Religiosity, divine control and consumer resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

By way of a cross-sectional survey (n = 524), this study demonstrates that religiosity positively influenced consumers’ willingness to use face-to-face services under very different, disruptive, and risky conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderated mediation analysis shows this relationship was mediated by beliefs in divine control and moderated by ethnicity. The findings establish intrinsic religiosity as a key predictor of adaptive consumer behaviour that was critical to promoting much-needed socio-economic support during the ongoing disruption of the pandemic. They provide an explanation at the individual level, grounded in concepts of consumer resilience, of why religiosity has previously been linked to socio-economic recovery following the pandemic, and reveal the important influence of intrinsic religiosity on consumer adaptation and behaviour during times of major socio-economic disruption.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Grimes, A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4471-506X Roper, S. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1381-6792 Hampson, D.P. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4005-8875
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Journal of Marketing Management is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Consumer resilience; Religiosity; divine control; ethnic minorities; service consumption; COVID-19
Dates:	Submitted: 28 October 2024 Accepted: 29 June 2025 Published (online): 11 August 2025 Published: 11 August 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield)
Date Deposited:	03 Oct 2025 10:35
Last Modified:	03 Oct 2025 10:35
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/0267257x.2025.2542932
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:232506

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Religiosity, divine control and consumer resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

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