Poster Session
Religious Coping and Psychological Well-Being: An Examination of the Relationship between Positive Religious Coping and Mental Health among Young Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic View Digital Media
Poster Session Mona Ibrahim, Aiyana Jollie Trottier
As reported in a recent U.S. surgeon general’s advisory, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly worsened the mental health crisis that young people were already experiencing. College students, in particular, are experiencing alarming levels of decreased psychological well-being and life satisfaction coupled with increased loneliness and anxiety. As a result, demand for psychological services has overwhelmed the existing mental health system. The surgeon general’s advisory urges finding a wider variety of resources to help people cope with the pandemic. While there is much attention directed to how religious beliefs might hinder efforts to fight the pandemic, the role that religious coping might play in increasing psychological health and life satisfaction during the pandemic has not received enough attention. Previous research has indicated that positive religious coping is a predictor of life satisfaction and psychological wellbeing. My research focuses on the intersection of faith and health in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. We designed a survey to assess religious coping and key mental health outcomes in adult college students. This poster presents findings from our research study pertaining to the correlations between positive religious coping and various mental health outcomes, including life satisfaction, anxiety, and loneliness. Implications for potential interventions that might help enhance positive religious coping in young adults to increase their psychological well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.
Christian Nationalism and the Formation of Transgender Health Policies: A Review of Stigmatization around Gender Diversity in the Bible Belt
Poster Session Grace Payne
Developments in gender diversity are not nuanced, nor have they historically been demonized. Stigmatization on transgender people in the early twentieth century was far less aggressive than current attitudes towards transgender health. When gender is pulled into a political sphere, rather than residing in a personal one, negative opinions are forced upon queer people by those who hold the power of “normality.” Across the bible belt, cultural norms are represented by heteronormativity, christian nationalism, and capitalistic attainment. The overlap of conservatism and christianity has undeniably influenced the formation of strict health policies related to gender affirmation. In the bible belt, communities of queer folx have been restricted to seeking online health, health care in nearby liberal states, or receive no health care at all. Ultimately, gender has been brought into a political field by christian nationalists who support restrictive health policies and fixed autonomy. Preventative policies further promote paternalism in health care settings, which instill heteronormative notions of gender. When medical professionals cannot be responsible for implementation of gender-inclusive practices, members of society are led to believe that the only acceptable notion of gender is the model portrayed in their belief system. Those who reside in the bible belt are subject to the conflation of religious authority and political representatives, even when those individuals do not hold a religious affiliation. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the need to separate christian values from policy making as it relates to transgender health.
Religion and Love: Queering Relationships to Deconstruct Patriarchal Christianity
Poster Session Samantha Royka
Colonial and patriarchal interpretations of Christianity spread through time have culminated in cultural norms of a particular relational structure, namely, monogamy. These norms have been reinforced through repetition of colonized gender roles and stereotypes. When alternative relationship structures have been historically allowed to coexist with Christianity, as in 19th century Latter Day Saints plural marriage, the factors of sexual and racial oppression are revealed further. For example, men have many subservient wives while women are devoted to one man. This study examines the historical context that led to monogamist and hetero-normative culture while providing clues about how to begin the processes of queering and decolonizing our relationships through an open-minded and gender-expansive lens.
Religiosity, Spirituality, and Religious Conspiracy Theories: Their Association with Health Outcomes During the COVID-19 Pandemic. View Digital Media
Poster Session Alice Kosarkova
Religiosity and spirituality (R/S) can help some people shape their worldview and in coping with difficult situations. As such, they can also play an important role in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in times of uncertainty and threat, R/S may in some aspects became also a factor related to the development of religious conspiracy theories (RCT). Given the negative consequences of RCT, it seems important to examine the nature of R/S itself and the type of religious coping used, which may be key to understanding the basis of the worldviews that underpin the emergence of RCT. This poster presents findings from two studies conducted in the Czech Republic in 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic and in 2021 during the COVID-19 vaccination period. We investigated R/S, religious coping, RCT about COVID-19, religious fundamentalism, their associations with worsened mental health and willingness to be vaccinated. Our results show that RCT beliefs are related to an individual’s R/S, maladaptive religious coping strategies and religious fundamentalism. The negative effect of RCT beliefs and of negative coping was revealed by significantly higher levels of worsened mental health in those who reported such beliefs or/and a way of coping. A negative effect of RCT beliefs was further revealed by significantly higher levels of COVID-19 vaccine refusal among those who were spiritual but not religiously affiliated. Our findings may help to understand the factors influencing the dynamics of RCT development and their associations with R/S domains of human life during a pandemic.
The Theoretical Construction and Social Significance of Leonardo Boff's Mariology: How Does Liberation Theology Reconcile the Ethics of Social Movement and Everyday Life?
Poster Session Ran Gao
Leonardo Boff is one of the few male liberation theologians who write on Mariology systematically. His fundamental principle is that the Holy Spirit has become hypostatically united with Mary at the moment of the Annunciation, since Mary becomes the permanent temple of the Holy Spirit from then on. As a result, Mary is the revelation of the feminine dimension of God whereas Christ is the revelation of the masculine dimension of God. Together, the two reveal the fullness of the Godhead. What is the most interesting in Boff's writing is the seeming paradox that, on the one hand, he depicts Mary as a prophetic women of liberation, which is totally public and political, but on the other hand, he also identifies Mary as the archetype of the eternal feminine, which is not so far away from the traditional Mariology and even Marianismo, in terms of her participation in divinity and the caring virtue of motherhood. In Boff's view, if the progressive church just keeps talking about the plan or project of God, it would unconsciously take a masculine way of faith and miss some immediate relevance of the Virgin Mary among Latin American people. He hoped that women's political participation would infuse women's experiences and qualities into public life and change the dangerous tendency of the male-dominated social movements that put too much emphasis on grand projects rather than people.
