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Deprivation, Compensation, and Conceptions of an Afterlife

1987; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3711683

2325-7873

Charles P. Flynn, Suzanne Kunkel,

Religion and Society Interactions

The Stark-Bainbridge model of religion as compensation was investigated empirically using data on conceptions of the afterlife from the General Social Surveys. Afterlife conceptions were factor analyzed, with several found to be compensatory, and others non-compensatory. Analyses were undertaken to determine if particular kinds of compensations afforded by compensatory afterlife beliefs were associated with particular kinds of deprivations, including low socioeconomic status, loss of loved ones, and traumatic events in respondents' lives. The findings showed limited support for the compensation model, but the relationships between compensatory afterlife conceptions and particular deprivations were neither as undimensional nor as uniform as the Stark-Bainbridge model would suggest. It is concluded that the Stark-Bainbridge model does not provide a definitive explanation of how religious beliefs provide rewards that compensate for various kinds of deprivations. The view that religious belief and commitment can be explained by various factors extrinsic to religion has had a long and multivariegated history. Feuerbach (1845, 1857) provided the foundations for most later compensatory models of religiosity with his view of God and other supernaturalistic conceptions as projections of human needs. Marx's noted conception of religion as the opiate of the masses extends and specifies this by asserting that belief in the supernatural assuages the miseries of victims of class exploitation, oppression, and alienation by the promise of a reward-filled, status-inverted afterlife. Freud ([1927] 1961) further elaborated the concept of religion as projection with his view that God, and by extension all supernaturalistic beliefs, are manifestations of childhood anxieties alleviated by an all-powerful father figure, while Durkheim (1915) focused on religion's provision of moral and social cohesion. More recently, various scholars have elaborated the central idea of religion as a projection of human need into theories that relate specific kinds of needs to particular religious belief systems. Glock and Stark (1965) contend that new religious movements derive from five basic kinds of deprivation: economic, social, organismic,