Religious Struggle and Life Satisfaction Among Adult Christians: Self-esteem as a Mediator

Małgorzata Szcześniak,Celina Timoszyk-Tomczak

doi:10.1007/s10943-020-01082-9

Małgorzata Szcześniak, Celina Timoszyk-Tomczak

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-01082-9

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Abstract

The religious dimension of life represents an important source of human strength, meaning, and coping for many people. However, the religious life is not always “smooth and easy” and can be associated with weak personal adjustment, poorer psychological well-being, and lower satisfaction. Yet, besides the direct relationship between these variables, some researchers postulate the existence of an indirect association that has not been fully explained by various psychosocial mediators. The aim of the present study was to verify whether self-esteem could be a potential mediator between religious strain and life satisfaction. The sample consisted of 607 adult Christians (49.6% women) aged between 18 and 79. We used the Religious Comfort and Strain Scale, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Consistent with our hypotheses, life satisfaction positively correlated with religious comfort and was negatively associated with fear/guilt, negative emotions toward God, and negative social interactions surrounding religion. The same pattern of results was shown in the case of self-esteem. Moreover, the outcomes obtained from bootstrap sampling (5000) with a 95% confidence interval indicated a significant role of self-esteem as a mediator in all of the relationships between: (1) religious comfort and life satisfaction; (2) fear/guilt and life satisfaction; (3) negative emotions toward God and life satisfaction; and (4) negative social interactions surrounding religion and life satisfaction.

Highlights

The religious dimension of life represents an important source of human strength, meaning, and coping for many people (Exline et al 2014a, b; Hill and Pargament 2003)
Fear, negative emotions toward God, negative social interactions, satisfaction with life, and selfesteem were tested for skewness and kurtosis to assess the normality of the variables’ distribution
It is important to notice that the scores of religious comfort, fear, negative emotions toward God, and negative social interaction obtained in the present study were quite similar to the values obtained by Zarzycka (2014), Zarzycka et al (2017), and Szcześniak et al (2019, 2020) in different Polish samples

Summary

Introduction

The religious dimension of life represents an important source of human strength, meaning, and coping for many people (Exline et al 2014a, b; Hill and Pargament 2003). At various stages of life development, different individuals may experience religious struggles manifested in negative thoughts, beliefs, emotions or behaviors toward God and other religious people or institutions (Exline et al 2014a, b). Most studies show that religious struggle has a tendency to be associated with weaker personal adjustment (Zarzycka and Zietek 2018), poorer psychological well-being (Stauner et al 2019), and lower life satisfaction (Park et al 2011; Szcześniak et al 2019). The research literature seems to indicate that struggles relate to lower functioning (Wilt et al 2016)

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