A large body of literature highlights the benefits of being religious in terms of subjective well-being. We examine changes to these so-called religious well-being benefits during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and address the role of (formal and informal) social integration when explaining these changes. We empirically test two contrasting scenarios: The first scenario predicts a decrease in religious well-being benefits (convergence hypothesis), while the second scenario predicts an increase in religious well-being benefits (divergence hypothesis). We adopt a potential outcomes framework and apply marginal structural models and inverse probability of treatment weighting to nationally representative, longitudinal data including both pre- and during-pandemic periods. Thereby, we show that initial religious well-being benefits declined during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. This decline was partly due to religious individuals’ perception of decreasing social integration. Our results challenge the widespread idea that religious individuals are better protected against crises.

大量文献强调了信奉宗教对主观幸福感的好处。我们研究了德国 COVID-19 大流行早期阶段这些所谓的宗教福利福利的变化，并在解释这些变化时讨论了（正式和非正式）社会融合的作用。我们凭经验测试了两种截然不同的情景：第一种情景预测宗教福利收益减少（趋同假说），而第二种情景预测宗教福利福利增加（分歧假说）。我们采用潜在结果框架，并将边际结构模型和治疗加权的逆概率应用于全国代表性的纵向数据，包括大流行前和大流行期间。因此，我们表明，在德国 COVID-19 大流行的早期阶段，最初的宗教福祉福利有所下降。这种下降的部分原因是宗教人士认为社会融合度下降。我们的研究结果挑战了人们普遍认为宗教人士可以更好地免受危机影响的观点。