Religion och bortgången utav en närstående : Sorgens påverkan på tron

Sammanfattning: This study focuses on how a persons religious beliefs can change after the loss of a closely related person. This, (the loss of a closely related person), is something that many people have experienced, it´s a certainty that we all know someone who has lost a closely related person. Maybe we have even lost someone ourselves. This could be whomever, a mother, a father, a child or a close friend. Whomever that person may be, the loss of someone close to you comes with grief and accordning to some studies, (Haynes et al 2017; McGowan & Cook 2021), humans tend to use religiosity or spirituality as a way of coping with grief. This is what I am going to look closer on, not necessarily how people use religiosity or sprituality to cope with grief, but rather how the loss of a closely related person can come to affect ones beliefs. In order to do this I have chosen to do five interviews, four of them consist of people who have lost a closely related person and one of them consists of a priest who works within Svenska Kyrkan, (the Swedish Church). The interviews are semi-structured and of qualitative method to explore the experiences of my informants more deeply. The informants have been chosen from the purpose of the study which is to see (1) how ones religious beliefs can change after the loss of a closely related person, (2) how people with various earlier religious identities react in comparison to eachother and (3) how the informants experience that their beliefs changed over time. Thereby the result of the informants were as follows, two of the informants had a lack of earlier reported religious belief, however one of the two had reported slightly less lack of belief than the other. The other two participants reported both having a lengthy background within Christianity, however one of the two described their faith in a way that I intepreted as a stronger faith than the other participant. The priest was chosen to in order to find out if the knowledge of a person who deals with many people experiencing grief can give insight into how peoples beliefs might change after the loss of a closely related person. The results show that all of the informants reported some kind of change in their religious beliefs to varying degrees. The results also showed that the informats who reported a higher amount of previous faith tended not to experience as big of a change as the other participants, as their faith was simply solidified. Finally, the study shows that three out of four of the informants experienced that different thoughts and religious practises, such as prayer for the deceased person, was more common in the earlier stages of the loss.