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After committing a moral wrongdoing, Christian adults who initially feel unforgiven by God tend to experience rapid increases in both repentance and feelings of divine forgiveness during the first few days, followed by a gradual leveling off over the next two weeks. New research published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality suggests that actively turning back to God in repentance tends to precede the internal sense of being pardoned, which in turn was modestly linked to a renewed sense of spiritual closeness.
Reconciliation with God is the psychological and spiritual process of restoring relational harmony with the divine after a believer feels they have violated moral or religious standards. In Christian traditions, maintaining an ongoing, intimate bond with God (often referred to as communion) is a central life aim. Becoming aware of a personal sin or wrongdoing can disrupt that bond, creating inner unrest, guilt, and spiritual strain.
To repair that strain, believers often move through two connected processes: engaging in repentance and experiencing absolution. Repentance is an active, approach-oriented response where a person acknowledges their wrongdoing and turns back toward God rather than withdrawing in shame. Experiencing absolution is the receptive counterpart, characterized by an internal assurance that God is moving toward the believer with mercy and has wiped away their guilt.
While psychologists have extensively studied how people forgive one another or themselves, the psychological dynamics of divine forgiveness have received far less empirical attention. In the interpersonal realm, a 2010 longitudinal study demonstrated that forgiving another person after an offense tends to follow a curve of diminishing returns, rising rapidly in the immediate aftermath before gradually leveling off. More recently, scholars began looking at how spiritual repair unfolds over time; for instance, a 2024 two-study investigation indicated that actively seeking God’s pardon is an initial step that predicts whether a person actually feels forgiven six to twelve weeks later.
Other recent work has highlighted how everyday shifts in feeling pardoned by God can ripple outward into daily life. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in July 2026 found that on days when individuals felt more forgiven by God than usual, they were more forgiving and willing to make amends with their romantic partners.
The new study was conducted by Richard G. Cowden, a research scientist with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University (which coordinates the Global Forgiveness Movement) and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Kaye V. Cook, dean of the School of Psychology and Human Services at Gordon College. Building on a theoretical framework that positions repentance and absolution within a broader system of spiritual closeness and struggle, the authors designed their study to track the exact day-by-day timeline of divine reconciliation immediately after a moral misstep.
“Most studies have taken a relatively faith-neutral approach to divine forgiveness,” Cowden and Cook told PsyPost. “That can be useful for identifying processes that may be shared across religious traditions, but it may overlook beliefs, practices, and relational meanings that are especially important within a particular faith tradition. In the Christian faith, for example, personal wrongdoing may be understood not only as moral failure but also as personal sin that can disrupt one’s sense of communion with God.”
“Our earlier work showed that many Christians may affirm that God is forgiving while still struggling to personally experience God’s forgiveness following specific instances of wrongdoing,” the researchers explained. “To explore how this experience unfolds over time, we focused on two related experiences within a Christian-sensitive understanding of experiencing reconciliation with God.”
“We wanted to know how these two processes unfold in the days after Christians become aware of a particular instance of wrongdoing,” Cowden and Cook added. “Does engaging in repentance with God tend to precede experiencing absolution from God, or vice versa? Do they develop together? And how are they related to a renewed sense of communion with God?”
To capture this process as it unfolded in real time, the researchers used an online research platform to screen 2,481 practicing Christian adults across the United States. They looked for participants who had committed a specific personal sin within the past 24 hours, could describe the event in writing, and currently felt little to no assurance that God had forgiven them for it. From this screening, 175 eligible adults enrolled in the main study and completed surveys on Days 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 following their wrongdoing.
“One distinctive feature of the study is that participants answered questions about the same instance of personal wrongdoing on Days 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 of the study,” Cowden and Cook noted. “This allowed us to examine change within each person rather than simply comparing people at one point in time.”
The sample ranged in age from 19 to 78, with an average age of about 42, and was roughly 59 percent female and 74 percent White. Participants represented a variety of Christian traditions, primarily identifying as Catholic (38 percent), nondenominational (23 percent), or Baptist (16 percent). The recent wrongdoings they described were most often rated as moderate in severity (40 percent), with the most common offenses involving sexual sin (22 percent), anger or resentment (21 percent), and dishonesty or lying (15 percent).
At each of the five survey waves, participants were reminded of the specific wrongdoing they had written about and rated their current levels of repentance and absolution on a 4-point scale. They also answered questions measuring their current sense of communion with God on a 5-point scale. On the first day, the researchers additionally measured participants’ general perception of God as benevolent versus strict, their baseline tendency to feel forgiven by God across life in general, and their divine struggles, meaning feelings of conflict, anger, or fear of punishment in their relationship with God since the incident.
When testing which factors predicted faster or slower change, the authors controlled for a wide range of background factors. These included age, sex, race, education, marital status, geographic region, frequency of prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance, as well as adverse childhood experiences, Big Five personality traits, and baseline anxiety and depression.
By comparing several mathematical growth models, the researchers found that both repentance and absolution followed a logarithmic trajectory over the 16-day window. In plain terms, both processes showed rapid increases during the first few days after the wrongdoing, followed by progressively smaller gains that tapered off over the second week. Although the two processes tended to rise in tandem across participants, they started at different levels and moved at different speeds.
On Day 1, average repentance scores were already relatively high at 2.52 out of 4, whereas feelings of absolution started lower at 1.90 out of 4. Over the 16 days, however, absolution increased at a steeper rate than repentance (growth estimates of 0.28 versus 0.19). At the same time, individual patterns varied considerably from person to person, and where a participant started on Day 1 had almost no bearing on how quickly their scores changed over the two weeks.
“Among Christians, taking appropriate responsibility for personal sin before God and experiencing God’s forgiveness are connected, but they are not the same thing,” the researchers said. “A Christian may acknowledge wrongdoing and turn toward God in repentance while still struggling to experience absolution from God.”
“On average, both engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God increased most quickly early in the study and then leveled off, but people differed quite substantially in how these experiences unfolded,” Cowden and Cook added. “The findings therefore do not establish a universal timetable for when a Christian should feel forgiven or how the process of experiencing divine forgiveness ought to unfold.”
When looking at what predicted faster spiritual recovery, the researchers found that ongoing relational experiences with God mattered more than abstract beliefs about God’s character. General perceptions of God as benevolent and a person’s general trait tendency to feel forgiven did not meaningfully alter the speed of change for either process. By contrast, participants who reported fewer divine struggles on Day 1 experienced steeper increases in both repentance (a growth rate of 0.23 for those with low struggles versus 0.15 for those with high struggles) and absolution (0.34 versus 0.22).
In addition, a stronger baseline sense of communion with God on Day 1 predicted a steeper rise in feeling absolved over the 16 days (a growth rate of 0.33 for those with high initial communion compared to 0.23 for those with low communion). This suggests that feeling close to God and free of spiritual conflict may provide a supportive foundation for internalizing forgiveness after a misstep.
“One particularly interesting finding was that the quality of participants’ lived relationship with God was more consistently associated with rates of change than their more general beliefs about God,” Cowden and Cook said. “An important contribution is showing why it helps to ask about both engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God. Simply asking, ‘Do you feel forgiven by God?’ misses whether someone is also acknowledging the wrongdoing and turning toward God, as well as how those experiences relate over time.”
The researchers also examined how fluctuations within an individual from one survey to the next predicted their responses on the very next survey. When a participant reported a higher-than-usual spike in repentance at one time point, they tended to report higher levels of absolution at the following assessment. The reverse was not true: spikes in feeling absolved did not predict subsequent changes in repentance.
Looking at downstream spiritual outcomes, experiencing a higher-than-usual increase in absolution at one wave modestly predicted a stronger sense of communion with God at the next wave. Fluctuations in repentance alone did not directly predict subsequent shifts in communion, and the link between absolution and later communion fell just short of statistical significance when both processes were analyzed together, likely because they overlap so closely. Taken together, the findings are consistent with a sequence in which repentance tends to come before feeling pardoned, and feeling pardoned tends to come before a renewed sense of closeness with God, though the evidence for that second step was weaker.
“These findings offer tentative evidence that experiencing absolution from God may precede a deeper sense of relational harmony with God, but leave unclear whether it has an association independent of engaging in repentance with God given that the two processes tended to unfold together,” the researchers explained. “One possible practical implication is that supporting Christians after personal sin may involve attending to both sides of experiencing reconciliation with God: taking wrongdoing seriously through engaging in repentance with God while also helping individuals more fully receive and internalize God’s forgiveness.”
There are a few caveats to keep in mind when interpreting these results. The study was not preregistered. Because the researchers intentionally selected Christian adults who still felt unforgiven up to 24 hours after their transgression, the findings may not apply to believers who immediately feel at peace with God after making a mistake. This screening approach may have also favored individuals who view God’s forgiveness as conditional upon human repentance rather than automatic, which could help explain why repentance preceded absolution in the timeline.
“We studied the psychological experience of reconciliation with God,” Cowden and Cook emphasized. “We could not determine whether God had forgiven someone, when God forgave them, or what theologically constitutes divine forgiveness.”
“The finding that engaging in repentance with God tended to precede experiencing absolution from God does not mean that Christians must earn God’s forgiveness through engaging in repentance with God,” the authors continued. “Rather, it describes the temporal ordering of two experiences. In some Christian understandings, forgiveness may be freely available while repentance helps a person become more able to receive or internalize it. Because this was an observational study, the temporal patterns are suggestive and should not be interpreted as demonstrating causality.”
In addition, about half of the participants committed their wrongdoing between 12 and 24 hours before the screener survey, and Day 1 repentance scores were already relatively high. Because some initial spiritual repair had likely already begun before the first measurement, future studies could track individuals even closer to the moment of a transgression. Finally, the participants who completed all five surveys attended church more frequently and had higher general perceptions of divine forgiveness than those who missed at least one survey, which raises the possibility of some attrition bias. Testing these patterns across other Christian traditions and other religions will also be important.
Looking ahead, the researchers are exploring practical ways to help believers navigate spiritual distress after moral missteps. “We have developed a freely available self-directed intervention to support Christians who are struggling to experience reconciliation with God following specific instances of personal wrongdoing, which is called the RECEIVE Forgiveness workbook,” Cowden and Cook told PsyPost. “We have completed a randomized controlled trial showing initial efficacy in a sample of adult Indonesian Christians, and we are looking to conduct further trials in other cultures and contexts.”
“More broadly, we are interested in understanding how engaging in repentance with God, experiencing absolution from God, and experiencing reconciliation with God differ across cultures and Christian traditions, particularly traditions that differ in beliefs and practices related to addressing personal wrongdoing and receiving divine forgiveness,” the researchers concluded. “We also want to understand why some Christians are able to internalize God’s forgiveness relatively readily after personal sin, whereas others remain caught in guilt, shame, divine struggle, or perceived distance from God. We are also interested in whether changes in reconciliation with God contribute over time to renewed communion with God and flourishing more broadly across different aspects of life.”
The study, “Temporal Dynamics of Experiencing Reconciliation With God After Personal Wrongdoing: An Incident-Anchored Longitudinal Study of U.S. Christian Adults,” was authored by Richard G. Cowden and Kaye V. Cook.