Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Religiosity: Evidence from Germany

Kanol, Eylem; Michalowski, Ines

Abstract

How does a major external shock that potentially threatens the community and the individual impact religiosityin the context of ongoing secularization? Do individuals in a rich and secularized society such as Germany reactto potential community-level (sociotropic) and individual-level (egotropic) threat with heightened religiosity? Weestimate multilevel regression models to investigate the impact of sociotropic and egotropic existential securitythreats associated with the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’religiosity. Our data come from a rolling cross-sectional online survey conducted in Germany among 7,500 respondents across 13 waves in 2020. Our findingssuggest that a global health pandemic such as COVID-19 increases individuals’ perception of existential andeconomic threat, which, in turn, leads to an increase in religiosity. However, this relationship is only true foregotropic existential security threat but not for sociotropic threat. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.