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The Types of People Who Are Most Likely to Embrace Death

A 2017 study looks at who fears death and who is ready to shuffle off their mortal coil.
A woman holding a skull
Photo by Deirdre Malfatto via Stocksy

There have been many studies over the years that have looked at the link between religion and a fear of death, and it's not hard to understand why. The theory goes that the more religious you are, the more likely you are to embrace the end times. You'll be saved, after all—or, as Donald Trump's CIA director has said, all will be well after the rapture.

To see if this hypothesis was actually true, Dr. Jonathan Jong, a researcher at Coventry University in the UK, conducted an analysis of 100 studies, published between 1961 and 2014, that examined the association between religiosity and death anxiety. He found highly religious people are more likely to feel comfortable with their mortality, but the link was weak.

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Read more: What Is Death-Positive Activism?

Further, some studies looked at "extrinsic religiosity" and "intrinsic religiosity" as it relates to a fear of death ("extrinsic religiosity" refers to people who turn to religion due to external factors, such as social acceptance, whereas "intrinsic religiosity" refers to those who see religion as an end in itself). Jong found that religious people who fit the former category—those who primarily motived to adhere to a religion for its social benefits—were more worried about death than the latter, the "true believers." (Perhaps this means that disingenuous, evangelist politicians like Ted Cruz and Mike Pence sometimes lose some sleep over the fact that their aging bodies will soon turn to dust.)

Conversely, past research has also indicated that if you're not religious all, you're also likely to be chill with dying. Jong looked at this too, among the 11 studies from the dataset that allowed for this analysis. Almost all of them confirmed the pattern.

"This definitely complicates the old view, that religious people are less afraid of death than nonreligious people," Jong said in a press release. "It may well be that atheism also provides comfort from death, or that people who are just not afraid of death aren't compelled to seek religion."

I asked some people who will definitely not be transported to heaven during the second coming of Christ what they thought about this and, indeed, they seemed fine with their inevitable demise. "I think i would get really bored and tired if i didn't die eventually," Claire*, a friend in her twenties, said. "I really love being asleep," she added, "which I assume is similar to being dead."

Another heathen responded, "It's comforting knowing when I die that it's because I am literally just a random collection of bacteria and no one cares."