The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 3: Benefits of Religion

For most believers, faith is not just an intellectual position. It is an emotional world, built over a lifetime. Religious beliefs are often taught in early childhood, and they can represent a fundamental bond and a shared culture with parents and ancestors, sometimes going back centuries.

Religion as Family Inheritance

Religious stories, passages from religious texts, and familiar rituals can become like a "native language," in the sense of the fluency and familiarity people develop through repeated exposure and practice over many years. Shared religious beliefs can be a bridge to memories of parents—alongside memories of fishing together, playing baseball, going camping, playing music, or cooking together. In that sense, religion is not simply an "idea." It is the atmosphere of the family home—a mood, a shared vocabulary, and a living link to one's past.

Unlike hobbies, however, religion carries a far heavier weight. A parent might be mildly disappointed if a child dislikes baseball; with religion, the stakes are much higher. Parents may insist—with fear, sadness, anger, or a sense of emergency—that their children must remain within the same faith. If the children stray, guilt can be induced in ways that are far deeper than ordinary family disagreements. In extreme cases, the divergence leads to estrangement or disowning. In some families, the price of doubt is guilt, exile, or the fear of breaking a parent's heart. It is hard to overstate how high the emotional cost can be, for questioning or leaving the family’s faith tradition.

One of the deepest reasons why many people are religious is because the people they have loved most have been religious: parents, grandparents, mentors, teachers, community leaders, or admired public figures (for me, someone like Desmond Tutu or Martin Luther King). When these beloved figures explain their moral courage, comfort, or meaning as flowing from God, the religion becomes fused with the goodness of the person.

Out of love and respect, many people continue the same faith—not because they have weighed the evidence with fresh eyes—few of us ever do that with our deepest commitments—but because questioning the belief can feel like questioning the beloved person. It can feel, emotionally, like an insult to one's parents, or a betrayal of one's ancestors, or a rejection of one's own story. Over time, religion can become so interwoven with identity that challenging it feels less like an intellectual inquiry and more like a renunciation of a precious part of oneself.

Religion as Neurobiological Experience

Beyond family attachment, there is the brain itself: the human mind is remarkably capable of mystical experience. Many people have had moments—alone or in groups—of awe, presence, unity, transcendence, or "spiritual certainty." Whatever one concludes philosophically, the raw fact is that such states are part of the normal range of human experience. And they can be intensified or triggered by particular brain states: by psychedelics and other drugs that alter serotonin or dopamine signalling, by sleep deprivation, by stress, and in some neurological conditions. Wilder Penfield's mid-twentieth-century work at the Montreal Neurological Institute showed that direct electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe could conjure vivid "dreamy states" that felt profoundly meaningful to the patient. Penfield thought he was replaying stored memories; later research suggests something more striking still—that the brain was partly reconstructing, and partly fabricating, these experiences on the spot. The feeling of deep significance, in other words, can be manufactured by the tissue itself, and then clothed by the mind in whatever meaning its culture provides. In temporal lobe epilepsy, similarly, some people report intense subjective or spiritual states in association with seizure activity.

The brain constantly seeks to make sense of things. When something unusual happens in perception, emotion, or bodily feeling, the mind strains to explain it. Often a mystical explanation feels logical even when the actual cause is biological. A powerful feeling state can be interpreted as "God," "fate," "destiny," "the universe speaking," or "a presence," depending on one's cultural vocabulary and expectations.

The same instinct often fuels belief in other mystical phenomena, such as ghosts, spirits, or psychic abilities. These beliefs can act as a lens for understanding reality, where coincidences are read as evidence of a hidden world. This can make life feel "magical" in a satisfying way, offering a sense of specialness and wonder akin to the feeling one gets from a fantasy story like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

Religion as Psychological Comfort

Religious beliefs, services, and rituals have helped countless people cope psychologically with death and loss. You can have less fear about death—your own death, or the death of someone you love—if you believe that death is an entry point to another world, and that separation is temporary.

I think it is a psychological skill, for any person, to practice acceptance of the fact that everything ends: every pleasant experience, every day and night, every song, every meal, every breath, every firework, every life, every mountain. They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then they are gone—sometimes literally in a puff of smoke. It is entropy in action: one of the underlying realities of the universe. Some forms of religion can interrupt that acceptance by bypassing finality with an imagined eternity. This calms fear. But it can also be a kind of avoidance—a comforting story that softens grief by blunting the truth.

It is easy to see why the idea of "taking away" religion can feel like taking away a rich cultural inheritance and a shield against despair. Many people imagine that without religion they would be left adrift, empty, or nihilistic. I do not believe that is a necessary outcome, but I do believe it is a real fear—and a psychologically understandable one.

Religion as Culture

Many religious phrases are woven into everyday language; other words and symbols have roots in ancient mythology. For example, our word "panic" comes from the Greek god Pan, and our month "January" is named for the Roman god Janus. Language forms a lens—deeply ingrained in the brain through memory infused with emotion—through which we describe and interpret experience; in a religious household, one naturally develops the habit of interpreting events with religious references in mind, because those are the interpretive tools one has practiced. And historically, in some homes and communities, scripture was not merely a weekly reading—it was a central text around which literacy and moral education were organized.

Religion has also served, in many families and cultures, as a framework for moral development. Lessons about how to be kind, how to deal with guilt or mistakes ("sin"), how to navigate conflict, how to be a decent citizen, how to face suffering and loss—these have often been taught through weekly sermons, study of sacred texts, and the social modelling that occurs in a community of adults trying (at least some of the time) to be better people. Daily habits—such as saying grace—can instill a rhythm of gratitude. Religious services often use architecture, music, and ritual to evoke awe and reverence. A great deal of human beauty has come through religion: Bach, Handel, hymns, icons, mosques, temples, cathedrals, and the mysterious emotional power of a room built for reverence.  Many of my own favourite pieces of music are deeply tied to that history.

For many people, their happiest memories—friendship, loyalty, meaningful service, celebration, "ecstatic" spine-tingling moments of being emotionally moved—are associated with church or religious community. Many believers interpret these peak emotional states as manifestations of God. But these are natural emotional states whose interpretation is culturally shaped: in a cathedral, at a concert, at a political rally, in nature, or even at a sports event. The state is real and valuable; it is the supernatural explanation, not the experience, that the evidence fails to support.

Religion also organizes time.  It gives people ceremonies for birth, coming of age, marriage, and death, and it fills the year with holidays, fasts, and feasts.  A family gathering for Christmas dinner, or lighting candles, does not think of itself as "doing theology"—and this is precisely one of religion's quiet powers: it sets private life inside a shared calendar.  

This communal power is often concentrated through the figure of the minister. Some ministers are wonderful orators: gifted storytellers with compelling voices, humour, and genuine moral seriousness—sometimes with a breadth of knowledge about history and literature that makes their sermons a kind of free education in the humanities. Some of the great orators in modern history, such as Martin Luther King, were ministers. Churches have been one of the few sustained modern venues where people regularly gather to hear impassioned, ethically themed rhetoric delivered with skill and intensity. Mind you, preaching can be used for darker purposes: demagogues can weaponize charisma, spectacle, and group emotion to fuel intolerance.

Religion as Refuge

Religion can also function as refuge. Many people who feel lonely, adrift, or ungrounded are drawn to a religious or spiritual group because it offers instant community: new friendships, mentorship, comforting rituals, structure, sometimes even material support, and a ready-made language for meaning. This differs from many other community organizations because the commitment is thicker: it is not merely "we play badminton together," but "we share a destiny that goes beyond this life." It's a little bit like an orphan finding a home and then gratefully adopting the new family's beliefs.

This is also part of why religious (and ideological) communities can become so resilient: they meet deep social and psychological needs. Research on radicalization and extremist commitment—including the work of Nafees Hamid, Scott Atran, and Harvey Whitehouse—has explored how peer influence, identity, and social exclusion can harden commitment in tightly bound groups. Ordinary religious life and extremism are very different, but they share a human vulnerability: questioning faith or contemplating a departure from the group can feel like abandoning your family or your core values.   

Religion as Charity

Churches help many people through charity work.  In downtown Vancouver, for example, a well-known fundamentalist church has helped provide temporary winter shelter for street-involved adults.  On a much larger scale, the Salvation Army—which operates roughly one in five of all emergency shelter beds in Canada—provides thousands of shelter, detox, and supportive housing beds each night, along with millions of meals and extensive street outreach. Religious organizations in Canada receive billions of dollars per year in donations.

Still, this needs to be interpreted carefully. These figures do not mean that all religious giving goes directly to the poor, and church charity can at times be paternalistic or conditional—tied to doctrinal messaging or a subtle expectation of loyalty. Nor is this benevolence unique to religion: secular charities, food banks, municipal programs, and public agencies also provide shelter, low-cost food, outreach, housing support, and addiction services. So the charitable success of churches is real, and sometimes admirable, but it demonstrates the power of organized community, volunteer labour, and pooled resources more than it demonstrates the truth of any supernatural claim.

Religion as Moral Leadership

Many religious leaders are wonderful people: warm, generous, giving, gentle, and wise. They can motivate others to focus on positive values, inspire acts of kindness, encourage a healthy lifestyle, and even exert political influence as peacemakers or as voices standing up to injustice.

On a small or local scale, a church minister, rabbi, priest, or imam may be a gentle and respected pillar of the community, organizing acts of kindness, comforting people in need, mediating conflicts, and providing counselling.

On a larger scale, some religious leaders have offered real moral leadership on the world stage. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop from South Africa who helped lead his country peacefully out of the apartheid era, was one of the great moral figures of the late twentieth century. Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun, was beloved for her profound acts of charity. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen monk, spread a message of compassion and peace. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has become a global symbol of nonviolence, gentleness, and compassion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, drew on his Christian theology to resist the Nazis, ultimately leading to his execution in 1945. Rabbi Abraham Heschel used his standing as a Jewish theologian to combat racism and support the civil rights movement. Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani Muslim whose charitable work followed a simple religious ethic of mercy and service, was one of the world's great humanitarians. B.R. Ambedkar, the Indian intellectual leader who helped write India's constitution, used a Buddhist framework later in his life to stand peacefully against caste-based discrimination. Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025, is emphasizing a theology of peace, while other darker forces in the world use religious language and symbolism to support war. In early 2025, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, used the moral language of Christianity not to flatter power but to restrain it, calling on political leaders to show mercy toward people living in fear—and she did so as a plea for mercy rather than a denunciation, which is part of why it carried. There are thousands more examples—many people of extraordinary courage and kindness have been religious leaders or devout believers.

Religion & Persecution

There is another layer as well: persecution and trauma. Many individuals and communities have been oppressed because of their religion, sometimes brutally—often by other religious groups, including rival branches of the same tradition. This happened to my own ancestors, most recently in my grandmother's generation near the beginning of the Soviet era. There were experiences of fear and brutality that she could never speak about for the rest of her life. Trauma can cement belief—or at least cement loyalty to the people, symbols, and stories associated with survival.

Mind you, people who questioned the religious beliefs of their time have often been persecuted and executed through the ages. The point is simply that fear—whether fear of outside violence, or fear of internal exclusion—can make belief feel like survival.

Religion, Stigma, and Politics

Finally, we should acknowledge the stigma surrounding the word "secular." To many ears, it evokes coldness: a painting devoid of colour, music devoid of emotion. It can evoke memories of totalitarian states that suppressed religion. Some people equate secularism or atheism with nihilism, criminality, or a lack of moral grounding. Many believers sincerely think that without God there would be moral decay. People who are religious benefit from its association with moral stability, regardless of whether the association is valid.

Politics amplifies this. In many contexts, public piety is rewarded, and some leaders clearly perform religiosity to secure loyalty. This is a cross-partisan and cross-cultural phenomenon: politicians of many faiths and parties learn to display the symbols of belief—a visit to a church, a mosque, or a temple, a well-timed scriptural quotation, a Bible held up for the cameras—because the gesture rallies the faithful regardless of how the leader actually lives. So it is politically beneficial to appear religious.

All of this is why critique of religion, to be intellectually honest, must begin with an accounting of religion's benefits: the attachment, the community, the rituals, the moral vocabulary, the beauty, the refuge, the saintly leaders, the buffering against death. These are good things, even when the supernatural claims do not align with the evidence. The political advantages of religiosity are also understandable. Understanding these benefits is not a concession. It is the only way to explain why religion persists, and why leaving it can feel less like changing one's mind than losing a world.  

References

Atran, S. (2010). Talking to the enemy: Faith, brotherhood, and the (un)making of terrorists. HarperCollins.

A field-based study of what binds people to sacred causes, drawing on interviews with militants and on the "devoted actor" framework. It argues that commitment to extremist groups arises less from doctrine than from small-group loyalty, kinship-like bonds, and identity—shedding light on the broader human tendency for belonging and belief to fuse so tightly that abandoning the belief feels like abandoning the self.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

The foundational work on "flow," the state of deep, self-forgetful absorption. It supplies the psychological vocabulary for the absorbed, joyful states people often experience during collective worship, prayer, and music—states that are genuinely beneficial regardless of how they are interpreted.

Hamid, N., Pretus, C., Atran, S., Crockett, M. J., Ginges, J., Sheikh, H., Tobeña, A., Carmona, S., Gómez, A., Davis, R., & Vilarroya, O. (2019). Neuroimaging 'will to fight' for sacred values: An empirical case study with supporters of an Al Qaeda associate. Royal Society Open Science, 6(6), 181585. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181585

An fMRI study of men sympathetic to a radical Islamist cause in Barcelona, examining the brain basis of willingness to fight and die for "sacred" values. When participants contemplated sacrifice for values they held sacred, activity fell in prefrontal and parietal regions associated with cost-benefit calculation—suggesting such commitments are processed as non-negotiable duties rather than weighed as trade-offs. Willingness to fight also shifted once participants saw how their peers rated the same values, underscoring the role of social influence in hardening commitment. When identity and belief fuse, the ordinary machinery of cost and consequence is bypassed.

Inzlicht, M., McGregor, I., Hirsh, J. B., & Nash, K. (2009). Neural markers of religious conviction. Psychological Science, 20(3), 385–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02305.x

An experimental study finding that religious conviction and belief in God were associated with reduced neural responses (in the anterior cingulate cortex) to uncertainty and error. The work supports the idea that religious belief can buffer anxiety and provide a felt sense of certainty and comfort—one of the psychological benefits surveyed here.


Lim, C., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction. American Sociological Review, 75(6), 914–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410386686

Panel research showing that the life-satisfaction benefits of religion flow primarily through congregational friendships and a shared religious identity rather than through private belief. Directly relevant to the claims that religion functions as community, refuge, and belonging, and that these communal mechanisms—rather than doctrine—account for much of religion's measurable good.


Pargament, K. I. (1997). The psychology of religion and coping: Theory, research, practice. Guilford Press.

A comprehensive scholarly treatment of how people use religion to cope with stress, loss, and mortality. It documents both adaptive and maladaptive forms of religious coping, supporting the account of religion as psychological comfort—particularly in confronting death and grief—while noting that such coping can sometimes function as avoidance.


Penfield, W., & Perot, P. (1963). The brain's record of auditory and visual experience: A final summary and discussion. Brain, 86(4), 595–696. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/86.4.595

The classic summary of Penfield's findings that electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe can evoke vivid experiential and "dreamy" states. Although Penfield interpreted these as the replay of stored memories, later researchers have argued that many such experiences are partly fabricated or reconstructed—supporting the point that the brain can manufacture feelings of profound significance that are then interpreted in supernatural terms.


Whitehouse, H. (2018). Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e192. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18000249

A theoretical synthesis of "identity fusion"—the visceral sense of oneness with a group that can motivate extreme sacrifice. It provides the precise technical concept behind the observation that when identity and belief become fused, questioning the belief can feel like self-annihilation, helping explain the resilience of tightly bound religious and ideological communities.

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