Intrinsic religiosity protects believers from the existential fear of a human Jesus

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the role of internalised religious beliefs in defending against existential concerns aroused from a creaturely Jesus. Prior work has found that biologically human traits (e.g., vomiting, sweating, etc.) can increase death concerns when applied to both humans and a god. Intrinsic beliefs, however, have been shown to reduce mortality awareness. In the current study, religious participants were primed with thoughts of either a human or neutral Jesus followed by a single item measure about fear of death. A moderated regression analysis found that whereas high intrinsic individuals were buffered from existential concerns, low intrinsic individuals experienced a greater fear of death when primed with a human Jesus. These results replicate prior work within terror management theory and the psychology of religion suggesting that internalised beliefs serve a protective function against existential anxieties.

KEYWORDS:

• Terror management theory
• intrinsic religiosity
• creatureliness
• fear of death
• existential anxiety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Criteria were based on pilot-tests of the article (i.e., average reading time was ≥30 seconds), in addition to suggestions made by Arrowood and Cox (2018). Even when including the 33 persons from the analyses, the results remained in the hypothesised direction. Our decision to drop participants was to remain conservative in our analyses. However, given the moderate to large effect sizes observed by Arrowood and Cox, combined with TMT work in general (Burke et al., 2010), a power analysis found that 90 participants were needed to obtain statistical significance with 80% power.

2. Following Zhou and Fishbach (2016), a binary logistic regression examined whether the number of dropped participants varied as a function of the 2-way interaction between the creaturely Jesus prime and intrinsic religiosity. The results were non-significant, b = −.02 (SE = .16), χ² = .01, p = .91.