College students often question their faith because of the intolerance or hypocritical behavior of religious groups. These questions can increase emotional distress, but they also often foster intellectual humility and a broader search for meaning. These subtle effects of questioning your faith are detailed in a new study published in the journal Science. Psychology of religion and spirituality.
Interest in religion has steadily declined in the United States over the past few decades. A growing number of young people identify as non-religious and are increasingly leaving the traditions in which they were raised. Sociologists and psychologists sometimes refer to this demographic of formerly religious people as “dons.”
University of Virginia researcher Julie J. Exline led a team that investigated how questioning one’s faith affects mental health and personal growth. Exline and colleagues focused specifically on college students because the transition to adulthood is typically a time of intense exploration of identity. During this period of development, young people often encounter new ideas that shake up their childhood worldview.
To understand this process, psychologists look at how people construct overall systems of meaning. A meaning-making system is essentially a mental framework that a person uses to understand the world and their place in it. Deeply held religious beliefs often form the core of this orientation framework.
People experience psychological tension when they encounter information that contradicts their core beliefs. To resolve this discomfort, individuals must engage in a process called accommodation. Adaptation involves mental efforts to modify existing belief structures so that new and contradictory ideas can be integrated.
This tension often surfaces as religious doubt, a feeling of uncertainty about religious teachings. Psychologists distinguish between common religious doubts and what they call doubt struggles. Common doubts can simply be intellectual doubts about doctrine, such as wondering whether a particular historical event actually happened.
On the other hand, fighting doubts involves deep worry, confusion, or emotional distress regarding those uncertainties. For someone whose entire life and social world revolves around the church, doubting the existence of God can cause severe distress. Conversely, a person with little religiosity may have many questions without experiencing any emotional upheaval.
To explore these dynamics, researchers surveyed 3,953 undergraduate students across three different university campuses in the United States. These institutions include private research universities, public state universities, and private Christian universities. Participants completed an extensive questionnaire about their religious background, current spiritual identity, and mental health.
Researchers divided students into six different groups based on their level of religious involvement. These categories ranged from students who were not religious at all, to students who had left their faith completely, to students who were very active in their faith. This allowed the researchers to see how current religious identity influences a person’s response to skepticism.
Students were asked to rate 20 different reasons for their religious doubts, based on a psychological scale developed in the late 1990s. The survey also includes measures of psychological distress, including depression, anxiety, anger, and stress. To balance this out, the study tested indicators of well-being such as life satisfaction and self-compassion.
To measure the potential benefits of questioning faith, the team assessed participants’ directions of inquiry. Inquiry orientation is a psychological term that describes a way of thinking that views religion and spirituality as an ongoing and flexible search for truth. People with a high inquiry orientation embrace complexity and are willing to change their minds when new evidence is presented.
When the team analyzed the data, the most popular reasons for doubting religion were primarily social rather than theological. Students cited the hypocrisy of religious figures and intolerance toward gay and lesbian individuals as the top two reasons for questioning their faith. Other high-rating factors included intolerance toward other religions and the tendency of religious groups to put pressure on outsiders.
Issues of evil and unjust suffering were also high on the list of suspicions, but social grievances topped the list. The students were primarily bothered by the negative behavior of religious believers rather than by the logical contradictions in the scriptures. This suggests that interpersonal friction is the main cause of young people leaving religion.
Different types of students prioritized slightly different concerns. Students who were more religious were more likely to report conflict with concepts such as an afterlife and conflicts between evolutionary science and creationism. Still, overall, religious individual behavior was found to be a major barrier for undergraduate students.
As the researchers expected, the presence of suspicion was associated with negative mental health outcomes. Both general religious doubt and struggling with specific doubt predicted greater psychological distress and lower overall well-being. Even when controlling for overlapping similarities, both variables independently predicted negative mental health scores.
These negative mental health outcomes were most pronounced among students who were highly involved in religion. For religious students, questioning their faith was closely associated with emotional turmoil and anxiety. Because their belief system was central to their identity, cracks appeared in its foundation, creating intense anxiety.
In contrast, nonreligious students reported more doubts but did not experience the same level of psychological distress in response. For students who had already left the faith, many reasons for doubt simply justified their decision to leave the religion. The relationship between religious doubt and mental health problems was also stronger at Christian colleges compared to secular institutions.
Although the effects on mental health seem depressing, the data revealed a brighter side of questioning one’s faith. Students who reported higher levels of religious doubt also scored higher on the inquiry-oriented scale. They demonstrated a strong desire to explore meaning and a willingness to embrace nuanced worldviews.
Furthermore, students who had doubts showed greater intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is the recognition that one’s beliefs may be wrong and the willingness to listen to opposing views. Students who identified as spiritual but not religious, or those who had completely disengaged from organized religion, had higher scores on these open-minded variables.
The research team determined that having doubts is more than just a mental health liability. Rather, experiencing religious uncertainty can serve as a catalyst for personal growth and deeper existential exploration. Engaging with difficult questions often helps emerging adults develop a more flexible, compassionate, and resilient worldview.
This study has several limitations that need to be considered. Most participants were white, Christian, and cisgender women, so the results may not fully reflect the attitudes of the broader population. This data was also collected several years ago, meaning it does not capture cultural changes over the past decade.
The specific survey used to measure Reasons for Suspicion was originally created in 1997. Therefore, this study did not include political factors that may cause religious disillusionment today. Issues such as reproductive rights, climate change, and the fusion of religion and partisan politics are perhaps the main sources of modern skepticism.
Future research could use open-ended questions to identify additional reasons why young people are turning away from their faith. Scientists could also incorporate modern tools to more accurately measure intellectual humility and spiritual yearning. Exploring how different demographic groups handle spiritual questions can help psychologists better support individuals navigating faith transitions.
The study, “The Many Reasons for Religious Doubt: The Relationship between Doubt Struggles, Mental Health, and an Open and Humble Inquiry Orientation,” was authored by Julie J. Exline, Yehudis Keller, Andrew C. Moffitt, Joshua A. Wilt, and Kenneth I. Pargament.
