Earthquakes, Volcanoes and God: Changing Perspectives on the Importance of Religion as an Important Influence in Cultural Responses

During the past thirty years, the authors have been engaged in researching the influence of religious belief on responses to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. As late as the 1990s, the prevailing attitude within both the academic and disaster planning communities was that such responses, though important historically, had been progressively replaced since the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment by notions of scientific contingency operating within largely secular frames of reference. Such attitudes where they remained were either those of a small minority in economically more advanced countries, or represented the last redoubts of superstition and irrationality in societies untouched by the forces of modernism. In this work, it is argued that academic and disaster planning perspectives have changed profoundly in recent years, and there is now recognition that, in many societies, not all of them economically less developed, there is a widespread religious framing of responses. Using examples from Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Shinto traditions, the authors propose that religious believers and their resources (e.g. buildings, wealth and access to indigenous and foreign aid networks) may assist in the achievement of successful disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies.