Religious Fundamentalism and Terror Management

Abstract

The study reported herein tested the following hypothesis: Religious fundamentalism can serve a protective function against existential anxiety, such that the need to engage in secular worldview defense when mortality is made salient is reduced for high fundamentalists. The results showed that high fundamentalists engaged in less worldview defense after thinking about their own death versus a control topic. Low fundamentalists, however, engaged in more worldview defense after thinking about their deaths versus a control topic. Exploratory analyses revealed that high fundamentalists' writings about death had a more positive emotional tone and that reactions to the death salience manipulation moderated the impact of fundamentalism on worldview defense. Fundamentalists who saw their deaths in terms of peace and acceptance appeared most protected against terror management concerns.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Ramona L. Paetzold for her assistance with this article.

Notes

¹School traditions may seem like a relatively unimportant component of one's worldview. At Texas A&M University, where the present data were collected, much emphasis is placed on maintaining school traditions. It is widely believed that the university's many traditions connect it to its long history and, thus, maintain the university's identity and distinguish it from other schools. In our study, the tradition at issue involves behavior at a football game. Support for this single tradition has broader implications; support for any one tradition is support for the broader notion that the campus should hold fast to its history and identity.

²A t test indicated that fundamentalism scores were not impacted by experimental condition, t(118) = .33, p > .05. This result is entirely consistent with the results of Landau et al. (2004) and Pyszczynski et al. (2006), who both found no effect of MS on political orientation, and with the results of Jonas and Fischer (2006), who found no effect of MS on religiosity. From the perspective of TMT, the critical impact of the MS manipulation is to strengthen one's central beliefs, not to change them.

³Preliminary analyses showed that gender was related to certain components of the worldview defense measure but not others. For this reason, gender is included as a fully crossed factor to test for main effects or interactions involving this variable. No such main effects or interactions appear.

⁴An examination of the worldview defense means in the dental pain control condition shows that, consistent with our previous findings, high fundamentalists show greater baseline support for campus traditions than do low fundamentalists.

⁵A repeated measures ANOVA assessing reactions to the pro- and anti-traditions essay writers as a within-subject dependent measure revealed a significant Essay Type (pro vs. anti tradition) × Condition × Fundamentalism interaction, F(1, 111) = 3.98, p < .05. Low fundamentalists in the MS condition evaluated the pro-tradition essay more favorably and the anti-tradition essay less favorably, compared to low fundamentalists in the dental pain control condition. The differences between high fundamentalists' reactions to the pro- and anti-tradition essays in the MS versus the dental pain control conditions were small in comparison to differences among low fundamentalists.

⁶The Condition × Fundamentalism interaction did not reach statistical significance in regression format, β = −.22, t(111) = 1.39, p = .17. However, the Fundamentalism × Peace/Acceptance interaction in the MS condition (presented next) indicates that high fundamentalists' worldview defense is moderated by their specific reactions to the MS manipulation. Because there is no linear relationship between fundamentalism and worldview defense in the MS condition, the overall Fundamentalism × Condition cannot be significant in regression format.

⁷This analysis focused on peace and acceptance because these two variables are conceptually related; both focus on the level of positive feelings surrounding one's death. Uncertainty is conceptually different in that it focuses on sureness about what follows death, whether it is good, bad, or neutral. In support of this notion, the correlation between peace and acceptance (r = .85) is greater than the correlations between uncertainty and peace (r = −.61) and acceptance (r = −.52), respectively.

⁸The Fundamentalism × Peace/Acceptance interaction was statistically significant in regression format, β = −.32, t(50) = 2.02, p < .05.

⁹The analysis also revealed an interaction between peace/acceptance and gender, F(1, 51) = 7.39, p < .05. Men whose descriptions revealed positive emotions engaged in much less worldview validation than men who did not. Women's tendencies to validate were not as strongly related to the emotions coded.

¹⁰A Levene's test indicated that the error variances were equal across cells, F(7, 43) = 1.75, p = .12, ns.

¹¹A t test (using the overall MS error term) comparing worldview defense among high fundamentalist based on levels of peace/acceptance (low vs. high) revealed an effect for peace/acceptance, t(43) = 1.35, p < .10 (significant at α = .10). The corresponding t value for low fundamentalists was t(43) = .27, ns.

¹²An analysis of fundamentalism scores showed that people in the high fundamentalist groups who revealed less peace/acceptance in their writings scored just as high on fundamentalism as people who revealed more peace/acceptance. Thus, differences in worldview validation by high fundamentalists based on their death essays cannot be explained by variation in fundamentalism scores.

¹³The relationship between religious themes and worldview defense was examined in a similar manner to that of peace and acceptance. An ANOVA using worldview defense as a dependent variable (DV), and examining effects of fundamentalism (high vs. low), religious themes (high vs. low), and the interaction of these variables revealed no significant effects.