ABSTRACT
Social scientists have had little to say about the relation between religion and stress. Typically, religion has been viewed as a dispositional construct—a general set of beliefs and practices. Its applications to life’s most critical moments have gone largely unstudied. Coping theory provides one framework for understanding the role of religion in stressful times. Coping is a goal-directed process; it moves to the future. People cope with crises to maximize whatever is of significance to them. Significance may be material, physical, psychological, social, or spiritual. Like coping, religion is also a process. It too is a search for significance, but a search of a special kind. Religion provides a number of special coping methods by which people attempt to conserve the things they care about most deeply. In the process of coping, religion may serve as the independent variable, shaping coping outcomes, and as the dependent variable, shaped by the coping transaction.
