Spirituality as a Personal Value: Meaning, Examples, and Related Values
What Is Spirituality as a Core Value?
Spirituality values connection to the transcendent, meaning beyond the material, and inner presence. People high in Spirituality orient toward purpose and reverence.
Why Spirituality Matters
Honoring Spirituality helps you:
- cultivate resilience through faith or awe,
- integrate ethics with purpose,
- find coherence during hardship,
- experience gratitude and humility.
How Spirituality Shows Up (High vs. Low Expression)
High Expression
- practices contemplation or prayer,
- engages in service rooted in meaning,
- aligns choices with deeper purpose,
- honors sacred time or space.
Low Expression
- focuses solely on material outcomes,
- neglects reflective rituals,
- dismisses wonder as impractical,
- treats purpose as optional.
Common Challenges of High Spirituality
- difficulty with pragmatic trade-offs,
- conflict with strictly secular settings,
- potential spiritual bypassing,
- ambiguity hard for concrete collaborators.
Spirituality in Conflict With Other Values
Spirituality vs. Wealth
Wealth prioritizes material accumulation; Spirituality prioritizes meaning and service.
Tension: resource maximization vs. transcendence.
Spirituality vs. Certainty
Certainty seeks firm answers; Spirituality accepts mystery.
Tension: definitive proof vs. faith and wonder.
Examples of Spirituality in Daily Life
- Taking time for reflective practice.
- Serving others as expression of purpose.
- Choosing roles aligned with meaning.
- Designing quiet spaces for contemplation.
Strengths and Risks of Spirituality as a Value
Strengths
People interested in spirituality are looking for answers to fundamental questions important to them. They are capable of self-reflection and keeping an open mind.
Risks
Spirituality is a very personal and individual matter. It is important to remember that not everyone will share our beliefs.
From the Global Values Research
How often people rank Spirituality
Across the 2,099,004 assessments completed on personalvalu.es since 2020.
- Appearance rateof assessments rank it in their ten. 50th of 62 values.
- 7.7%
- First placeof assessments put it first. 32nd of 62 on this measure.
- 1.0%
- Top threeof assessments put it in the top three. 32% of those who rank it.
- 2.4%
- Average positionis its mean position, out of ten, where it is ranked at all.
- 5.5
Spirituality is ranked more often with age, from 6.0% among participants under 18 to 19.9% among those 65 and over. Women rank it more often than men, at 11.8% against 8.1%.
Age and gender from the assessments of December 2025 to September 2026 whose participants gave them.
