Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 40, August 2021, Pages 40-44
Current Opinion in Psychology

Death anxiety and religion

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.08.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The linear relationship between death anxiety and religious belief is inconsistent and probably averages around zero.

  • There is limited evidence that extremely religious and irreligious individuals report lower death anxiety than others.

  • Experiences with and proximity to death do not consistently predict religious belief.

  • Reminders of death temporarily strengthen religious belief among believers, but not nonbelievers.

  • Early evidence suggests that nonbelievers pursue nonreligious forms of literal immortality.

This review summarises research on the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity. The fear of death is commonly hypothesized as a motivation for religious belief. From a Terror Management Theory perspective, religious beliefs are especially attractive because they offer both literal and symbolic immortality in the form of afterlife beliefs and belonging in venerable systems of value respectively. However, the evidence for any relationship — whether correlational or causal — between death anxiety and religious belief is weak. Indeed, evidence for death anxiety under normal (i.e. non-life threatening) circumstances is surprisingly hard to find. If the fear of death motivates religiosity, it does so subtly, weakly, and sporadically.

Introduction

In an admittedly unscientific poll of 208 American users of Amazon Mechanical Turk, Jong and Halberstadt [1] found that over a quarter of respondents ranked the fear of death as the most important explanation of religion, trumping other plausible factors such as social influence from family and friends and the need to explain phenomena whether natural or seemingly miraculous. Popular opinion is joined here by scholars throughout the ages. Theorists of religion who posit the fear of death among the chief causes of religious belief include David Hume in the 18th century, Ludwig Feuerbach in the 19th, and Sigmund Freud, Bronisław Malinowski, and Ernest Becker in the 20th. It is, however, in Becker’s work that the fear of death really takes centre stage, not only in a functional analysis of religion, but as a fundamental driver of all human social and cultural activity [2,3]. Becker’s theory has been translated into social psychological terms with remarkable success as Terror Management Theory (TMT) [4,5].

Following Becker, TMT posits that human beings, gifted with self-awareness, are also cursed with the knowledge of our own mortality: this truth being too awful to bear, we embark on quests for immortality, literal and symbolic. On the literal side, we seek various means to prolong our lives, whether through elixirs or exercise or biotechnological enhancements. On the symbolic side, we yearn to live on in our offspring and our moral and material accomplishments within the value systems we inhabit. Religion therefore appears to be an especially attractive immortality project, as many religious traditions offer both literal and symbolic immortality, through their accounts of an afterlife and of morality and piety respectively. However, until recently, the empirical research on TMT has largely neglected religion. In the most recent meta-analysis of TMT research, only eight of the 277 collated effects can plausibly be considered to be about religion [6]. This review will examine the more recent TMT literature on religion in later section, but we will first begin by looking at correlational evidence for the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity.

Section snippets

Are death anxiety and religiosity correlated?

It is not clear what one ought to predict about the relationship between trait levels of religiosity and death anxiety. On one hand, if death anxiety motivates religiosity, then we might expect the two variables to be positively correlated. If, on the other hand, religiosity effectively reduces death anxiety, then we might expect a negative correlation. One way to resolve this contradiction is to posit a curvilinear relationship, such that the causal direction of the relationship changes as the

Does mortality salience increase religiosity?

We turn now to the experimental evidence. The first experiment on this topic actually predates Terror Management Theory: Osarchuk and Tatz [27] presented participants with a slideshow of scenes of death set to funereal music and accompanied by exaggerated mortality statistics, and found that those who had previously expressed belief in an afterlife now reported stronger belief. Participants who were told to expect electric shocks — also an anxiety-inducing experience — were not thus affected,

Conclusion

It is hard to say what to make of all this. There are plenty of correlational studies on death anxiety and religiosity, and survey of this literature suggests no linear relationship between them, or at best a very weak negative one; a handful of studies provide evidence for a curvilinear relationship, but if such a relationship exists it is weak and cross-culturally fickle. There are much fewer experimental studies, and these studies admit much less cultural diversity. Most — but not all — of

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper was supported by research grants from the John Templeton Foundation (52257) and Templeton World Charity Foundation (1064).

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