagement and disengagement in response to prayer. Religions, 12(2), 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12020080