Anger toward God(s) Among Undergraduates in India
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 9
Abstract
Many people report occasional feelings of anger toward God. However, most evidence pertains to western, predominantly Christian populations. In this study, Indian university students (N = 139; 78% Hindu) completed a survey about anger toward God(s). Polytheists (45%) chose one god to focus on. Measurement invariance tests supported comparisons of anger toward God between the predominantly Hindu Indian sample and three mostly Christian U.S. undergraduate samples (Ns = 1040, 1811, 918). Indian participants reported more current and situation-specific anger toward God than U.S. participants, but less anger toward God over their lifetimes. In the Indian sample, anger toward God correlated positively with other indicators of religious/spiritual struggle, seeing God as cruel and distant, and seeing anger toward God as morally acceptable. Regarding an event involving suffering, anger toward God related positively to the event’s harmfulness, seeing God as responsible, seeing God’s actions as negative, and responses involving substance use and protest toward God. Generally, these findings replicated those from prior U.S. samples. Polytheists who preferred some gods over others or chose to follow a different god reported greater anger toward gods. Results uphold the comparability of anger toward God(s) between Indian and U.S. undergraduates while beginning to reveal key differences.
Authors and Affiliations
Julie J. Exline, Shanmukh Kamble and Nick Stauner
The Canonical Black Body: Alternative African American Religions and the Disruptive Politics of Sacrality
“The Canonical Black Body” argues that central to the study of African American religions is a focus on the black body and the production and engagement of canons on the sacred black body within the black public sphere...
Passing through Customs: Merold Westphal, Richard Kearney, and the Methodological Boundaries between Philosophy of Religion and Theology
Continental philosophers of religion and the theologians who engage with them have recently began to blur the lines between the disciplines of philosophy and theology. This is particularly true after the so-called “the...
The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale: Overview and Results
The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES) is a 16-item self-report measure designed to assess ordinary experiences of connection with the transcendent in daily life. It includes constructs such as awe, gratitude, mer...
The International NERSH Data Pool— A Methodological Description of a Data Pool of Religious and Spiritual Values of Health Professionals from Six Continents
Collaboration within the recently established Network for Research on Spirituality and Health (NERSH) has made it possible to pool data from 14 different surveys from six continents. All surveys are largely based on th...
Faith in the Ghosts of Literature. Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrison’s Beloved
Literature, this paper argues, is a privileged language that can give form to those specters of existence that resist the traditional ontological boundaries of being and non-being, alive and dead. This I describe as th...