We find the understanding of Christian contentment in a well-known passage from Philippians 4 where Paul states, “for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty….I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” As more mature believers will often note for young believers who throw around the last verse, Paul is talking about leaning upon God’s strength to be content. We desperately need God to do it.

This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found that “between one-half to two-thirds of young, emerging adults (18-23) said that their well-being can be measured by what they own, that buying more things would make them happier.”¹ Perhaps one has guessed, but I am talking about the virtue of contentment.

According to Google n-gram, the use of the word “contented” has been in continual decline since 1791, and “contentment” has been waning since 1925. Due to Christian writers, there are still recent books written about it,² but the virtue has received surprisingly little attention from the wider scholarly world. It has been especially neglected in positive psychology. I found less than a dozen studies in this field examining contentment, and all of these were written within the last decade and associated with two key authors.³

Thus, it is not surprising that one of these studies, a 2021 proposal for how to measure contentment empirically, had to plow new ground by creating one of the first-ever measures of contentment.⁴ In this post, I will evaluate the definition behind the measure and the measurement itself by comparing it to the Christian understanding of contentment. I find that there is nothing more helpful in seeing the limits of common grace/natural law than examining positive psychological measures of various virtues and comparing them to a conception of the virtue defined by the Biblical tradition.

Measuring Contentment

To begin, it is interesting to see how the scholars define contentment. They describe it as “an emotion that arises from the perception of completeness in life.”⁵ Thus, although this definition acknowledges a cognitive aspect (“the perception of completeness in life”) as a trigger for the emotion, contentment is seen primarily as an emotion. The scholars do not mention how this habitual perception might be transformed into a habitual affection that then transforms one’s behavior—a habit that would be the essence of the virtue of contentment.

Thus, the scale they developed, the PEACE Scale, is not so much a measure of the virtue of contentment, but “a stable and reliable, one-factor measure of the emotion of contentment.” Below are fifteen items “that generally captured the construct of contentment” as they defined it.⁶

• I am satisfied with everything that life has to offer each and every moment.
• I feel contentment in my daily life.
• I feel content with who I am.
• I feel contentment and peace no matter what is going on in my external environment.
• I often feel an unshakable sense of peace and contentment.
• I feel a deep sense of contentment even during difficult situations in life.
• Even though I may work throughout the day, I feel content with everything I do.
• I feel content with my life regardless of whether others accept me or not.
• Everything is exactly as it should be.
• I am content with what I have.
• I feel balanced in my relationships with others.
• Overall, my relationships with others are easy to manage.
• I do not desire anything more in my relationships with others.
• I would be content with my life even if I lost all of my status, wealth, and achievements.
• When I feel stressed, I stop what I am doing and take care of myself.⁷

Does this scale measure the Christian virtue of contentment? Not really.

We find the understanding of Christian contentment in a well-known passage from Philippians 4:11b–13 where Paul states:

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