Fear of death unaffected by intensity or type of afterlife belief in a Jewish population

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between religious afterlife belief and fear of death in a Jewish population. Functionalist theories of religion often assert that afterlife belief serves as a buffer for death anxiety. Accordingly, those who attest to stronger, more orthodox, beliefs in an afterlife ought to indicate lower rates of death anxiety than those who do not have strongly held afterlife beliefs. From a wide-ranging survey of attitudes and experiences with death, we show that specific beliefs, intensity of belief, and orthodoxy of held beliefs play no significant role in the self-reported level of death anxiety in a Jewish population.

Notes

1 Given the flexibility of many Jews in terms of their denominational identity, we found a total of 87 different combinations of denomination, most of which were claimed by only one respondent, and so we present here only those claimed by at least 10 respondents.

2 A possible exception appears in the relationship between “Reform” respondents and those indicating a denomination of “Reform; Secular/Humanist,” to be discussed below.