Frequent religious participation is associated with better mental health outcomes, including lower suicide risk and reduced substance misuse, according to a new report published Monday by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University. The report, which analyzed hundreds of previous studies, found that people who attend worship services at least once a week tend to report higher levels of hope and better stress management than those who are less engaged.
“Although harmful or coercive forms of religion do exist, the overall pattern across the best available studies is clear: religious belief and practice are overwhelmingly associated with better mental and emotional well-being,” the report stated. The Wheatley Institute describes its mission as “research-supported work that fortifies the core institutions of the family, religion, and constitutional government.”
Several prominent U.S. mental health organizations have expressed positive views of religion’s connection to well-being. The National Alliance on Mental Illness says religion “gives people something to believe in, provides a sense of structure and typically offers a group of people to connect with” and notes that research “suggests that religiosity reduces suicide rates, alcoholism and drug use.” Mental Health America has taken a similar stance.
The American Psychological Association, in its Handbook of Psychology, Religion and Spirituality, takes a more nuanced view, saying the volume “sheds light on the many purposes religion serves… and the capacity of religion and spirituality to do both good and harm.”
Timothy Powers, a visiting psychology instructor at St. John Fisher University — a Catholic school in Rochester, New York — said he sees both sides in his counseling practice. “While faith community participation can confer real and well documented protective benefits, those same communities can also be sources of shame, spiritual bypass, trauma, and significant barriers to seeking help,” Powers said. “Clinically, both realities show up in the counseling room, sometimes in the same person.”
He added that “the task for therapists is to approach the subject without assuming that religion/spirituality is a resource or that it is a wound, to be open to ambiguity, and to ask rather than presume.”
Charles Camosy, a professor of moral theology and bioethics at The Catholic University of America, cautioned that religious faithfulness does not guarantee mental health. “We expect on the one hand that being faithful will bring with it good things in this life,” Camosy said, but “people still get sick, including mentally ill. Christians, and especially faithful Christians who are salt and light in a world full of violence and injustice, are not promised mental health as a reward for faithfulness in this life.”
Fish Stark, executive director of the American Humanist Association, said he did not dispute that religious engagement can offer psychological benefits, but stressed that nonreligious people have ways to fare equally well. “If you have a strong secular, atheist identity, and actively participate in a nonreligious community, you get the same benefits,” Stark said. He added that “the key is whether you have core convictions and participate in social groups. Those with strong religious identities and strong secular identities are equally happy.”
Ellen Idler, a sociology professor at Emory University and director of its Religion and Public Health Collaborative, suggested that studies measuring the effect of religion on mental health may be skewed because those who have been harmed by congregations often stop attending. “Those who have been, or perceived that they have been, harmed by religion will stay away, leaving those less troubled in the pews,” she said, pointing to people who had been sexually abused by clergy as children or were stigmatized because they were LGBTQ+.