Fear of death unaffected by intensity or type of afterlife belief in a Jewish population.

Résumé

We investigate the relationship between religious afterlife belief and fear of death in a Jewish population. Functionalist theories of religion often assert that afterlife belief serves as a buffer for death anxiety. Accordingly, those who attest to stronger, more orthodox, beliefs in an afterlife ought to indicate lower rates of death anxiety than those who do not have strongly held afterlife beliefs. From a wide-ranging survey of attitudes and experiences with death, we show that specific beliefs, intensity of belief, and orthodoxy of held beliefs play no significant role in the self-reported level of death anxiety in a Jewish population.