Experimental Theological Aesthetics: A New Way to Study Faith, Beauty, and Architecture

How can the architecture of a church or other sacred space help people understand their faith, relate to God, and reflect on life’s deepest questions? Dr. Matthew Niermann, professor of architecture in CBU’s College of Architecture, Visual Arts and Design, is leading an interdisciplinary research project exploring this question. 

Many people describe stepping into a church, cathedral, or other beautiful space and feeling drawn toward prayer, stillness, wonder, or reflection. These experiences are often treated as personal feelings that are difficult to study. This research begins with a larger possibility: beauty and architecture may do more than create emotion. They may also help people gain insight, make meaning, and understand spiritual realities more deeply. 

The project is helping develop a new field called Experimental Theological Aesthetics, or XTA. Theological aesthetics explores the relationship between God, faith, beauty, and the arts. Empirical aesthetics uses observation, experiments, and scientific tools to study how people perceive and respond to beauty. XTA brings these approaches together by empirically testing aesthetic experiences, interpreting them theologically, and using what is learned to inform future art, architecture, and design. 

With support from Templeton Religion Trust, the research team conducted a comparative study involving approximately 180 Catholic, Protestant, and nonreligious participants. Each participant experienced three architectural settings: a Catholic cathedral, a Protestant church, and an art museum. Because every participant visited all three locations, the study produced approximately 540 individual site experiences. 

During the visits, participants wore eye-tracking equipment and physiological sensors. These tools allowed researchers to examine where people looked, which architectural features held their attention, and how their bodies responded. Participants also completed surveys and interviews describing what they noticed, felt, and thought about during each experience. 

The goal is not simply to determine which building people found most beautiful or to claim that architecture automatically produces faith. Instead, the study asks how different environments shape attention, reflection, emotion, and meaning-making. It also examines whether Catholics, Protestants, and nonreligious participants notice and interpret the same spaces differently. 

Although the full analysis is still underway, early patterns suggest that spaces experienced as beautiful, coherent, or sacred may encourage deeper reflection on meaning, purpose, transcendence, and human existence. The research also indicates that a person’s religious background may shape what they notice and how they understand the experience. 

By combining physiological data, visual attention, participant descriptions, architectural analysis, and theological reflection, XTA offers a fuller way to study experiences often considered too personal or subjective to measure. The findings may help architects, theologians, artists, and church leaders better understand how sacred spaces can support worship, contemplation, discipleship, community, and spiritual flourishing. 

To learn more about Experimental Theological Aesthetics, watch the video above or explore CBU’s Architecture program.