Two Cambridge-led studies suggest that the psychological distress caused by lockdowns (UK) and experience of infection (US) was reduced among those of faith compared to non-religious people.
People of religious faith may have experienced lower levels of unhappiness and stress than secular people during the UK’s Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, according to a new University of Cambridge study released as a working paper.
The findings follow recently published Cambridge-led research suggesting that worsening mental health after experiencing Covid infection – either personally or in those close to you – was also somewhat ameliorated by religious belief. This study looked at the US population during early 2021.
University of Cambridge economists argue that – taken together – these studies show that religion may act as a bulwark against increased distress and reduced wellbeing during times of crisis, such as a global public health emergency.
“Selection biases make the wellbeing effects of religion difficult to study,” said Prof Shaun Larcom from Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy, and co-author of the latest study. “People may become religious due to family backgrounds, innate traits, or to cope with new or existing struggles.”
“However, the Covid-19 pandemic was an extraordinary event affecting everyone at around the same time, so we could gauge the impact of a negative shock to wellbeing right across society. This provided a unique opportunity to measure whether religion was important for how some people deal with a crisis.”
An ideology that told you you were protected by some big brother type being, that your dead relatives would once live again and that the bad people you knew would get theirs eventually would absolutely be comforting. Thats a lot of why religions spread so readily in the past when things were arguably bleak by default. i.e most of your kids died young, diseases, storms, droughts, floods, locust swarms, famine, war, very little of the world would be understood. The only thing people really had to cling to was religion. It gave them (false) explanations for the unexplainable and (false) hope and comfort that they could pull through if only they believed a specific set of things and followed a specific set of rules. It was arguably advantageous during a time when there was really no alternative. But today it is dangerous. Comforting when shit hits the fan but often directly or indirectly the cause of shit hitting the fan in the first place.