The Science of Religion, Spirituality, and Existentialism

Kenneth E. Vail III,Clay Routledge

• Editorial: Academic Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780128172056
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Experimental Psychology

The Science of Religion, Spirituality, and Existentialism presents in-depth analysis of the core issues in existential psychology, their connections to religion and spirituality (e.g., religious concepts, beliefs, identities, and practices), and their diverse outcomes (e.g., psychological, social, cultural, and health). Leading scholars from around the world cover research exploring how fundamental existential issues are both cause and consequence of religion and spirituality, informed by research data spanning multiple levels of analysis, such as: evolution; cognition and neuroscience; emotion and motivation; personality and individual differences; social and cultural forces; physical and mental health; among many others.

The Science of Religion, Spirituality, and Existentialism explores known contours and emerging frontiers, addressing the big question of why religious belief remains such a central feature of the human experience.

• Discusses both abstract concepts of mortality and concrete near-death experiences
• Covers the struggles and triumphs associated with freedom, self-regulation, and authenticity
• Examines the roles of social exclusion, experiential isolation, attachment, and the construction of social identity
• Considers the problems of uncertainty, the effort to discern truth and reality, and the challenge to find meaning in life
• Discusses how the mind developed to handle existential topics, how the brain and mind implement the relevant processes, and the many variations and individual differences that alter those processes
• Delves into the psychological functions of religion and science; the influence on pro- and antisocial behavior, politics, and public policy; and looks at the role of spiritual concerns in understanding the human body and maintaining physical health

Part 1

Death

Outline

• Chapter 1 Dwelling forever in the house of the lord: on the terror management function of religion
• Chapter 2 Death anxiety and religious belief: a critical review
• Chapter 3 Face to face with death: the role of religion in coping with suffering
• Chapter 4 Near-death experiences: the mystical feeling of “crossing over” and its impact on faith and spirituality

Chapter 1

Dwelling forever in the house of the lord: on the terror management function of religion

Jeff Greenberg¹, Peter J. Helm¹, Mark J. Landau² and Sheldon Solomon³, ¹University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States, ²University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, United States, ³Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, United States

Abstract

A critical function of religion is to manage the potential for terror inherent in living knowing the only certainty in one’s life is the knowledge that it will inevitably end. We first provide an overview of this terror management theory (TMT) account of religion. We discuss how children are socialized into faith in worldviews that allow them to believe they are significant contributors to a meaningful life. We consider how religious worldviews emerged and evolved over human history. We then briefly review empirical support for TMT in general and specifically as an explanation of faith in religions. We cover evidence that religiosity reduces death anxiety, that reminders of mortality increase investment in religion, and that religiosity reduces defensive responses to reminders of mortality. We conclude by considering TMT insights into the constructive and destructive influences of two kinds of religious worldviews.

Keywords

Terror management theory; religiosity; death anxiety; mortality salience; worldviews; immortality

Fear, first of all, produced gods in the world.

Statius (AD 45–AD 96).

…In the decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man and realizes his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself for the first time as essentially human fear in the presence of death… higher thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it.

Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West (1926/1999, p. 166).

A phenomenon as long-standing, complex, and far-reaching as religion undoubtedly serves multiple psychological functions. Indeed, Allport (1950) explored many of these functions in his classic The Individual and His Religion. More recently, Batson and Stocks (2004) proposed that, over historical eras and for many individuals, religion has served each of the categories of human needs in Maslow’s (1970) hierarchical model: physiological, safety, belongingness, self-esteem, and self-actualization. Numerous chapters in this volume examine the relationship between religion and one or more of these needs. Here, we make the case that a critical function of religion is to manage the potential for terror inherent in living in an apparently absurd universe in which the only certainty in one’s life is the knowledge that it will inevitably end.

Religious affiliations and identities can help assuage existential terror by providing a sense of symbolic continuance beyond death via enduring contributions to the religious group or its causes, or simply by identifying with the collective, which will continue beyond one’s individual death. In this regard, religions are very similar to secular forms of symbolic death transcendence, such as nations, the sciences, and the arts.

Religions are, however, unique in that they also offer hope of literal death transcendence by providing people with supernatural conceptions of reality that include the possibility of transcending death through an immortal soul and afterlife, a function deemed important by many writers (e.g., Allen, 1897/2000; Allport, 1950; Atran, 2002; Becker, 1971; Burkert, 1996; Durkheim, 1995; Feuerbach, 1843/1980; Freud, 1915/1959; Kierkegaard, 1955; James, 1902; Lifton, 1979/1983; Rank, 1931/1961; Spengler, 1999; for alternative views, see Boyer, 1994; Leuba, 1925; Skinner, 1948; Wilson, 2002). For example, Allport (1950, p. 9) noted that

Man’s life, bracketed between two oblivions, is haunted by fear – of enemies, of nature, of sickness, poverty, ostracism; most of all of death, for of all creatures on earth man alone knows that he will die. Do we evoke the protection of an amulet, do we trust ourselves to the everlasting arms, do we discipline ourselves to seek Nirvana and so escape the threats that hover over us?

Historical and anthropological observations provide abundant evidence for this proposition. All small tribal religions include elaborate rituals associated with death and explicit beliefs that some aspect of the individual—one’s soul or spirit—persists after physical death (e.g., Siegel, 1980; Smart, 1996). Similarly, death rituals and beliefs in a death-transcending soul or other essence are prominent in the most popular contemporary religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism (although there is ongoing debate regarding Judaism). Moreover, the primary theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian text believed to be the foundational myth from which all the major monotheistic religions have sprung, was the search for immortality. From this perspective then, Jesus’ restoring of Lazarus to life and his own rising from the dead 3 days after his crucifixion were far more than mere parlor tricks to establish his supernatural powers; rather, they spoke to humanity’s most burning desire, to believe that death is not the absolute end of one’s existence.

There is also evidence that the threat of death inclines people to embrace and rely on religious beliefs. For example, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a surge in church attendance in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia (Lampman, 2001; Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003); in Bible sales in the United States (Rice, 2001); and in visits to religious and spiritual websites (Lampman, 2001). Heflick (2006) found that references to religion and afterlife beliefs were highly prevalent in 228 Texas death row inmates’ last statements. More recently, Pelham et al. (2018) found that, across many cultures, there is a substantial uptick in Google searches for religious constructs following surges in Google searches for potentially deadly diseases.

Although theological, anthropological, and historical scholarship, and these correlational findings are of great importance, terror management theory (TMT; for overviews, see Greenberg, Vail, & Pyszczynski, 2014; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991a, 2015) has generated a considerable body of experimental research that provides additional support for the central roles that religion (and secular culture as well) play in quelling mortality concerns by providing people with a sense of death transcendence. TMT builds on pan-disciplinary cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s (1971, 1973, 1975) synthesis of insights from scholars such as biologist Charles Darwin, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, psychologists Sigmund Freud, William James, Gregory Zilboorg, and Otto Rank, sociologist Erving Goffman, psychohistorians Norman Brown and Robert Jay Lifton, and theologian Paul Tillich to understand the motivational underpinnings of human behavior. After encountering Becker’s work in the early 1980s, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (1986) distilled Becker’s synthesis into TMT. Subsequent tests of TMT-based hypotheses have generated a corpus of research that now consists of over 1400 studies conducted in 26 different countries. We believe that TMT provides a compelling account of why and how religion serves to manage existential terror and offers clues as to how religion might have evolved to serve this aim.

Terror management theory

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Baldwin, 1963/1998, p. 339).

TMT begins by noting fundamental commonalities between humans and other animals. As products of evolution, humans share with other species a variety of biological systems geared toward survival. We have elaborate mechanisms to sustain the necessary intake of oxygen and nutrients, to regulate our internal temperature, and to execute a myriad of other vital physiological processes. We also have basic emotions that help keep us alive, such as fear and anger to marshal fight or flight responses to parry threats to existence. Indeed, reminiscent of Freud’s concept of the it (also known as the id), our limbic system seems designed primarily to keep us alive by regulating basic biological needs and generating fear and urgent action when our lives are threatened.

Of course humans are not all it; what distinguishes us most clearly from other animals is the relatively large and highly developed cerebral cortex that provides our species with a unique intelligence: a capacity for symbolic thought and reasoning, which has facilitated the vast proliferation of our species around the globe. Humans are singularly capable, for example, of contemplating their own existence and shifting attention away from the momentary flow of sensations to think in complex, symbolic ways about the past, present, and future. At this very moment, this seemingly crowning jewel of evolution is precisely what allows us to proclaim ourselves the crowning jewel of evolution!

These awe-inspiring, powerful conceptual tools have made us so smart that we can imagine and bring to fruition all kinds of great possibilities (e.g., plows, planes, and pizzas). However, they also allow, and at times compel, us to imagine possibilities and inevitabilities that are distinctly less desirable. To know that we exist enables us to consider the possibility that we will not exist. We can anticipate all sorts of possible threats to existence; but even more unsettling, we know that, sooner or later, our own death is inevitable. Combine this knowledge with the desire for survival rooted in our limbic system and you have an organism with an omnipresent potential to experience dread, or terror:

In every calm and reasonable person there is hidden a second person scared witless about death.

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (Roth, 2001, p. 153).

How, then, can the human animal—abundantly predisposed to survive while knowing full well that annihilation is always potentially impending, and ultimately, inevitable—function securely in this world? TMT posits that we do so by imbedding ourselves in a symbolically constituted reality according to which, the world is orderly, stable, and meaningful; and each of us is a significant being who will survive in some way after physical death. Toward this end, all cultural worldviews explain where we humans come from, our present place in the universe, how we may be valuable contributors to this ultimate reality, and how, through our valued status, we can transcend death. P...

Índice

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part 1: Death
• Part 2: Freedom
• Part 3: Isolation and social identity
• Part 4: Systems of meaning
• Part 5: Mechanisms, variations, and individual differences
• Part 6: Applications and controversies
• Index