Life with God.

The religious experience of Christians was viewed as an interpersonal relationship between believers and God. Six aspects of that relationship appeared as orthogonal factors in responses obtained from a random sample of adults in metropolitan Detroit. All six were found in three sub-samples: black Protestants, white Protestants, and white Roman Catholics. Compensatory and evolutionary theories of religious experience were found to be of little use in explaining the variance of respondents' scores on these factors. Hypotheses derived from a sociological perspective on religious experience showed greater power in explaining that variance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]