BY: Dr. Lynne Taylor | March 22, 2025
I’ve long been curious about how and why people come to embrace (and remain in) the Christian faith. In a western context of declining church attendance and declining religious affiliation, some people – even among those who did not grow up in the church – choose to become Christians.
I explored this in my 2017 PhD thesis, by interviewing a small number of adult Australians who came from an unchurched background and had become Christians in the previous two years. One of the interesting findings was the match that existed between what the participants told me they liked about God and what they aspired to be more like themselves. They told me that they saw God as loving, powerful, patient, accepting and forgiving; and that they wanted to be more loving, patient, accepting and forgiving themselves. It was one finding among many – and one that I flagged for further investigation.
Space to Explore the (Possible) Connection
Fast forward a few years, and in 2023, I was delighted to be accepted as a Fellow on the University of Birmingham “New Perspectives on Social Psychology and Religious Cognition for Theologians” Fellowship. I am grateful for funding from the Fellowship (made possible by the John Templeton Foundation) that has enabled me to explore this possible connection further. I’ve used the funding to set aside some of my own time for this project and to employ a part-time research assistant: the fabulous Dr Jessica Bent. In our research, we’re working to better understand if there exists a relationship between people’s perceptions of God and their aspirations towards being better people.
A Gap in the Literature!
We started by looking for other work that makes the connection between people’s personal aspirations towards being a better person, and their god concepts and god images. We didn’t find much. At all. Which is, of course good and bad – good because it’s clearly a gap in the literature; and bad because we couldn’t find another study to replicate. But that’s OK! There was still lots to read and explore, from both psychology and theology.
The Imago Dei
A theology of imago Dei asserts that human persons are made in the image of God, to reflect God’s image or attributes. Defining who people inherently are, the imago Dei also impacts on both how we live and how we aspire to live. Theologian, Theodore Runyon called it a vocation, and a true destiny.[1] Those familiar with psychology might be hearing echoes of the ideal self…We sure did!
The Ideal Self – And a Little Michelangelo
Psychologist, Theresa DiDonato explains that “the ideal self encompasses the type of person an individual aspires to become: the constellation of behaviors, traits, and skills she wishes to acquire.”[2] The ideal self can motivate people towards a place where their actual self matches what they see as their ideal and ought self.
Achieving their ideal is not something that one can do alone. Some have compared others’ assistance in forming one’s ideal self to the sculptor Michelangelo, working to reveal the true artform from within a block of stone. While generally this connection is made to a romantic partner, some scholars, like Elaine Cheung and Wendi Gardner, extend the idea in relation to a community of sculptors who have different skills and emphases. We could readily see how belonging to a church that was made up of people who wanted to live according to their Christian values might also help move people towards ideal selves that were defined by those values. And we wondered if people who understood themselves to be in a relationship with God, and appreciated attributes of God, might aspire to an ideal self that is like God.
Investigating the Connection
We started data gathering with a questionnaire completed by recently baptised adult Christians (from Baptist Churches in New Zealand), in which we investigated if their God representations correlate with the attributes that they aspire to live out themselves.
We chose recently baptised adults because in Baptist churches, baptism signifies a personal commitment to Christianity and a desire for ongoing personal transformation. Those being baptised usually share a testimony beforehand where they describe why they have chosen to be baptised. Therefore, we figure that they will have recently considered the meaning and the implications of their faith. This made them an ideal sample, especially as we’re also interested in whether an aspiration-attribute match motivates faith formation.
We designed a questionnaire that asked what participants wanted to be more and less like, and what they appreciated about God. There was a combination of open-ended questions and other, quantifiable measures.
At the end of the questionnaire, we asked directly if “reflecting on what God is like” made them “want to be more like God.” They all said yes, it did; and all but one indicated that “reflecting on what God is like” made them “want to be a better person.” Unfortunately, we’d only ended up with a very small sample size (17 valid responses) so we couldn’t do any quantitative analyses. But the qualitative data was rich and confirmed our hypothesis…
They did want to be like God! In the open-ended questions about what they wanted to be more like, their responses (for instance, more graceful, less “for myself”, and less independent) matched the attributes of God they said they most appreciated (the same person said: God is graceful, Jesus is servant-like, Jesus is fatherly, God is friend). Each participant showed at least one match between their aspirations and the attributes of God they appreciated.
The matches fitted within twelve different categories: self-giving, active, Christ-like, loving, faithful, mental wellbeing, patient, generous, relational, authenticity, forgiving, and other spiritual. Of these different categories, matches were most prominent in the self-giving (self-control, humble, self-less, obedient) category.
What’s Next?
Because we didn’t get enough responses to statistically analyse the quantitative data in this first study, we refined and simplified the questionnaire and gathered more data from anyone aged over 18 who considers themselves to be of Christian faith. We expected that this general cohort may be less likely to have matching aspirations and appreciated attributes, but that they will still exist for most participants. We’re currently analysing this second dataset, and it looks like this is the case!
Why Are We Interested?
We hope that this research contributes to both theological and psychological theory, and helps churches and Christians understand how they can best support people towards flourishing. Churches can play a role in helping their congregation members healthily define what their ideal self is like, and then to support them towards those aspirations.
This blog is cross-posted on https://crosstrainingpsychologyandtheology.com/2025/03/22/blog-an-ideal-self-and-the-imago-dei/
