Experiential comforting faith among Christian college students: Associations with private religious practices, forgiveness, and religion as quest

The purpose of this study was to explore how Christian spiritual disciplines (i.e. private religious practices) such as prayer, scripture reading, meditation, and forgiveness are related to experiential comforting faith and the role of religion as quest (i.e. positively valuing doubt, openness to questioning and change, etc.) as a moderator in those relationships. It was anticipated that the private religious practices would be positively related to comfort from faith. No hypotheses were put forth regarding religion as quest as a moderator. The sample consisted of college students ( N = 165) at a large southeastern university in the USA, who completed an online survey. A series of multiple regressions revealed that private religious practices and forgiveness were positively related to experiential comfort from faith. Religion as quest was negatively related to experiential comfort from faith as an individual predictor but did not significantly moderate the regression analyses. The implications include the power of forgiveness across three entities on the experience of comfort from faith and the collective predictive power of forgiveness and private religious practices on comfort received from faith while considering the influence of religion as quest. Future research should consider more comprehensive measures of religion as quest, as well as samples of individuals who engage in private religious practices more frequently.