Terror Management Theory

When reading in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, I stumbled across an article by Mike Friedman and W. Steven Rholes, “Religious Fundamentalism and Terror Management.” Thinking that the subject was one of Islamic terrorists, normal American that I am, I was surprised to find that the “fundamentalism” Friedman and Rholes studied was essentially Christian. On the bright side, however, the terror management was not one, directly, of blowing up buildings and busses.

Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg borrowed from Anthropologist Ernest Becker and produced something called the Terror Management Theory, or TMT. In a 2004 article for Social Research, Pyszczynski generally described a synthesis that Becker began as “to integrate and combine what he saw as the best and most enduring insights that had come out of the human sciences and humanities over the years—ideas from Darwin, Freud, Rank, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, G. H. Mead, and many others.” Pyszczynski then “took Becker’s ideas and combined them with” what they were seeing from their psychological and then-current studies. From this, to summarize Pyszczynski, TMT dealt with the role of self-esteem, a preference for one view of truth (“out of all the different ways of conceiving reality”), and why don’t people just get along with people who are different. From reading in related articles, I get the idea that the “Terror” in the Terror Management Theory may be some sensationalism to help sell the theory.

Back to Friedman and Rholes, they describe two primary aspects in TMT. First, there is the aspect of “mortality salience” and, second, an “anxiety buffer.” From reading further on the matter, the anxiety buffer is what makes the TM theory more than just applicable for hospice care counseling for those on the verge of dying. Many want to expand the anxiety buffer to extremes of prejudicial actions. It is almost as if the terror of dying lends itself to the fear of people that are different, and that to the attack and murder of people who are different, thus resolving the conflicts in mind. Rather than managing terrorists, as I first surmised, Terror Management is to keep such narrow minded souls as we who find only one solution to our human mortality, Jesus Christ, from becoming a terror to those who do not.

The TMT subscribers are mostly humanists, to whom God and religion was a human invention. It makes me wonder, however, that if God really created us, then the author of terror management set in motion the process to alleviate all our fears of death. Jesus died in our place, accepting the punishment of our sins, our failing to live up to God’s expectations of us. Jesus makes us accepted, new creatures, children of God so that when our souls are called to account, Jesus will stand in the middle and say, “My blood was shed for this one.” My terror management is the reality of following Christ.