Faith Pinnacle Moments: Stress, Miraculous Experiences, and Life Satisfaction in Young Adulthood

Abstract

Religious beliefs often persist among unaffiliated young adults, and certain beliefs about God have been shown to support subjective well-being. Yet we know much less about the persistence or psychological impact of religious experiences, specifically miracles from God. I conceive of such experiences as faith pinnacle moments which express and reinvigorate the individual's reciprocal bond with God, frequently occur in response to certain types of stress, and support well-being by solidifying one's sense of that bond. My results show that net of institutional religiosity, young adults who experience stress from traumas are more likely to report miracles. This suggests that these reports often refer to healings or similar interventions. Stress from family breakups, however, is negatively correlated with miracles, presumably since these disruptions damage the bond with God due to the established connection between parental relationships and perceived relationship with God. Finally, miracles are positively correlated with life satisfaction and partially protect against the negative effects of stress on life satisfaction.

Beliefs in Miraculous Healings, Religiosity and Meaning in Life

“…A negative correlation has been observed between the understanding of miracles as phenomenon belonging to the sphere of nature, religious activity and the sense of meaning in life, and at the same time a positive correlation was visible within the supernatural sphere. It is coherent with other researches which show that religiosity and believing in miracles have protective effect in terms of being exposed to stress and trauma, e.g., Manglos [34], in his study conducted on a group of American teenagers (aged [13][14][15][16][17] identified the protective effect of believing in miracles understood as a God's intervention in relation to various types of traumatic experience. On the other hand, the influence of traumatic experience on the level of acceptance of the relationship between supernatural events and the intervention of the divine factor should also be analyzed.…”

“…Hartshorne, R. Swinburne) underlines that the perception of miracles is an outcome of metaphysical presuppositions and not scientific data [32,33]. It is interesting to know how people understand miraculous healings and how this belief interacts with other personal, sociological and psychological factors, such as: age, gender, ethnicity, household incomes, level of experienced stress, life satisfaction, religiosity and beliefs [34]. It seems that religiosity may be of particular importance as to a large extent it shapes ideas about the relationship between the material and spiritual world and is connected with life's meaning [35].…”

Identity, Inequality, and Legitimacy: Religious Differences in Primary School Completion in Sub‐Saharan Africa

“…I frame this question in terms of institutional legitimacy and the challenges to the establishment of legitimacy by postcolonial states and their associated institutions such as primary education (Bates ; Munene ). The article aligns with the literature on how religious identity shapes important political and socioeconomic outcomes in SSA, which has tended to find particularly strong—though not necessarily uniform—differences between Christians and other groups on dimensions such as political interest and involvement, marriage and fertility patterns, and HIV prevention behaviors (Agadjanian, Yabiku, and Fawcett ; Manglos‐Weber , ; Stambach ; Trinitapoli and Weinreb ). Yet this study is unique in its direct and detailed treatment of how religious identity shapes educational outcomes across the continent.…”

In-home firearm access among US adolescents and the role of religious subculture: Results from a nationally representative study

“…This finding complicates research on the effects of religion on adolescent health and safety risk factors, which generally finds protective effects of religious involvement and conservative religious groups Hill et al 2009;Dew et al 2008;Manglos 2013;Adamczyk and Felson 2012;Adamczyk and Palmer 2008;Wallace and Forman 1998;Harker 2001;Borowsky, Ireland, and Resnick 2001;Regnerus 2003). This study also adds to a growing body of research showing the importance of religious subcultures for life chances and the unfavorable influence of conservative Protestantism and conservative religious beliefs for a number of outcomes, extending this literature to the arena of an important health and safety risk factor (Cline and Ferraro 2006;Darnell and Sherkat 1997;Fitzgerald and Glass 2008;Glass and Jacobs 2005;Keister 2008;Massengill 2008;Sherkat and Darnell 1999;Emerson and Smith 2000;Ellison, Burr, and Mccall 2003;Sherkat 2010Sherkat , 2012Stroope, Franzen, and Uecker 2015;Uecker 2014;Lehrer 1999).…”