Have you ever wondered how to tell what someone treasures most in life? They might reveal their answer if asked, “What is most sacred to you?”
“Life is unfair, challenging, and brutal,” says Nathan Leonhardt, an assistant professor in the School of Family Life. “People need to find something of deep enough value to consider that life is, in fact, worth living in the face of how unfair it is.”
Driven by that belief, Leonhardt studies what people consider sacred — what they view as meaningful enough to transcend life’s inevitable hardships.
His interest in sacredness stems from a conviction that sacred experiences often represent the most beautiful and poignant aspects of life. “Hopefully, understanding more deeply both the commonalities of experience and the diversity of experiences with the sacred can highlight both our common humanity and individuality,” says Leonhardt.
Leonhardt collaborated with several students, including Abbey Sutherland, a senior in the school of family life from Provo Utah, and Emma Howlett (BS ‘25), a recent school of family life graduate, to design a research study to understand what people find sacred. They developed and distributed a survey, collecting over 350 responses from participants across the United States. The survey included open-ended questions designed to capture detailed, personal insights.
“There is not much research out there that has actually tried to define this term from the bottom up,” says Sutherland, a senior studying family life. “This study is also meant to explore what role sacredness plays in peoples' lives.”
The team is currently coding responses to identify patterns and themes. Participants were asked to list the top three things they considered sacred. From 200 unique responses, several categories emerged:
- 34% identified relationships—such as with family, siblings, parents, spouses, and friends—as sacred
- 27% identified anything “religious” or “spiritual”
- 8% cited “places” or “positive attributes”
- 3–5% defined “meaningful objects, life, values, and aspects of self” as sacred
“The most frequent response to the question ‘What top three things do you consider to be sacred in your life?’ was relationships in some form,” says Sutherland.
According to the researchers, these insights offer a deeper understanding of personal values and priorities. For Leonhardt, asking people what they find sacred provides a window into what they truly treasure and prioritize in their lives.
Now, the team is preparing to take the research global. Leonhardt has begun fielding the survey internationally and plans to gather responses from about 10 culturally diverse countries, including India and Japan, where he already has collaborators.
“If not officially religious, there might be something resonant in the idea of sacredness that speaks across country borders,” Leonhardt says. “We could get really interesting cross-cultural evidence of how sacred people find family relationships to be.”
Leonhardt sees the research as a way to explore the core of religious experience, spirituality, and meaning. His goal is to promote understanding—both within individual faith traditions and across cultures.
More specifically, he hopes the findings “elevate and affirm the importance of our faith, while also giving us language in all the branches and understanding the experiences of others.”
Howlett and Sutherland showcased the research at the April 2024 Mary Lou Fulton Mentored Student Research Conference. Leonhardt went on to present more of the survey's findings in 2025 at his own exhibit titled "’Something Beyond our Grasp’: A Bottom-Up Approach to Sacredness” during the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention in PLACE. His presentation delved into the study’s insights on how sacredness shapes individual lives across cultures and contexts.