In COVID We Trust: The Impact of The Pandemic on Religiousness—Evidence from Italian Regions

By changing many aspects of everyday life, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distance policies implemented to face it have affected the behaviour of people all over the world. Has the pandemic also affected people’s approach towards the divine? Previous evidence suggests that prayer searches on t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of religion and health
Authors: Alfano, Vincenzo (Author) ; Ercolano, Salvatore (Author) ; Vecchione, Gaetano (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V. 2023
In: Journal of religion and health
Further subjects:B Mass
B Religious Attendance
B Coronavirus
B Covid-19
B Mass streaming
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:By changing many aspects of everyday life, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distance policies implemented to face it have affected the behaviour of people all over the world. Has the pandemic also affected people’s approach towards the divine? Previous evidence suggests that prayer searches on the Internet rose during the pandemic and that people tend to rely mainly on intrinsic rather than extrinsic religiousness to cope with adversity. In the present contribution, using a set of panel random effect estimators, we compare the change in religious attendance in Italian regions before and during the pandemic. Our results suggest that there has been an increase in religiousness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings are robust to several specifications of the model and to different estimators. This suggests that people derive more comfort from religious activities during hard times that are characterized by uncertainty.
ISSN:1573-6571
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of religion and health
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10943-023-01755-1