Secular Cultural Worldviews

Abstract According to terror management theory (TMT), culturally shared beliefs about the nature of reality (i.e., cultural worldviews) are critical for people’s efforts to combat existential fears about death. Cultural worldviews delineate why we are here, where we come from, and what happens to us when we are gone. More importantly, cultural worldviews provide pathways to obtaining immortality, either literal immortality in the form of an afterlife or symbolic immortality in the form of achievements that transcend one’s self. It is easy to see why religious worldviews would function to alleviate concerns about death, given their strong portrayal of religious afterlives that can be obtained. However, considerable research also indicates that secular worldviews serve a death transcendence function. This chapter will provide an overview of this research and will serve as the natural companion to the chapter on religious worldviews. Specifically, this chapter will describe the TMT analysis of secular worldviews and will provide an integrative overview of the research in support of it. Example topics to be covered include the TMT analyses of the allure of fame, politics, scientific worldviews (including evolution), and nationalism/patriotism. Given the breadth of these topics, this chapter will be appealing to social scientists from a range of disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, and political science.