Music and Spiritual Experience in Christian Worship: The Covid-19 Effect - Sarah Moerman

Summary:

In responding to the practical (and highly contested) issues about the role, function, power, and kind of music appropriate for Christian worship, theologians and musicologists have historically tended to rely on theoretical and abstract reasoning about music and its spiritual effects. By contrast, this project will investigate the specific research question: What is actually happening when people sing, or listen, to music in Christian worship, and how this actually affects their perception of spiritual experience. The recent Covid-19 pandemic offers a unique historical opportunity to investigate this fundamental question in a short-term experimental research project that seeks, initially, to explore the potential cognitive effects of the removal or lack of music-making in a religious community or context. Testing new empirical methodologies developed in the recently completed Templeton Religion Trust-funded project The Most Spiritual of the Arts: An Empirical Approach to the Relationship between Music and Spiritual Realities (ended 30 November 2023), this proposed programme has the twofold aim of (1) Establishing how different types, forms, and contexts of music and ‘musicking’ can afford emotional, cognitive, and spiritual experiences in worship by analysing qualitative data collected from this previous study, and (2) Building a complex picture that understands empirically the ‘spiritual effects’ and ‘dispositional effects’ of different kinds of music in Christian worship. With regard to the aims of the Cross-Training Fellowship Programme, the questions this project will address align with the questions posited by the Fellowship theme, specifically, by determining how spiritual maturity can develop and flourish, especially in rebuilding after the pandemic, and by investigating how participating in music-making can contribute to spiritual development and individual flourishing. Initial observations of the data indicate that there was a stated need to be able to both memorialize and construct meaning from experiences of Christian worship during the pandemic.  

Therefore, the project activities will be focussed largely on (1) Analysis of qualitative data, first undergoing training in particular software, then transcribing and analysing data from eighteen interviews. Further activities will include (2) A literature review of psychological research in musicking in a Christian worship context,  (3) A synthesis of the literature review, results from the initial Most Spiritual of the Arts project, and analysed results from this project, and (4) Construction of potential hypotheses generated by this research for a follow-on grant proposal. The main outputs of this research project will be (1) a peer-reviewed article for an academic journal, (2) a presentation of results and generated hypotheses at a conference, and (3) a grant proposal to test the generated hypotheses. 

As anticipated outcomes, I hope, therefore, to make a significant contribution to (a) the broader investigation of the arts as sources, rather than vehicles, of understanding (Graham, 1997); (b) the more holistic understanding of cognitive progress through the arts (Baumberger, 2013); and (c) the understanding of the cognitive value of the arts in their ability to engender spiritual transformation (Carnes, 2021).