Stressful Life Events and Religiousness Predict Struggles About Religion and Spirituality

摘要

Many people experience religious/spiritual (R/S) struggles following specific stressful life events (SLE). However, SLE may aggregate, gradually undermining individuals' orienting systems. Does SLE accumulation predict greater R/S struggles? Might general religiousness buffer cumulative effects of SLE on R/S struggles? We tested these hypotheses using religiousness and 19 kinds of SLE as predictors of the 6-factor Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale. Using measurement invariance constraints on four samples from 3 universities and the Internet (total N = 4,675), cumulative SLE independently predicted greater R/S struggles of all kinds in all samples equally. Thus, heightened R/S struggles tend to accompany accumulated SLE. However, the interaction of religiousness and SLE failed to predict R/S struggles, yielding no support for the buffering hypothesis. Stress-exposed populations face R/S struggles of many kinds, regardless of religiousness. We recommend tests of the buffering hypothesis targeting aspects of religious orienting systems that connect more directly to R/S struggles.