Going to religious services every week will not prevent common mental illnesses or improve your overall psychological health. A recent analysis of long-term data suggests that the previously reported health benefits of gathering for worship may be the result of a combination of life circumstances rather than a true medical benefit. The findings show that the act of attending religious services alone does not provide direct protection against mental illness. The study was published in The Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.
For decades, a vast body of literature has suggested a strong association between religious attendance and positive mental health outcomes. Many theoretical models have proposed that coming together for spiritual reasons provides individuals with an embedded community and creates a wealth of social support. Theory also suggests that involvement with a faith community reduces participation in unhealthy behaviors, increases positive emotions, and provides individuals with better coping mechanisms during difficult life events.
Based on these concepts, some medical professionals and mental health advocates have historically recommended spiritual community integration as a routine psychological intervention. Although countless studies have documented positive outcomes associated with church and temple attendance, the majority of this research relied on cross-sectional designs. Cross-sectional studies take a single snapshot of a population at a single point in time. Although this approach can identify correlations, it cannot determine whether one factor explicitly causes another. Even when past researchers used longitudinal studies that followed the same subjects over long periods of time, they were often unable to account for changes in life variables.
Gabriele Prati, a psychology researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy, initiated the current study to rigorously test this supposed protective effect. Plati wanted to assess whether religious participation really leads to improved mental health when separated from other beneficial life circumstances. To achieve this, it was necessary to adjust for various confounding variables in the statistical analysis.
Confounding variables are external factors that influence both the intended cause and the intended effect, creating the false impression that there is a direct connection. For example, people who maintain strong connections with friends are more likely to attend group religious services, and those same social connections may also protect against depression. If researchers are unable to mathematically remove these friendship effects from their data, it may appear that only religious events protected against depression.
To remove these external influences, Prati used data from the U.S. Midlife Development Project. This large study followed a nationally representative sample of 7,108 adults living across the United States. The researchers collected information in three major waves over 20 years, starting in the mid-1990s and ending around 2014. Data collection included telephone interviews and an extensive self-administered questionnaire.
The dataset recorded how often participants attended religious meetings and categorized participants into groups according to whether they attended more than once a week. The study also recorded formal diagnostic criteria for several common mental illnesses. Specifically, the data tracked cases of major depressive episodes, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic disorder.
In addition to clinical illness, the researchers also analyzed general psychological health. This index was assessed using established scales that measure several different aspects of human experience. These aspects include a person’s sense of autonomy, mastery of the environment, perceived personal growth, positive relationships with others, most important purpose in life, and level of self-acceptance.
Prati employed advanced statistical methods designed to mimic the conditions of randomized clinical trials. This approach isolates the specific act of attending a religious gathering by balancing the remaining variables across participants. The analyzes adjusted for fixed demographic factors such as participant age, gender, and ethnicity.
Most importantly, the software was adjusted for time-varying confounders. These are living environments that can change from year to year. Variables include self-rated physical health, perceived economic status, personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism, and frequency of contact with a network of friends. The study also took into account a person’s past mental health history and previous religious attendance habits.
Once all these changing factors were balanced, the expected benefits of religious attendance did not materialize. Frequent religious attendance did not change the odds of developing a major depressive episode. The data showed that rates of depression were equal between those who frequently attended religious services and those who rarely or never went to religious services. Similarly, weekly religious attendance did not prevent respondents from developing panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.
The relationship between attending religious services and general psychological well-being was not statistically significant. Those who frequently attended religious services did not report higher levels of purpose in life or self-acceptance than those with similar living arrangements who strictly stayed at home. Changes in a person’s frequency of religious attendance compared to typical habits did not lead to subsequent improvements or declines in mental health.
These results question the widespread assumption that spiritual gatherings are a universal protective factor for human psychology. Prati noted that people who regularly attend religious services often have other overlapping benefits, such as good physical health, steady income, and outgoing personalities. When these underlying benefits are removed from the equation, the very act of religious attendance loses its supposed healing properties.
This pattern holds true in the United States, and this finding has special weight in sociological research. The “religion as a social value” hypothesis suggests that the spiritual benefits of religious service may only emerge in societies that highly value religion. Religious people in these places may have fewer mental health problems because they receive more social approval and resources. Because the United States is characterized by relatively low levels of secularization, the lack of a protective effect in this U.S. sample suggests that this association is truly coincidental.
The findings have concrete implications for medical practice. Health professionals may be encouraged to raise the topic of spiritual community engagement with patients as a way to treat or prevent psychological distress. This new study suggests that such advice oversimplifies how mental health works. Participation in a religious organization is not necessarily meaningful social participation for all individuals, and not all social participation has positive psychological outcomes. Physicians and therapists should evaluate the actual evidence before offering recommendations for specific behaviors related to spirituality.
This study has several limitations typical of observational studies. Calculating precise causal relationships from survey data relies on mathematical assumptions about demographic balance that cannot be perfectly tested in the laboratory. Participants also self-reported religious attendance. Surveys sometimes inflate the reporting of socially respected behaviors, which can introduce measurement error into the data.
The multidimensional nature of mental health also means that this study can only track a limited number of factors. The study excluded measures such as sleep quality and physical stress reactivity and focused on depression, panic, anxiety, and general health. Future research may benefit from examining different cultural demographics outside of the United States. Researchers might also track subjects at short intervals, once a month, to see if attending religious services has a short-lived, short-lived boost in someone’s mood that wears off too quickly to show up in long-term studies.
The study, “Attendance at religious services and common mental disorders and well-being: causal relationships based on a longitudinal marginal structural model approach” was authored by Gabriele Prati.
