Does Religion Help You See the World as Good?

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Religion is good at cultivating beliefs. For thousands of years, religions have used music, ritual, oratory, and missionaries to bolster and spread religious beliefs.

Do these beliefs impact well-being?

I grew up an American in Taiwan as a child of Evangelical Christian missionaries. Now, I study the psychology of beliefs as an empirical researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t study which beliefs are true—that’s above my pay grade—but rather how beliefs develop and impact well-being. I recently discovered my research is getting discussed in spiritual devotional materials, sermons, theological books, and other religious contexts. It got me thinking.

If I had to pick the two most important discoveries over the past 50 years in my research space, the first would be: Beliefs impact well-being. Belief change even underlies cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the most widespread form of talk therapy.

But the second big discovery is: Only certain beliefs reliably and strongly impact people's well-being, including almost none found in religious creeds. Beliefs about things like reincarnation, tripartite divinity, and even whether a deity exists usually don’t register in well-being studies.

Well-being-related beliefs are more general and simple.

For example, cognitive behavioral therapy works by focusing on basic beliefs about the self, like "I’m worthless" or "My boss hates me." My own research concerns primal world beliefs, or primals for short, which are beliefs about the world and its typical character.

Our research at the Penn Primals Project suggests that most humans hold 26 different primals. Many boil down to beliefs about whether the world is predominately safe (versus dangerous) and enticing (versus dull). Seeing the world as safe and enticing are the two main reasons one has to see the world as a good place overall, as opposed to a bad place where, in the extreme, the world is a giant dumpster fire.

The correlation between well-being and good-world belief is about the same size as that between Earth's surface temperature and distance from the equator (both huge: ~.60). Good-world belief does not simply stem from having led an easy life. The belief is similarly common among rich and poor, men and women, privileged and not privileged.

Most primals aren’t in official religious doctrine.

Besides the dhukka (the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism, which claims life is suffering), most primals are way too broad to be found in a creed. For example, the belief in a just and fair world is strongly tied to life satisfaction and can be fostered by, say, Hindu notions of karma, Christian notions of sin, and non-religious ideas about Newton's third law.

Religions are divided on primals anyway.

Official doctrine aside, there are still huge, unofficial divides within most religions, including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, where people of the same faith think it supports opposite primals.

Take Christianity, for example. I recently turned on my car radio, and an Evangelical preacher told me God has given me the world for my enjoyment and orchestrates everything for my safety and growth: The world is good.

But there’s also a fire-and-brimstone Christianity that says the world is bad and humans worthless. In Jonathan Edwards’s famous 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he describes a God who “abhors you,” who holds you precariously every day over the fires of hell “as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect,” and “looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire.”

Even my mother—not the fire-and-brimstone type—happens to see the world as dangerous but isn’t interested in changing this belief, partly because she sees it as stemming from her Evangelical faith. Millions of people are in a similar spot, thinking that seeing the world as safe or enticing is off-limits for religious reasons.

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If you think your religion might require negative primals, you had best be sure.

I have no interest in questioning your religious beliefs. I just want you to know the stakes: If you must see the world as a bad place as part of your faith, your well-being may suffer throughout your life. This trade-off might be acceptable to some since religion is often about more than just well-being, but then you should know well-being is likely not the only tradeoff. There are behaviors you might care about. For example, a recent study by Swiss colleagues found strong connections between good-world belief and character strengths such as joy, love, and hope—traits the Bible calls the fruits of the spirit.

Beyond just allowing positive primals, could your religion actively promote them?

You'd best be sure about this, too, because your religion may well be among society’s best-positioned institutions to increase well-being at scale.

First, 84 percent of humanity is already religious—a pretty big audience.

Second, religions have amazing practical tools, honed over millennia, to cultivate beliefs—from music to meditation via strings of beads.

Third, religion is free to posit strongly positive beliefs in a way science is wussy about. Likely the biggest weakness of science-based interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy is the incessant moderation. Instead of encouraging positive beliefs, our business is making negative beliefs less negative—neutral at best—which limits their impact. Religion is freer to paint the world as so wondrous that the chance to live here is a blessing.

Start the conversation.

The first step to exploring how your religion intersects with primals and other well-being-related beliefs is jumpstarting a conversation within your religious community. One idea is to send this post to your local religious leader and ask for a homily on a simple question: As people of faith, are we free to see the world as a place where safe and beautiful things predominate more than dangerous and ugly things?

For your and my mother’s sake, I hope the answer is yes.