Death and deities: A social cognitive perspective

written by Jonathan Jong & Jamin Halberstadt
edited by Namkje Koudenburg

One problem with such a view is that the afterlives that many religions promise are arguably more terrifying than death itself. Many religious belief systems posit gloomy graves or horrific hells. According to their own religious texts (cf. Iliad), Homeric Greeks, regardless of merit, all descended into a dreary Hades, while ancient Mesopotamians were infamously cast into a terrifying netherworld populated by monsters (cf. The Netherworld Vision of an Assyrian Crown Prince) or a despairing one in which “dust is their food, clay their bread” and “they see no light, they dwell in darkness...over the door and the bolt, dust has settled” (cf. The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld; Dalley, 1998, p. 155). Historically, and also contemporarily, eternal torment in Hell is a subjectively real possibility in various Christian denominations. Calvinists, for example, experience “salvation anxiety”, as each individual’s eternal fate is determined unilaterally by God and unaffected by human effort (Mather, 2005, p. 4; Munzer, 2005). Indeed, this anxiety can be so entrenched that many ex-fundamentalists still report experiencing intense fear of divine punishment even after they have abandoned such beliefs (Hartz & Everett, 1989). These anthropological findings at least call into question the universality and priority of death-anxiety reduction as a motivating force for religious belief.

Another question regarding TMT is how to distinguish between the two routes by which religion theoretically reduces fear of death. It is easy to see how religious worldviews—at least those with comforting afterlife beliefs—can provide literal immortality: they promise that, despite appearances, physical death is not final. But religious worldviews also provide symbolic immortality by allowing people to feel like valuable parts of something larger and more enduring than themselves (Landau, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2004; Vail et al., 2010). Indeed, Becker (1971, 1975) and Greenberg et al. (in press) suggest that religious worldviews offer symbolic immortality more effectively than do secular worldviews, thanks to their self-esteem-enhancing notions of cosmic significance. How can we determine whether supernatural agents are comforting in themselves, or by virtue of their association with individuals’ worldviews, or both?

Testing the relationship between fear of death and religious belief

One seemingly simple approach to the question would be to ask whether people who are relatively receptive to religious beliefs do indeed feel comforted about death, even when they do not hold a religious worldview. However, the theoretical relation between religiosity and death anxiety is not as straightforward as it appears. For those who already have a religious worldview, religious belief may be available as a resource to buffer anxiety, but for those who do notbelieve, anxiety might provide a motivation to do so, such that these individuals are more inclined to believe as their anxiety increases. Thus, the relation between religious beliefs and fear of death may depend on prior religious commitment: as atheists increasingly fear death they are increasingly tempted to believe in God, whereas those who already believe in God successfully use that belief to allay their fear of death.

Indeed, although the correlational data on religiosity and death anxiety are mixed and inconclusive (Donovan, 1994), some sense may be made of them by taking into account participants’ prior religious leanings. For example, Harding, Flannelly, Weaver, and Costa (2005), surveyed Christians and found negative correlations between death-related anxiety and belief in God and an afterlife, whereas Dezutter et al. (2009) studied a predominantly non-religious sample and found a positive relationship between fear of death and literal interpretations of Christian faith. Relatedly, Cohen, Pierce, Chambers, Meade, Gorvine, and Koenig (2005) found that death-anxiety was negatively correlated with Protestants’ “intrinsic religiosity” (roughly, the extent to which they embrace religious beliefs as important in themselves; Allport & Ross, 1967), but positively correlated with “extrinsic religiosity” (roughly, the extent to which their beliefs are merely useful means to some other practical end; Allport & Ross, 1967). Similarly, in our own recent survey of university students, the half who identified themselves as religious reported less fear of death to the extent they endorsed the existence of supernatural agents and events (God, angels, heaven, etc.), whereas the half who identified as non-religious showed the reverse trend: for them, greater fear of death was associated with a stronger inclination toward religious belief (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2012; for conceptually similar results see: Aday, 1984–1985; Dolnick, 1987; Downey, 1984; Leming, 1979– 1980; McMordie, 1981; Nelson & Cantrell, 1980; Wen, 2010; Wink & Scott, 2005).

The fact that non-religious people—atheists, agnostics, as well as the more nominally non-religious—appear to seek solace in religious beliefs, seems to argue that these beliefs are comforting in themselves (presumably via their implications for literal immortality), and not because they fit their worldviews. But is increased anxiety about death the cause of enhanced religious belief? Or is decreased religious belief the cause of lower anxiety about death? Atheism is, after all, a worldview, and a positive correlation between anxiety and religious belief may simply reflect that, like their Christian counterparts, atheists relieve their existential anxiety by bolstering their own beliefs, which in their case happen to include a denial of God.

magazine issue 5 2012 / Issue 15