Death, Despair, and Deities
Religion, the panacea to duress. Religion is prevalent in everyday life, but in times of extraordinary stress, religion is dusted off and becomes even more ubiquitous. Throughout history, it has been documented that the level of involvement, in terms of intensity and duration, religiosity undulates. Religion ultimately serves as a coping mechanism for providing explanatory answers to a complex, convoluted world. This post will examine several calamities — both past and present — that accentuated religious practice.
Starting with the U.S. Civil War, mass death was a burden imposed on many. War was a lived experienced by nearly all of society. The U.S. Civil War accounts for anywhere between 752,000 to 851,000 deaths.[1] Up until the Vietnam war, the Civil War’s death rate exceeded all other war deaths combined. Society was hurriedly compelled to seek justifications and means of coping with the encompassing morbidity. During the war, clergymen played a significant role in publicly promoting the use of religion as a form of solace and hope, and religious ideology became a sort of psychological haven, promoting the notion of “afterlife,” as a way to eliminate the finality of death. According to some religious doctrine, for assurance of eternal life, soldiers and civilians alike must be spiritually prepared for death, meaning they have made “right” with God and are ready and willing to meet their savior.[2] This ideology helped society conceptualize and accept potential imminent death. Religious schema and prose helped the public justify their immense loss while evolving their fears of death into an eagerness of spiritual immortality. There was suddenly a growing sense of ease with the promise of reunification in the afterlife.
Just fifty or so years later, the U.S. was again faced with mass death. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 swept across the globe, ultimately killing at least 50 million people worldwide, with about 675,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.[3] Again, sudden death was becoming the norm, and society was faced with uncertainty. Since the Spanish flu threatened death upon anyone, ministers wasted no time in urging the community to make right with God. This phenomenon was not exclusive to the United States. Orthodox Protestants, specifically in the Netherlands, urged “both Christians and non-Christians alike” to “repent their sins and see God through His Word.”[4] Akin to the importance of salvation during the Civil War, the Influenza Pandemic embodied a warning that people should be spiritually prepared for death for assurance of eternal life.
Fast forward one hundred years and our modern world is yet again faced with a global pandemic. After almost one full year since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the world has suffered through over 58 million total cases and over 1.3 million deaths.[5] The world is currently living through another stage of mass carnage. And according to a recent study, by analyzing the increase of Google searches for the word “prayer,” interest in religion has dramatically escalated amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.[6] The study goes further in identifying that samples who were considered to have “higher intrinsic religiosity” correlated with lower amounts of negative impacts of COVID-19 in terms of sleep, family, and enjoying life.[7] When uncertainty (especially death-related) becomes increasingly omnipresent, it is evident that people tend to depend on existential escapes in times of physical and mental turmoil. Their findings exemplify the positive impact that believing in a “higher power” can have on one’s mental health in terms of hope, solace, and optimism. This indicates why people are so apt to find relief via religion. By integrating religiosity, one can become more psychologically resilient in moments of duress and uncertainty.
From the nation’s greatest challenges of the past to the current — in order to quell negative emotions and to make sense of the world — people seek theological answers. Does this religiosity ameliorate the fundamental reasons causing this angst? God only knows.
[1] J. David Hacker, “A census-based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 307–48.
[2] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 18–19.
[3] “1918 Pandemic (H1N1 Virus) | Pandemic Influenza (Flu) | CDC,” June 16, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html.
[4] “Coping with Covid-19 in Dutch Christianity: A Comparison with the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic (Part One),” University of Groningen, April 24, 2020, https://www.rug.nl/research/centre-for-religious-studies/religion-conflict-globalization/blog/coping-with-covid-19-in-dutch-christianity-comparison-with-the-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-24-04-2020.
[5] “Coronavirus Update (Live): COVID-19 Virus Pandemic — Worldometer,” https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/.
[6] Steven Pirutinsky, Aaron D. Cherniak, and David H. Rosmarin, “COVID-19, Mental Health, and Religious Coping Among American Orthodox Jews,” Journal of Religion and Health, July 23, 2020.
[7] Pirutinsky, Cherniak, and Rosmarin, “COVID-19, Mental Health, and Religious Coping Among American Orthodox Jews.”