Questions to Ask About Spirituality
Twenty questions for talking with someone about faith, doubt and what they hold sacred, written to work across traditions and with people who claim none. They ask about practice and experience rather than about doctrine.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Is spiritual a word you would use about yourself?
Why ask it
Worth asking before anything else, because a great many people who think seriously about these matters dislike the term. Their objection to the word usually tells you which tradition or which kind of talk they are distancing themselves from.
What did you grow up with, and what is your relationship to it now?
Why ask it
Nearly everyone is either continuing, adapting or reacting against something, and naming the starting point makes the rest legible. Note whether they describe leaving as a loss, a relief, or both, since that shapes what is safe to ask later.
Do you do anything regularly that you would call practice?
Why ask it
Practice is more concrete than belief and easier to describe honestly: prayer, sitting, walking, fasting, a particular hour of the day. People with no beliefs they can state often have a practice they can, and the reverse is also common.
When did you last do it, and what actually happens when you do?
Why ask it
The follow-up that separates a real practice from an intended one, asked without accusation. Descriptions of what happens are usually undramatic (boredom, restlessness, occasional quiet), and that plainness is the most useful thing you will hear.
Is there a place where you feel differently than you do elsewhere?
Why ask it
Almost everyone has one, and it is as likely to be a hillside, a kitchen or a hospital corridor as a building set aside for worship. Asking about place gets an answer from people who would deflect a question about belief.
Has anything happened to you that you cannot easily explain?
Why ask it
Ask this only once there is some trust, and accept whatever comes. Many people carry an experience they have told very few others about, usually because of how it was received the first time, and being asked without scepticism matters more than what they say.
What do you do with doubt when it turns up?
Why ask it
This assumes doubt rather than treating it as failure, which is why people answer it honestly. Some argue with it, some wait it out, some have stopped requiring resolution, and each answer is a different relationship with certainty.
Have you changed your mind about something you were sure of?
Why ask it
The most revealing question in the set for people who have thought about this for a long time. Whether the shift came from an argument, a book or a bereavement tells you how their convictions are actually held.
What has been hardest to reconcile?
Why ask it
Suffering, an institution's failures, a scientific account, a person they love who does not agree. Asking for the hard part rather than the answer avoids apologetics and gets you the thing they are still working on.
Where do you turn when it is bad?
Why ask it
Answers name specific texts, people, prayers, songs or rooms, and they are usually offered plainly. This is often the point at which a general conversation about spirituality becomes a real one.
Is there a text or teaching you keep returning to?
Why ask it
Ask which passage and what they take from it now, because the reading tends to change over a life. Someone with no text at all often names a person or a memory instead, which answers the same question.
Do you belong to a community, and what is that like?
Why ask it
The what is that like is not filler: community is frequently the difficult part rather than the sustaining one, and people will say so if asked openly. Those without one often have views about why they left.
What do you think happens when we die?
Why ask it
Direct, and better asked plainly than approached sideways. Many people find they have no settled answer and are glad of somewhere to say that; some have a very specific one that has shaped how they live.
Has a death changed what you believe?
Why ask it
Ask gently and be ready to stop. Bereavement moves conviction in both directions, toward faith and away from it, and the account is usually specific to one person rather than general.
What is expected of you, and by whom?
Why ask it
Obligation is where belief meets ordinary life: observance, family, money, time, a way of behaving. This produces practical answers rather than abstract ones, and it works for people in strict traditions and loose ones alike.
Is there something you do that you cannot fully justify?
Why ask it
Superstitions, inherited habits, prayers kept up long after belief lapsed. This is a gentle question that people enjoy answering, and it often shows the gap between stated belief and actual life.
How do you live with people close to you who see it differently?
Why ask it
Marriages, parents and children all manage this, mostly by an unspoken settlement. Asking how it works in practice is more useful and less confrontational than asking what they think of the other view.
Have you ever felt pressure to hide or overstate what you believe?
Why ask it
Both happen, in workplaces, families and religious settings alike, and people rarely get asked. The answer often explains why they hedged earlier in the conversation.
What would you not want said about your beliefs by someone who disagreed?
Why ask it
This gives them the chance to correct the common caricature in advance, which is a courtesy and also genuinely informative. It works equally well with atheists, who have their own version of it.
Is there something about this you wish people asked you instead?
Why ask it
A good closing question, since the standard questions about faith are tiring and the interesting matter is usually elsewhere. The answer tells you what to ask next time.
Talking about faith and doubt
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to hold the conversation
Ask about practice before belief
What someone does is easier to describe than what they hold, and it is less likely to trigger a defence. Prayer, silence, fasting, attendance and habit all give you somewhere concrete to start.
Use their vocabulary
If they say practice, do not switch to faith; if they say God, do not substitute the universe. Adopting someone else's words is the clearest signal that you are trying to understand rather than translate.
Say where you stand if asked
A one-line honest answer, including uncertainty, keeps the conversation mutual. Withholding your own position while asking twenty questions makes the whole thing feel like an assessment.
Leave the silences alone
These questions produce pauses because people are thinking rather than stalling. Filling the gap with a follow-up is the most common way a promising conversation gets shallow.
A reasonable order
- 1Start with whether the word spiritual fits them, and what they grew up with.
- 2Move to practice: what they do, when they last did it, what happens when they do.
- 3Then places, texts and where they turn when things are bad.
- 4Then doubt, changed minds, and what has been hardest to reconcile.
- 5Only then death, bereavement and pressure to conceal, if the conversation has gone well.
- 6Close by asking what they wish people asked instead.
What goes wrong
Debating instead of asking
The questions about doubt and about what is hardest to reconcile are easy to use as openings for an argument you had already prepared. Once that happens the answers stop being candid and do not resume.
Treating uncertainty as an opportunity
If someone admits they do not know what they believe, the useful response is a further question, not a case. Offering a resolution to their doubt ends the conversation and often the friendship's candour.
Asking about experience too early
The question about unexplained experience needs trust first. Asked cold it sounds like a test, and the person who has such an experience will simply say no.
Assuming a tradition from a label
Two people using the same name for their faith may practise almost nothing in common. Ask what it looks like for them rather than proceeding from what you have read.