Religion plays a varying role in people’s lives, from serving as a component of your sense of identity to giving you a framework for your daily schedule. With the election of Pope Leo XIV, everyone around the world is tuned in to this latest example of how prominent organized religion can be, whether people believe in that particular religion or not.

The Upsides and Downsides of Religious Involvement

You can probably generate your own list of reasons why religion could be beneficial or detrimental to mental health, or perhaps fall somewhere in between.

People with steadfast religious beliefs not only identify strongly with a spiritual being, but also tend to socialize with others who share those beliefs. Going to the site of your religious involvement, you’ve got an automatic group of friends, or at least companions, whom you see on a regular basis. They can provide emotional support and often, more than that, practical help if you run into trouble. Does this kind of built-in support group help provide lasting boosts to well-being?

Putting Religion’s Value to the Test

In a new study on religion’s possible benefits to mental health, University of Bologna’s Gabriele Prati (2025) zeroed in on the social aspects of being a part of organized religion. In summarizing the “huge literature” demonstrating religion’s positive effects, she suggests that more than meeting up with friends and like-minded people, religious involvement helps to promote the maintenance of a healthier lifestyle. You’re less likely to drink, smoke, and use alcohol and recreational drugs if you’re part of a religious community, she maintains.

Narrowing religion’s advantages down to these health maintenance behaviors, Prati nevertheless points out that there are, despite that huge literature, not enough studies carried out over periods of time long enough to help tease apart cause and effect. Healthier people might attend religious services more often, just as much as religious participation fosters better health.

Prati was able to overcome this limitation through her use of a large longitudinal dataset known as the Understanding Society—British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), carried out by the University of Essex. Covering 18 waves of testing between 1991 and 2009, the BHPS included 10 sets of measures in which participants indicated their frequency of religious service attendance with a simple one-question rating scale.

Across the 10 testing intervals, the percentage of participants who stated that they attended services averaged about 11 to 16 percent, with half to two-thirds never setting foot in a house of worship. Participants averaged 44 years old at the first time of testing, with 38 percent stating they had no religious affiliation.

The remainder were mostly Christian, representing the Church of England (Anglican; 36 percent), Roman Catholicism (9 percent), and Presbyterianism (Church of Scotland; 4 percent). The sample also included Methodist (3 percent) and others not specifically identified. The outcome measures included a 12-item scale assessing mental health from an overall health questionnaire and a single-item life satisfaction question.

Using modeling techniques that tracked relationships over time within individuals in the joint relationships between religious attendance and mental health outcome measures, the Italian researcher came to one surprising conclusion. In contrast to the prior literature suggesting mental health would benefit from religious attendance, the effects simply weren’t there.

In her words: “The findings of the current study cast doubt on the role of religious service attendance in improving mental health and the theoretical assumptions regarding religion’s specialness in the domain of mental health” (p. 164).

What Explains This Surprising Finding?

To understand this unexpected result, Prati cited four possible explanations.

One is that just because you go to religious services doesn’t mean you’ll have positive interactions there. Just being in a place with other people wouldn’t guarantee that you’ll leave feeling better.

Second, prior studies had not tackled the problem in as comprehensive a manner as her own, 18-year longitudinal work. Getting rid of or reducing the effect of possible contaminating variables was only possible with the extensive dataset she had at her disposal.

Third, Prati notes that her sample was all UK-based, and as a secular country, people who attend religious services may not receive the same kind of benefits they would in more religious cultures.

Finally, although there were plenty of assessments over time, they were still too sporadic, potentially, to detect direct church attendance-mental health links. It’s possible that the boost you get from going to a religious service wears off over time, particularly considering that such a small minority of the sample actually attended services regularly.

There are other considerations as well, not necessarily captured with the relatively superficial mental health measure used in this study. Also, there may be potential downsides to religious involvement—for example, if the guilt about not living up to its standards causes you to feel like a failure. If you cheat on the healthy lifestyle advocated by your religion, does this make you a bad person?

What’s more, you can also find yourself thrown into internal conflict if someone or some group representing your religious affiliation does something you find morally objectionable. How to reconcile that inner conflict can stir up a range of negative emotions and lead you to question the piece of your identity associated with that religion. Strife can also occur if your religion (or lack thereof) doesn’t mesh with the religion of your relationship partner or their family.

Another problem is that religions vary tremendously in their philosophy, teaching, and practices. The UK study included primarily members of the Christian religion, and even then, primarily Anglican. Might the benefit of religious involvement depend not just on your adherence to its teachings but on its set of spiritual beliefs?

Religiosity, Mental Health, and You

Clearly, there’s much more research needed in this area to explore in more depth the possible benefits of religious involvement. The Prati study provides an excellent example of the type of long-term research needed to be able to separate cause from effect, if those exist, within this area.

From a practical standpoint, the findings also suggest that if you’re seeking deeper benefits for your soul, church attendance on a weekly (or less) basis might not be the panacea you desire. You don’t need to put yourself in a physical space to experience the benefits of engaging with your own higher purpose or sense of morality.

However, if you are someone who makes religious attendance a part of your weekly (or more) life, the Prati findings might be helpful in thinking about how best to use this to your advantage. Recall what she concluded about the potential for negative vs. positive social interactions. Try to find ways to maximize the pleasant aspects of relationships with your fellow worshipers. Similarly, remembering that the UK-based survey didn’t include measures of health-promoting behaviors, consider ways that you build these into your lifestyle as well, whether through religion or otherwise.

To sum up, managing your mental health reflects a complex set of components, many of which interact with each other. Yours can flourish the more you take advantage of whatever brings you both inner peace, along with a healthy lifestyle.