Religion offers a uniquely potent collective self because groups outlive believers and explain death.

Evidence

For a substantial portion of the world’s population, religion can thus serve as a basis for the collective self. “I see being Jewish as… it’s something I’ve been born into so it’s who I am as a person” (Cadge & Davidman, 2006, p. 27). Being Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Hindu, or Buddhist provides individuals with a sense of self and becomes a way to define the collective self. By connecting the self to a larger collective, an individual extends beyond the unitary self to the collective self (Brewer, 1991). Terror management theory proposes that one reason we may be motivated to extend the self to the collective is the belief the group will continue after our death and thus in some form we will continue (Vail et al., 2010). In addition, most religions provide an explanation for what happens after death, thus religion is a particularly potent collective self (Vail et al., 2010). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 909

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes personal/relational/collective selves and locates religion as often the defining ‘collective self’ via Brewer’s work.
• XREF: The terror-management angle (group outlives me, so I continue) echoes the death-thought-suppression theme in the prejudice psychology thread and connects to broader cognition-of-outgroups literature.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the terror-management account of why believers defend their religious collective so fiercely when it is insulted — group attacks feel like personal death threats because the self is partly depersonalized into it.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 909