Did Seismic Activity Lead to the Rise of Religions?

We document a link between religiosity and natural disasters — earthquakes in particular. Using modern data from surveys, we first show that religiosity has increased in the aftermath of disasters such as earthquakes. As emotional effects can be analytically disentangled from those of physical destruction, we suggest that religious coping is the most potent link; people use their religion for comfort and explanation to match the other-worldly aspect of seismic destruction. Second, we show that the major religions of the modern world emerged in a remarkably tight band along seismically active plate-tectonic boundaries, suggesting the persistence of this link. Third, we show that the majority of known immediate cultural responses to historic earthquakes have been religious rather than secular. We conclude that religion tends to emerge as a response to the unanswerable questions posed by earthquakes, and other natural disasters, and as a provider of comfort to survivors. Earthquakes may thus have played a pivotal role for millennia in the emergence and persistence of religion.