Divine forgiveness protects against psychological distress following a natural disaster attributed to God

Abstract

It is common to attribute natural disasters to ‘acts of God’ yet the implications of doing so for victims of such disasters is relatively underexplored. Relevant data on the association between attributing a natural disaster to God and psychological well-being are contradictory and cross-sectional. A longitudinal study (N = 269) was therefore conducted to examine whether attributing Hurricane Michael to God predicted later psychological distress over and above pre-hurricane levels of distress. Controlling for religiosity and hurricane impact, the relation between God attribution and distress was found to depend on perceptions of divine forgiveness. Relatively higher levels of divine forgiveness buffered the relation between later psychological distress and seeing God as playing a role in causing the hurricane. The significance of this finding is discussed and its heuristic value for both spiritually oriented disaster psychology and research on forgiveness is emphasized.

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