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On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in the picturesque U.S. city of Charleston, South Carolina, during a Bible study class. Senior Pastor and State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney and his members welcomed Roof to the church. Soon after the Bible study began, Roof opened fire, injuring three members of the church and killing Rev. Pinckney and eight others. Roof, a White supremacist, targeted the church because its members are Black, and because of the church’s history of civil rights activism. Aligning his actions with a contentious U.S. Presidential election that deliberately fomented racial tensions, Roof hoped the murders would incite a race war. In the throes of their own suffering and grief, members of Emanuel AME church were called upon to issue public statements of forgiveness. Many community members rejected calls to forgive Roof, noting that African Americans have too often been asked to forgive people who have harmed them. Forgiveness aside, members of Emanuel AME joined with other African American leaders to foster a national conversation on faith, honesty, hope, healing, and justice. This virtuous response resulted from at least three factors: (a) peoples’ strong connection with their identities as Christians and as members of a cultural institution with deep roots; (b) deeply held cultural norms of centering on God and faith; and (c) a conviction that authentic faith requires radical hope, compassion, and mercy, as well as a genuine commitment to justice.

This chapter grapples with a key question: How might we draw upon these kinds of real-world events to develop ecologically sound models of the relations between culture, religion, and prosocial development? In this chapter, I argue that if psychology is serious about understanding the relations between culture, religion, spirituality, and human goodness, we must develop frameworks that attend to the role of power, structural factors, and sociopolitical realities in prosocial outcomes. I begin by reflecting on the meanings of culture, religiosity, and spirituality, and I conclude by offering such a framework. Throughout this chapter I use the term prosocial behavior to refer broadly to voluntary actions intended to benefit others (Pfattheicher et al., 2022).

What Is Culture?

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) defined culture as a “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (p. 89). Cultural values, beliefs, practices, products, and identifications share certain features. They are transmitted across generations. They are fairly stable. They are both implicit (nonconscious and often nonarticulated) and explicit (conscious and able to be articulated). They are learned, shared, and normalized by those within the cultural system (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952; Swartz, 2001). The dimensions of culture (beliefs, practices, and products) also have specific functions. They make the world understandable and predictable for individuals and collectives. They guide relations among the members of the group and provide members with the knowledge and resources needed to solve both mundane and extraordinary challenges (Hofstede, 2001; Javidan et al., 2006). They also serve as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 2001, p. 9). In sum, culture is a multidimensional, transgenerational phenomenon that shapes every aspect of life, including what individuals and groups think, how they behave, what they produce, how they structure their communities and physical environments, who they think they are, how they relate to people inside and outside their group, and how they navigate the vicissitudes of life.

It is worth pausing here to clarify what culture is not. First, culture is neither static nor discrete (García Coll, 2020). Symbols, values, practices, and other dimensions of culture may change as groups interact within and across geographic and virtual spaces (Fischer, 2009; García Coll, 2020). As such, cultural accommodation, cultural hybridity, and acculturation are important parts of the conversation, especially in a global context in which migration and encounters through virtual spaces are increasingly common (Fischer, 2009). Culture is also developmental. How people understand and engage particular cultural values, beliefs, or practices changes with age, developmental period, and cohort/generational status. As such, forgiveness may not have the same meaning or manifestations for cohorts of South Africans who lived amidst the daily brutality of Apartheid that it has for younger cohorts who were born and raised in the post-Apartheid era.

Second, culture is not synonymous with minoritized and marginalized ethnoracial or socioeconomic statuses. Minoritization, marginalization, poverty, and wealth are social positions that derive from enactments of power. In her critique of scholarship on Haiti and on Haitian culture, anthropologist Gina Ulysse (2015) cautioned against uncritically equating culture with these social statuses. Ulysse (2015) asserted that poverty and crisis are so ubiquitous in media representations of Haiti that people have come to equate these aspects of life with Haitian culture. However, these outcomes are largely long-term consequences of colonization. Haitian culture is not the sum of Haitian despair. Haitian culture is evident in the content of the rich body of stories, folk art, music, heroes, relational values, and accomplishments of its citizens (Ulysse, 2015).

The need to distinguish between culture and social position is vital as we consider recent calls to study socioeconomic status (SES) as a form of culture (e.g., see Kraus et al., 2020). The call to equate culture with SES reifies the problematic logic of Oscar Lewis’s (1966) work on the so-called culture of poverty. Equating SES with culture ignores the reality that, at least in the United States, SES correlates strongly with race and ethnicity (Williams, 1996). As such, classed assertions tend to become entangled with ethnoracial assertions. More importantly, when culture is conflated with statuses such as SES, we shift attention away from history and power, and we tend to misattribute to culture some of the outcomes and processes that are more accurately attributed to legacies of structural and or contextual inequity, including structural racism and colonialism (Malherbe, 2020). Without attention to these latter forces, researchers risk attributing to culture some sets of values, attitudes, and behaviors that may actually reflect intra- or transgenerational responses to chronic disadvantage, inequity, and trauma. In sum, researchers interested in the study of culture must be careful both to define culture and to avoid construct contamination (Hall et al., 2016). We must be sure that we are measuring and making valid conclusions about culture (e.g., historically transmitted values, norms, and practices) rather than actually measuring marginalization, SES, or similar constructs and making invalid misattributions about culture.

Religion/Spirituality and Culture

Defining culture is the first step in understanding the relations between culture, religiosity/spirituality, and positive outcomes. However, this work also requires us to define religiosity and spirituality and to clarify how these constructs are linked to culture. Religiosity refers to beliefs in and about a higher power (e.g., God), a relationship with that higher power, and engagement in practices (e.g., prayer, religious service attendance) that point to a commitment to those beliefs and that relationship (Mattis, 2000; Zinnbauer et al., 1997). Spirituality refers to a quest after the sacred (Pargament, 2007), a belief in the transcendent nature of life, and the translation of those beliefs into a connection with others, including God, humans, spirits, and nature (Mattis, 2000).

Religion and spirituality are cultural systems (Cohen & Neuberg, 2020; Geertz, 2006). As cultural systems, religious and spiritual systems are replete with historically transmitted products (e.g., stories, songs) and practices (e.g., rituals) that evoke emotions, set expectations, guide behavior, and define people’s identities (Geertz, 2006). Importantly, religious and spiritual values, symbols, and practices achieve power through their connection to a higher authority (e.g., God) and to beliefs about ultimate ends (e.g., salvation, divine punishment).

Here it is worth noting some of the limitations that plague work on the psychology of religion/spirituality. First, much of the psychological research on religion and spirituality tends to be Christian-centric (overly or exclusively reliant on Christian samples, relevant to Christianity, and based on Christian beliefs, symbols, values, norms, and practices; Saroglou et al., 2020). Thus far, psychology has paid relatively little attention to the beliefs, symbols, and practices of people from non-Christian traditions, including practitioners of indigenous religions. A second limitation is that, unlike our colleagues in anthropology, psychologists have paid little attention to the reality that, in many cultures, religiosity/spirituality includes belief in range of spiritual beings, including ancestors, saints, and angels, as well as belief in the power of objects such as charms (Pew Research Center, 2010). For many people, these spirits, religious symbols, and sacred objects provide meaningful guidance, protection, healing, hope, wisdom, and courage (Mageo & Howard, 1996; Pew Research Center, 2010).

Third, psychologists often treat religious/spiritual identities and practices as distinct and bounded. Scholars tend to assume, for example, that people who identify as religious only embrace the beliefs and practices of a single religious/spiritual group. However, this assumption ignores the reality that religious syncretism—i.e., the mixing religious beliefs, practices, and symbols from two or more religious systems—is a common feature of religious/spiritual life (Sigalow, 2016). Indeed, roughly 24% of Americans attend services outside their religion (Pew Research Center, 2009).

Importantly, syncretism has been a common response to oppressive groups’ attempted imposition of religion or spirituality. Cultural groups that are subject to coercion have often infused dominant systems of faith with icons, stories, values, and practices that preserved their own indigenous beliefs, values, and identities (Mageo & Howard, 1996). Given this history of syncretism, researchers interested in the interplay between culture and religion/spirituality must remember that people who share the same religious identification (e.g., Christian) but have different cultural histories may embrace substantively different beliefs, symbols, and practices.

Finally, psychologists interested in religion/spirituality often have not accounted for the fact that, in response to the challenges they face, different cultural groups have reimagined the meanings of religious texts and developed unique modes of religious expression (e.g., religious music, patterns of worship, and modes of prayer). For example, in response to slavery, colonization, and persistent racism, African-American, Latinx, and Latin-American Christians have developed liberationist readings of the Bible. Liberation theologies emphasize themes of love, hope, resistance, and justice, and they imagine God and Christ as committed to dismantling injustice in the world (Barreto & Sirvent, 2019; Cone, 2010; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990). These readings of the Bible have allowed marginalized Black, Latinx, and Latin-American communities to expose the contradictions and evil that are endemic in using religion to justify the subjugation of others. Within the U.S., Black liberationists have animated the outreach and activism at the heart of America’s Civil Rights and justice movements (Cone, 2010; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990).

Importantly, cultural differences in peoples’ readings of religious texts have implications both for the ways that religious/spiritual institutions function and for peoples’ expectations of religious institutions. Indeed, African Americans are more likely than Americans from other ethnoracial groups to report their religious leaders preach about issues of equity and social justice. African Americans are also more likely to report that religious institutions have a moral imperative to address social justice issues directly (Pew Research Center, 2021a). Cultural and ethnoracial differences in institutional functioning and in peoples’ expectations of religious institutions may be amplified by the fact that religious institutions often are highly segregated, at least in the U.S. The overwhelming majority (80%) of Americans attend religious services in racially segregated settings (Dougherty et al., 2020). This level of segregation supports the reinforcement of religious/spiritual beliefs, values, and practices over time.

Values, Culture, Religiosity, and Positive Behavior

Cultural psychologists have been particularly focused on identifying core values that either are universal or help differentiate cultural groups. They then seek to understand how those values align with peoples’ identities, roles, choices, and actions (Betancourt & López, 1993; Pepper et al., 2010; Rokeach, 1969; Schwartz, 2010). Although the work on culture and values is large and robust, little of that work has centered on religiosity/spirituality. Recently, researchers interested in positive psychology have begun to explore the links among culture, religion, and values (Schimmel, 2000). Dahlsgaard et al. (2005), for example, mined the written texts of some of the world’s major religions to identify core values, virtues, and character strengths in these religious systems. They suggested that six character strengths—courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence—are commonly represented in these major religions, albeit to different degrees. Khodayarifard et al. (2016) similarly analyzed Islamic texts and identified an Islamic valuing of optimism, gratitude, and a view of God as a benevolent force. Other work has examined ethnoracial differences in values and sought to determine whether these differences are accounted for by group differences in religiosity. For example, Krause and Hayward (2015) found that, relative to their White counterparts, African Americans feel more compassion for strangers, and they provide more emotional support and instrumental help to strangers. These differences in prosocial orientation appeared to be explained in part by African Americans’ comparatively higher religious commitment, gratitude to God, and humility (Krause & Hayward, 2015). This emerging line of work supports the contention that the study of values provides important insights on culture and behavior (see Park & Van Tongeren, Chap. 6, this volume).

Although values are important, cultural theorists remind us that values are only one dimension of culture (Swartz, 2001) and provide us with only a slice of understanding culture (Inglehart & Baker, 2000). Moreover, Javidan et al. (2006) have cautioned that values-centered studies of culture are guided by two common but empirically untested assumptions: (a) the ecological values assumption and (b) the onion assumption. The ecological values assumption highlights researchers’ tendency to believe that values are especially important aspects of culture and that studying the values of individuals is the most meaningful and robust way to understand culture. The onion assumption calls attention to the tendency to believe that what individuals, organizations, and nations say they value is a good predictor of how they actually behave. Importantly, findings on the link between values and behaviors are mixed. For example, in multinational studies, values and behavior often are either unrelated or related in unexpected ways (Hofstede et al., 1990; Javidan et al., 2006). These mixed findings warrant increased scholarly attention.

For a host of reasons, studies that use values to predict prosocial behavior may fail to detect relations or may yield unexpected findings. It might be difficult to discern which specific cultural values (or combination of values) are most relevant for predicting particular outcomes. The values and behaviors under investigation also may not be measured accurately. This issue of measurement is especially relevant in cross-cultural research, because cultural values (such as happiness) do not always carry the same meaning across cultural contexts (e.g., see Joshanloo, 2014). Values-based models may also fail because the roster of values to which researchers attend is usually limited by the interests and perspectives of White, Western scholars (Taras et al., 2009). Values that exist in one cultural context may have no analogue in another, yet may be essential for explaining prosocial behavior. For example, the South African concept of ubuntu (“being self through others”) has no clear parallel in American culture, but it explains generosity and other prosocial attitudes and outcomes among South Africans (Mugumbate & Nyanguru, 2013). Excluding culturally important values from studies of behavior will naturally lead to poorer scientific outcomes.

Evidence suggests another important reason why values-based models of behavior may ultimately fall short is because values alone may be insufficient to explain behavior fully. Cultural values are often strongly related to macrolevel variables. For example, individualism and collectivism tend to correlate highly with macrolevel structural variables, such as level of industrialization, gross national product, birth rate, and rates of literacy (van de Vijver & Leung, 2000). These correlational patterns suggest models that seek to link culture and behavior may be incomplete if they fail to include structural and sociopolitical factors. An emerging body of cross-cultural research highlights the links between structural/sociopolitical conditions, religiosity/spirituality, and prosocial outcomes. For instance, using longitudinal data from the European Values Study, Storm (2016) found that people who live in countries that have a history of being governed fairly and effectively are more likely to behave prosocially (e.g., they are more likely to be honest), because they anticipate that they can rely on the government to catch and punish violators. In these national contexts, religiosity tends to be less strongly correlated with prosocial behavior. However, in European countries where people believe that structures of control (such as the government) are weak, illegitimate, or nonexistent, religious communities and God become central sources of moral authority (Storm, 2016). In these national settings, religiosity tends to be more strongly associated with prosocial behavior. Furthermore, there is evidence that the cultural orientations that inform people’s experience of structural conditions and their experience of religion may help to explain why people behave prosocially. For example, altruism and honesty are highest in European nations where people have a cultural orientation toward showing respect for authority (including governmental and divine authority) and a strong cultural awareness of being surveilled by figures of authority, including God and the government (Doebler, 2015; Galen, 2012; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007; Storm, 2016). Taken together, these findings highlight the need for conceptual models of prosocial development that account for structural, sociopolitical, and religious factors, especially when it comes to explaining positive outcomes.

Culture, Religiosity/Spirituality, Power, and Goodness

On one level, efforts to understand the interplay among culture, religiosity/spirituality, and structure mean paying attention to “1) religions as cultures in and of themselves, 2) religions as subcultures of national cultures, 3) national cultures as subcultures of transnational religious regions of the world, 4) religions and national cultures as conflicting with each other, and 5) new blends of religious and national culture resulting from globalization” (Cohen & Neuberg, 2020, p. 857). On another level, efforts to understand these relations entail attending to history and power.

Centering history, power, politics, and justice in conversations about culture, religiosity, spirituality, and human goodness should not feel alien. Indeed, religious and spiritual texts (such as the Bible) are replete with stories of the tenuous relationships between ruling classes, powerful leaders, and vulnerable populations. Moreover, history demonstrates that across time, religious individuals and institutions have often weaponized faith in the service of maintaining individual and in-group privilege and power. As such, religion and religious extremism have often been at the root of war, colonization, national invasions, forcible conversions, enslavement, genocide, oppression, and acts of inhumanity (Iannaccone & Berman, 2006). These aspects of religious life are evident in contemporary life. In fact, a 2021 study found that 43 countries reported high levels of social hostilities (e.g., terrorist activity, kidnappings, murders, and assaults) related to religion (Pew Research Center, 2021b). Religious institutions and religious communities also have been targets of discrimination. Indeed, 180 countries reported one or more instances of government harassment of religious groups. For example, governments have prohibited the display of religious symbols, mandated or prohibited head coverings, detained people for engaging in worship, and used technology to surveil members of particular religious groups (Pew Research Center, 2021b). Importantly, however, the same religious/spiritual beliefs that have been used by some individuals and institutions to justify domination and harm have been used by others to justify extraordinary acts of compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and justice-oriented activism.

The benefit of accounting for culture, religiosity/spirituality, and power in studies of prosocial development is evident in research on prosocial development among African American/Black adults in the United States. For African-American/Black communities, organizational religious involvement is a particularly robust predictor of a host of prosocial behaviors, including altruism, volunteerism, and community and civic engagement (Grayman-Simpson, & Mattis, 2013; Gutierrez & Mattis, 2014; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990). The prosocial leanings of Black youth and adults is credited to a strong cultural orientation toward communalism within African-American/Black communities, as well as to Black cultural theologies that emphasize love, hope, justice, and liberation (Cone, 2010; Gilkes, 2001). These cultural orientations have been especially important for African Americans because racism created harmful structural conditions that blocked people from opportunities to access key resources. African-American religious institutions have historically filled gaps in care by providing educational, financial, and other tangible supports to members of the African-American community (Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990).

Although religiosity/spirituality is a robust predictor of prosocial behavior among African Americans, the relations among culture, religiosity, and prosocial behavior are complicated by structural factors. In settings marked by inequality and unjust use of coercive power (e.g., threats of arrest), prosocial behaviors are common, but these behaviors are not always related to religiosity/spirituality in simple or direct ways. For example, Mattis et al. (2008) found that in overpoliced neighborhoods, helping others sometimes invited suspicion or placed helpers at risk for being harassed or otherwise punished by structures of power, including the police. Research on forgiveness reveals similar complexities in the relations between culture, religiosity/spirituality, structural factors, and prosocial outcomes. For instance, Gallagher (2002) found that, even when culturally and religiously grounded vehicles for interpersonal and intergroup forgiveness (e.g., the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa) were available, many individuals who were survivors of structural violence found it impossible to forgive (Gallagher, 2002). The brutal history of racism in South Africa—and devastating impact of this system within and across generations of people—made it difficult for many people to imagine forgiving without any conversation about punishment, reparations, and the ceding of power. Taken together, these findings highlight the need for models that center structural/sociopolitical conditions, power, and history in dialogues about relations among culture, religiosity/spirituality, and prosocial outcomes. Next, I propose such a theory—the Culture, Religiosity/Spirituality, and Positive Development (CRSPD) model.

A New Model of Culture, Religiosity/Spirituality, and Prosocial Development

The proposed framework offered here builds on Mattis et al.’s (2019) Socioecological, Transactional framework for explaining the study of Religiosity and Spirituality and prosocial development in urban settings (SET-RS Urban). The SET-RS Urban is a place-based model of prosocial outcomes that begins with an appreciation that religiosity/spirituality (e.g., religious institutions, religious/spiritual ideologies, and religious/spiritual family and friends) help shape prosocial outcomes. However, the SET-RS model posits the link between religiosity/spirituality and positive outcomes is complicated by macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors. Specifically, sociopolitical conditions that are characteristic of urban areas (e.g., pervasive inequality and segregation) promote structural arrangements (e.g., policies) that create risk, vulnerability, stress, and resources for urban communities and residents. The risks, stresses, and resources that people experience depend in part on their identities (e.g., race) and social positions (e.g., SES, caste).

Prosocial outcomes depend in part on how individuals, families, and communities are impacted by—and make meaning of—structural risks and stressors, as well as by people’s perceptions of contextual and situational cues. Prosocial outcomes also depend on individual-level (e.g., empathic personality orientation), family-level (e.g., family models of compassion), and community- or organizational-level factors (e.g., involvement in volunteerism). Finally, the likelihood that individuals, organizations, and social groups will express certain prosocial behaviors may depend on whether they are acknowledged, punished, or rewarded for their prosocial behaviors when they engage in such behaviors. For example, several factors might motivate an undocumented immigrant to advocate publicly for the rights of vulnerable groups, such as that immigrant’s faith, empathic personality orientation, and cultural and family orientations toward collectivism. However, when and how the immigrant does advocacy work may be informed by fears about arrest and the consequences of such an outcome for their family.

The Culture, Religiosity/Spirituality, and Positive Development (CRSPD) model advances the SET-RS Urban model by highlighting the role of culture in prosocial development. CRSPD (Fig. 9.1) retains the SET-RS model’s focus on sociopolitical and structural conditions, risks, stresses, assets, and opportunities, as well as individual, community, institutional, and contextual contributions to prosocial development. Yet CRSPD is not limited to urban settings. Furthermore, CRSPD introduces five features of culture into these inter-relationships: time, dimension of culture, modes of cultural expression, level of ecology, and sites of cultural expression.

Fig. 9.1
figure 1

Integrative model of the role of Culture, Religiosity, and Spirituality in Positive Development (CRSPD)

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Time

In its attention to time, CRSPD highlights the importance of change. The model elevates the reality that culture’s influence on behavior is historical and current, and culture’s processes of influence are developmental. This approach draws attention to factors such as personal changes in belief and national and generational shifts toward secularization or religious conservatism. Time is represented as a factor that operates across all aspects of the model.

Dimensions

The model requires us to remain mindful of the various dimensions of culture that may be examined in any study of development. CRSPD theory draws our attention to the fact we have the flexibility to study numerous manifestations of culture, including values, symbols (e.g., images), texts, gestures, practices, and rituals.

Modes

The CRSPD framework encourages researchers to ask how (i.e., in what format) culture is expressed. Culture can be expressed in a variety of ways, including visually, orally, emotionally, cognitively, behaviorally, and relationally.

Levels

CRSPD theory requires that we attend to the reality that culture operates at multiple levels (i.e., on multiple planes of the social ecology), including the national, community, institutional, relational, and individual levels.

Sites

Finally, CRSPD theory takes a more granular approach to the question of where culture is expressed. Within any level of ecology, culture is expressed at different sites. For example, at the individual level, religious and prosocial sensibilities might be expressed on the body through tattoos. Similarly, gurdwaras may express religious and prosocial values in the built environment, by posting messages such as “All Are Welcome Here” on their public billboards.

By calling attention to these five features of culture, CRSPD theory allows researchers and clinicians to stay true to current conceptualizations of culture as a historically transmitted, multidimensional, intra- and transgenerational phenomenon that is expressed in our values, practices, and products. Furthermore, by deliberately focusing our attention on dimensions, sites, modes, and levels of expression in each area (e.g., religiosity/spirituality, community, individual), the model intends to encourage researchers to see aspects of culture and cultural functioning (e.g., the manifestations of religiosity and prosociality in music) that might otherwise remain invisible.

Conclusion and Conceptual and Methodological Considerations

The definitions and conceptualizations of culture, religion, and spirituality that dominate psychology, and by extension this work, are not universal. They reflect the thinking of Western (and generally White and Christian) scholars from a particular subset of industrialized societies (Dueck et al., 2017). These definitions prevail because of the cultural politics of knowledge production and dissemination. Indeed, publication in social science texts requires that scholars (including scholars of color, indigenous, and non-Western scholars) cite Western (and generally White) scholars. Westerners and White scholars are, however, under no similar obligation to cite scholars of color, indigenous scholars, non-Western, or non-Christian scholars. Disrupting these hegemonic practices will be critical to building a truly inclusive approach to the study of culture, religiosity/spirituality, and prosocial development. Scholars in positive psychology and the psychology of religion and spirituality must be reflective about the ways in which disciplinary practices, assumptions, measures, and methods reify cultural dynamics that exclude, erase, and silence others.

As we move toward a more culturally inclusive approach to prosocial development, we must ensure that studies offer clear definitions of culture. We must identify the specific aspects of culture that contribute to positive and prosocial outcomes (Diemer & Gore, 2009; Taras et al., 2009). Efforts to identify and measure the aspects of culture that are at play should, of course, be primarily emically driven. That is, members of the cultural groups that are the focus of inquiry must centrally inform our thinking about the issues being studied. Finally, the conceptual frameworks that guide our work must be ecologically valid. In that regard, our frameworks must account for the ways that religiosity/spirituality and prosociality are informed by structural/sociopolitical factors, power, and more proximal factors (including personality and family and peer religious socialization).

The CRSPD framework is one important step towards accounting for these factors. Importantly, CRSPD lends itself to the use of various research designs, methods, and analytic strategies. For instance, the model lends itself to the use of longitudinal and cross-sectional designs, multilevel modeling strategies, and analyses of change. CRSPD also lends itself to the use of qualitative methods and analyses, including the use of interviews and archival analysis of cultural artifacts (e.g., music, clothing, social media postings). It is worth noting that studies of material culture have advantages in that, unlike self-report approaches, they do not presume that people are conscious of the cultural values and beliefs by which they operate (Taras et al., 2009).

CRSPD theory also has clinical implications. It of course is consistent with meta-analytic evidence that clinical interventions are more effective when they are adapted to the client’s culture and when psychotherapists demonstrate cultural competence (Soto et al., 2018). In addition, it recognizes that interventions certainly need to be clear on the religious and prosocial values, norms, and behaviors they intend to support and promote. However, CRSPD theory highlights the need to clarify the values, norms, and behaviors that already exist across various levels of people’s social ecologies. Interventions also must attend to the multiple sites in which people express and enact prosocial values. Importantly, CRSPD theory draws attention to the fact that because interventions exist in a sociopolitical context, the efficacy of interventions may depend on understanding historical and structural factors that support or work against desired outcomes of those interventions. For example, the model highlights the reality that individuals and groups who are the focus of interventions may need (or demand) acknowledgement of and accountability for harms done to them by others, in order for them to engage in and benefit from interventions. At best, interventions that ignore sociopolitical context may ring hollow and be of limited value; at worst, they may further harm, oppress, and marginalize the very people we are seeking to support.

If scholars and clinicians in positive psychology and the psychology of religion and spirituality are truly committed to culturally grounded models of positive and prosocial outcomes, it is imperative that we be critically reflective about the ways we do our work. It is also important that we expand our methodological and analytic toolkits so that we can more fully and thoughtfully study culture and work with people in culturally responsive ways. Our work will be richer if we collaborate with scholars and practitioners whose perspectives and skills can deepen our work.