In God We Trust? Faith and Community among Cancer Patients.

Abstract

In the following study, I try to determine the role and function of secular social support, religious social support and personal faith and respectively, the role and function of the individual and the group in cancer patients’ lives. Is personal faith enough to help comfort and give hope to the individual or is religion, in the larger sense of community, needed? Does a diagnosis of cancer cause individuals to have more faith, question faith or lose faith? Does a religious community provide more or better support than a secular community? Fueled by these questions, I set out to explore the “night-side” of cancer and the role of community.