Less religion in childhood, poorer mental health in adolescence: what the results of a scientific study show

(ZENIT News / Rome, 07.22.2026).- The debate over religion and mental health has acquired a new dimension. Rather than asking simply whether religious individuals are psychologically healthier than nonreligious people, an international study has examined what happens when the cultural place of religion changes—and finds that, particularly in affluent Western societies, the retreat of religious belief from the formation of children may be associated with rising anxiety among the young.

Published in Developmental Science, the research analyzed cultural and health data from 70 countries between 1989 and 2022, drawing on the World Values Survey, the Global Burden of Disease study, the Human Development Report and the Study of the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing. Its central question was not whether religious parents produce healthier children, but whether changing social expectations about what children should be taught and encouraged to value have consequences for their psychological well-being.

The results were more nuanced than some initial headlines suggested. At the global level, a growing emphasis on independence did not, by itself, produce a uniform increase in anxiety disorders. The picture changed, however, when countries were examined according to their broader cultural trajectories. Among WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries—the movement toward greater independence was significantly associated with higher rates of anxiety disorders among children and adolescents. No comparable association was found among non-WEIRD countries.

The strongest and most consistent finding concerned religion. Across the countries studied, a greater emphasis on religious faith as a socialization goal was associated over time with lower rates of anxiety disorders among children and adolescents. The effect was small in statistical terms, but its consistency across different analyses made it significant. Individual-level data from the United States replicated the finding and suggested that the cultural expectation of religiosity was a stronger predictor than the mother’s own religious commitment.

A cross-lagged panel model—designed to examine whether changes in one factor may precede changes in another—also supported the possibility that religiosity can have a protective effect against anxiety during childhood and adolescence. The researchers therefore point to faith as a potential source of purpose and social connection, rather than merely as a private preference.

That distinction matters. The study does not demonstrate that religious people are automatically healthier, nor does it prove that secularization directly causes mental illness. Its findings concern changes in cultural norms over time and the relationship between those changes and anxiety. Leonard K. Kulisch of Ruhr University Bochum, one of the study’s authors, has explicitly cautioned against interpreting the research as proof that religious individuals simply enjoy better mental health.

Yet the findings do challenge a familiar assumption of modern societies: that economic prosperity and individual autonomy necessarily make older sources of meaning socially unnecessary. Material well-being can alleviate many forms of suffering, but it cannot by itself answer questions about identity, belonging, purpose or the place of the individual within a larger moral community.

This may help explain why the study’s conclusions are particularly relevant to the mental health of the young. Childhood and adolescence are not merely periods in which individuals acquire skills; they are also stages in which they seek a stable answer to the question of who they are and where they belong. Religious communities can provide shared practices, intergenerational relationships, moral reference points and a narrative that places personal suffering within a wider horizon of meaning.

For the Catholic Faith, the findings resonate with an understanding of the human person that refuses to reduce well-being to either material conditions or psychological comfort. Faith is not a therapeutic device invented to manage anxiety. Nor does a positive psychological consequence establish the origin or purpose of religion. The fact that friendship, family life or religious practice may strengthen resilience does not mean that they were artificially created as stress-management techniques.

The more serious conclusion is anthropological: if religion contributes to belonging, purpose and a stable framework for life, then the disappearance of those structures may leave a vacuum that cannot automatically be filled by greater wealth, consumer choice or individual freedom. In some of the societies most successful in material terms, young people are nevertheless confronting growing levels of psychological fragility.

The researchers themselves call for greater support for young people growing up in increasingly secular societies. That recommendation deserves to be taken seriously—but it should not be interpreted merely as a call to create new substitutes for religion. The deeper question is whether modern cultures have underestimated the human need for transcendence, community and inherited meaning.

The study does not settle the relationship between faith and mental health. It does, however, make one conclusion increasingly difficult to dismiss: when a society changes the values it transmits to its children, it may also change the psychological environment in which those children grow up. And when religious faith disappears from that environment, the consequences may extend far beyond the walls of churches.

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