Van Tongeren (2020) - Face to Face with Death: The Role of Religion in Coping with Suffering

Human suffering is a focal point of religion, yet it also poses a problem for many religions: how could a loving God or sacred deity allow evil into the world and pain to torment humanity? Suffering is an existential concern that often erodes meaning, results in cracks in people’s fundamental assumptions about the world, and leaves people prone to existential anxiety. Moreover, suffering also makes threats of death unavoidable or undeniable—they must be directly confronted. In this chapter, I review the existential function of religion, discuss how the nature and content of religious beliefs play a role in how people manage the threats of death created by suffering, and consider how religious responses to death include fighting, freezing, fleeing, and flourishing. I conclude by discussing future areas of research to advance the scientific study of religion through the perspective of existential psychology.