 33. Personality and Religion  711
remaining faithful to the family’s religious 
systems. It is also possible that agreeable 
people are more amenable to maintaining a 
religious faith in part out of an earnest desire 
to maintain positive relations with God or to 
be involved in a value system that promotes 
kindness, altruism, forgiveness, and love.
Although much of the theorizing about the 
dynamics of the personality–  religiousness 
associations has focused on how certain 
traits might influence people’s religiousness, 
the causal direction of these relationships 
remains an area of further inquiry. Several 
longitudinal studies in the United States 
and Australia support the premise that 
personality traits chronologically precede 
religiousness rather than religiousness pre -
ceding traits (Heaven & Ciarrocchi, 2007; 
McCullough, Enders, Brion, & Jain, 2005; 
McCullough, Tsang, & Brion, 2003; Wink, 
Ciciolla, Dillon, & Tracy, 2007). These stud -
ies support the view that religion provides a 
characteristic way of expressing basic ten -
dencies. However, socialization is still im -
portant, as religiousness may be a product 
of not only gene × environment interactions 
but also gene × environment correlation 
(e.g., assortative mating on religious similar -
ity; Koenig, McGue, Krueger, & Bouchard, 
2005). Additionally, some studies find that 
religious values predict subsequent changes 
in personality traits (Huuskes, Ciarrochi, & 
Heaven, 2013).
Ultimate Concerns . Another way to 
conceptualize personality and religion is 
in terms of goals or strivings, or what Em -
mons, Cheung, and Tehrani (1998) have 
called “ultimate concerns.” Emmons (1999), 
following Tillich (1957), among others, ar -
gued that both religion and spirituality deal 
with ultimate concerns of people and devel -
oped a research program to identify ultimate 
concerns and their role in human personal -
ity and subjective well-being. Religions, as 
authoritative faith traditions, are systems of 
information that provide individuals with 
knowledge and resources for living a life of 
purpose and direction. Religion and goals 
are intertwined in human experience. One 
of the functions of a religious belief sys -
tem and a religious worldview is to provide 
“an ultimate vision of what people should 
be striving for in their lives” (Pargament & Park, 1995, p. 15) and the strategies to 
reach those ends. Religions recommend the 
ultimate goal of binding with the sacred and 
prescribe rituals for its realization. Emmons 
et al. (1998) found that it is not only possible 
to reliably assess the search for the sacred 
in personal goals, but that individual dif -
ferences in sacred goals also predict wellbe -
ing more strongly than any other category 
of striving that has been studied, exceeding 
those for intimacy, power, or generativity 
goals.
Sanctification of Goals.  In addition to 
maintaining explicitly spiritual goals, peo -
ple also imbue their daily goals with sacred 
or spiritual meaning (Emmons & Schnit -
ker, 2013). For example, a man may imbue 
his goals to be a good parent and husband 
with sacred qualities and transcendent sig -
nificance. Mahoney and Pargament (2005) 
found that people pursue sanctified goals 
with greater effort, derive greater meaning 
from them, and perceive greater social sup -
port for their achievement. Sanctification of 
goals and activities often leads to better goal 
outcomes, as well as decreased anxiety, de -
pression, and hostility (Tix & Frazer, 1998). 
For example, sanctification of marriage 
predicted self-  reported marital satisfaction 
(Stafford, David, & McPherson, 2013), as 
well as observed positive marital interactions 
across the transition to parenthood (Kusner, 
Mahoney, Pargament, & DeMaris, 2014). 
Similarly, sanctification of sexuality led to 
higher levels of marital, sexual, and inti -
macy satisfaction in newlyweds (Hernandez, 
Mahoney, & Pargament, 2011), and nonthe -
istic sanctification of parenting was related 
to higher parent–  child relational quality 
(Brelsford, 2013). However, when people 
fail in regard to their sanctified goals, they 
experience greater decrements in well-being 
(e.g., poorer psychological and physical well-
being after the loss of a sanctified romantic 
relationship; Pargament, Magyar, Benore, & 
Mahoney, 2005). Thus, goal sanctification 
tends to magnify the well-being effects of 
both goal failure and achievement.
Religion and  Narrative  Identity
Not only are religiousness and spirituality 
expressed at the level of personality traits 