Religious and Spiritual Struggles and Coping Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect countless individuals. Traumatic events like COVID-19 can often lead to significant resource loss and negatively affect mental health. As a result, people often go through various types of struggles, including those that are religious or spiritual (e.g., existential doubt). Also, in the wake of trauma, people often try to engage in coping strategies, including drawing on religious or spiritual resources, to work through negative emotions in the face of adversity. The current qualitative study explored religious and spiritual struggles and coping strategies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants (N = 172) described the types of religious and spiritual struggles they experienced, as well as the types of coping strategies they engaged in. Four themes of religious and spiritual struggles emerged: interpersonal struggles, moral struggles, doubt struggles, and ultimate meaning struggles. Four themes of coping strategies emerged: psychological coping, health-related coping, religious/spiritual (R/S) coping, and interpersonal/social coping. These themes suggested a wide range of R/S struggles and coping strategies and provided implications for the intersection between R/S and trauma as well as patterns of coping in a pandemic context.