When War Looms, Swedes Find Meaning in Family, Forests, and the Absence of Meaning

Sweden has not seen war within its borders for more than two hundred years, yet the threat now feels closer than at any point in living memory. Heightened geopolitical tension in Europe, government preparedness campaigns, and a visible military presence on the island of Gotland have turned an abstract danger into a passive anticipation that shapes everyday life. A new qualitative study published in Frontiers in Sociology asks a question that has rarely been examined in such a setting: how do people in one of the world’s most secular societies make meaning of, and cope with, the threat of war?

The research, conducted by Zahra Darvishpour and Fereshteh Ahmadi of the University of Gävle and Önver A. Cetrez of Uppsala University, forms part of the international research program Meaning-Making Coping with Crisis, which has studied coping strategies across contexts ranging from cancer and bereavement to the COVID-19 pandemic and armed conflict. For the Swedish arm of the program, the team recruited 41 adults in Stockholm and Gotland through housing associations, university websites, and cultural and political gatherings. Participants answered an online open-ended questionnaire between October and November 2025, describing in their own words how they manage worry and anxiety in relation to war or the threat of war.

The sample was deliberately varied in age, gender, geography, and worldview, though it skewed older and highly educated: 63.4 percent of participants were women, 61 percent were aged 50 or above, and 80.5 percent had completed university-level education. Gotland was chosen alongside the capital precisely because its strategic importance and growing NATO-related defence cooperation with the United States make military preparedness tangible in everyday life, allowing comparison between a diverse urban setting and a region with heightened exposure to security issues. The responses were analysed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase framework, informed by Pargament’s RCOPE model of religious coping and by a socio-cultural model distinguishing faith-based from secular existential coping.

The central finding is striking: while both religious and secular meaning-making strategies were present, secular strategies were markedly more prominent, and religious coping appeared peripheral at best. Where religion did surface, it was often confined to private practices such as prayer or reading the Bible, or to the church as a communal rather than devotional space. One 23-year-old man described praying to God to find peace of mind, while an 88-year-old man emphasized the value of his Christian congregation and the knowledgeable help a pastor or priest can provide. But other participants who described visiting churches explicitly rejected religious identity, framing the church as a place of calm, reflection, and aesthetic appreciation rather than doctrine.

Instead, the dominant coping resources were secular and existential. The most stable and recurrent theme across the dataset was relational coping: family, children, friends, and human relationships more broadly were identified as the most important sources of psychological security and emotional regulation. Participants described access to loved ones as essential for deeper conversations and mutual comfort, and some noted that being together made external threats feel distant. At the same time, relationships with children generated both intense anxiety and heightened responsibility—one participant spoke of being terrified for the sake of her children, another of losing a son in war as one of her worst nightmares—illustrating how family ties simultaneously create vulnerability and drive coping-oriented responses.

Nature emerged as a second major resource. Participants consistently described forests, the sea, natural silence, and walking as calming, grounding, and stress-reducing. For some, the experience opened onto existential reflection: one 45-year-old man said that by the sea he feels insignificant in comparison, which makes him appreciate what he has. This sense of being part of a larger whole—a philosophical orientation the researchers call cosmic meaning-making or unity of existence—appeared in accounts describing life as part of something greater, a small cog in a bigger organic wheel, providing perspective and a sense of security without any metaphysical or religious reference. Meditation and engagement with art and music rounded out the secular repertoire, offering emotional regulation, bodily grounding, and, for some participants, a sense of non-religious spirituality explicitly distinguished from religion.

The most theoretically significant finding, however, is a potentially novel form of secular existential coping the researchers call meaning-making through the absence of meaning. Rather than experiencing connection to a larger whole, participants expressing this orientation emphasized human smallness, limitation, or insignificance in the universe, sometimes accompanied by a sense of determinism. One participant said everything feels predetermined and beyond influence; another described repeatedly thinking about his own insignificance. Crucially, this was not experienced as despair or existential emptiness. Instead, psychological relief was achieved through the acceptance of human limitation and the relinquishing of ultimate meaning rather than its reconstruction.

The researchers interpret this orientation as a form of negative or minimal meaning-making, in which adaptation occurs not through the amplification of purpose but through its attenuation. By acknowledging relative insignificance and limited control, the individual reduces the cognitive and emotional strain associated with responsibility, uncertainty, and the demand that existence be justified. The recognition that events may lack an ultimate, human-centred explanation becomes itself part of the meaning-making process—a shift from meaning as assertion to meaning as release. The authors stress that this is not nihilism in a pathological sense, nor the passive religious deferral described in the RCOPE framework, but an acceptance-based response that generates stability grounded in acceptance rather than resolution.

Taken together, the findings indicate that responses to the threat of war are multidimensional, reflecting an interplay of several meaning systems alongside emotional and cognitive processes, and that they are shaped by cultural, relational, and existential context rather than by religious belief alone. The prominence of secular coping aligns with Sweden’s broader secularization: levels of belief in God and religious practice are low, trust in institutional and welfare systems is strong, and cultural norms emphasize individual autonomy, rationality, and emotional self-regulation. Even the strength of relational coping in a historically individualistic society, the authors suggest, may reflect recent social transformations, including welfare-state restructuring, immigration from collectivist cultures, and generational shifts toward more positive attitudes toward family and friendship.

The study underscores the need to extend established meaning-making and religious coping models to highly secular settings, where existential adaptation may occur independently of religious belief, transcendence, or coherent existential narratives. It also suggests that coping with uncontrollable crisis may involve not only the reconstruction of meaning, as emphasized in previous research, but also the acceptance of ambiguity, uncertainty, and the absence of ultimate meaning as psychologically adaptive responses. As war-related anticipation becomes a new social phenomenon in a country that has known peace for two centuries, the ways people find—or relinquish—meaning may prove as important as any bunker or brochure.

Subject of Research: Psychology of Religion and Coping

Article Title: Meaning-making coping under the threat of war: a qualitative study of people in Sweden

Article References: Darvishpour, Z., Ahmadi, F., & Cetrez, Ö. A. (2026). Meaning-making coping under the threat of war: a qualitative study of people in Sweden. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1917771. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1917771

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1917771

Keywords: meaning-making coping, secular existential coping, war threat, Sweden, qualitative study, RCOPE, relational coping, nature-based coping, absence of meaning, Frontiers in Sociology, Meaning-making, coping