Being-toward-God: Heideggerian Existential Phenomenology and the Structure of Religious Experience Across Cultures

Abstract

This article investigates the structural affinities between Martin Heidegger's existential analytic of Dasein and the phenomenological architecture of religious experience as reported across five cultural contexts. Drawing on a mixed-methods research design — combining a validated survey instrument (n = 500) administered across Romania, Germany, Turkey, Israel, and the United States, with qualitative thematic coding of open-ended responses — the study examines whether core Heideggerian existentials (Being-toward-death, thrownness, anxiety, care, authenticity, dwelling, and the call of conscience) find consistent resonance within religious lifeworlds. The findings indicate that Heideggerian categories exhibit significant explanatory power when mapped onto reported religious experience, particularly in traditions with a strong theology of finitude and divine transcendence. Cross-cultural variation is observed primarily in the concept of authenticity, which carries different valences in Western and non-Western religious practice. The paper argues that Heidegger's existential phenomenology, despite his own ambiguous relationship to theology, offers an indispensable hermeneutical framework for understanding the universal structure of religious existence beneath its confessional variations.