Your Religious Beliefs Might Not Make You Happy

The literature contains numerous reviews and meta-analyses that suggest a positive relationship between religiosity and mental well-being (Hoogeveen et al., 2022). However, these assumptions are based primarily on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal studies. Unfortunately, past studies reporting that religious beliefs improve feelings of well-being did not separate within-person and between-person levels of life satisfaction. Does believing in a particular deity affect well-being? If someone decides to become religious, do they become more mentally healthy? A long-term longitudinal study (Joshanloo, 2021) investigated this question and found zero associations between religiosity and the subjective experience of pleasure and satisfaction with their life.

A recently published report examined data from almost 6,500 people (mean age 47 yrs; 53% female) spanning approximately two decades and focused on the temporal within-person associations between religiosity and psychological well-being. The study utilized a religiosity scale that assesses an individual's overall religiosity and the importance of religion in their life. Religiosity was measured (Joshanloo, 2024) with six items: “How religious are you?” “How important is religion in your life?” “How important is it for you—or would it be if you had children now—to send your children for religious or spiritual services or instruction?” “How closely do you identify with being a member of your religious group?” “How much do you prefer to be with other people who are the same religion as you?” and “How important do you think it is for people of your religion to marry other people who are the same religion?”

These items provided a multifaceted assessment of how deeply religion permeates several spheres of respondents’ personal, social, and cultural experiences. The strength of this within-person analysis is that it reflects fluctuations around an individual's typical or baseline levels of well-being and religiosity over the period of investigation. This distinction is important because these factors change over time.

The study discovered a small positive correlation between religiosity and psychological well-being at the between-person level. Unfortunately, this small correlation alone provided no insight into the direction of associations between religiosity and psychological well-being. It only indicates a small probability that high religiosity and high well-being occur together, not whether they are related to each other in any causal manner.

Overall, the results confirmed that no temporal within-person association exists between religiosity and psychological well-being. Furthermore, these results warn that drawing conclusions from cross-sectional findings (i.e., as with previous analyses) is misleading. While slightly high levels of psychological well-being have been reported among more religious individuals, this does not inevitably indicate that religiosity directly enhances well-being. This has been the most common misinterpretation of the cross-sectional findings promulgated by already religious individuals.

The present study challenges the assumption that increased religious involvement leads to improved psychological well-being by reporting a total lack of a temporal link between changes in religiosity and psychological well-being, which is consistent with recent studies (Prati, 2023). The investigation did not discover a clear connection between changes in religiosity and well-being over time. Further, they contradict the popular belief that increased religious engagement leads to sustained improvements in individual well-being. Although short-term longitudinal studies might identify significant effects, the absence of long-term within-person associations reported in the current research study calls for caution when proclaiming the lasting well-being benefits of religiosity. Future studies using longitudinal analyses will prevent the perpetuation of oversimplified assumptions regarding the importance of religiosity for well-being.