A Relationship With God Can Boost Mental Health, Even if You Don’t Believe
By: T Ryan Byerly
Tags: Spirituality, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Religion, Self

A Relationship With God Can Boost Mental Health, Even if You Don’t Believe

New research points to mental health benefits for the devout and agnostic alike

Photo: d3sign/Moment/Getty Images

Maybe you don’t believe in God. But could cultivating a relationship with God, despite your agnostic stance, make a difference for your mental health? As a philosopher of religion, this question is of great interest to me — and now a recent research trend suggests the answer might be yes.

For decades, researchers have wondered about the factors that account for the complex relationship between religion and mental health. Under certain circumstances, it appears that religion positively influences mental health — though not in all cases. One key variable in this equation has become increasingly clear over the past ten years: the value (to the believer) of a perceived relationship with God.

Research in this area focuses on what psychologists call “attachment to God.” If “attachment” sounds familiar, it should — attachment theory (often invoked as a framework for understanding relationships) has received a great deal of attention in recent years.

Just because a person lacks the sort of evidence they might require in order to believe in God doesn’t mean they won’t take an intellectual risk and try to engage in a relationship with God — just in case God is there.

The idea of attachment to God was borne out of a research paradigm that began with studies of attachment relationships between infants and caregivers. Infants could be avoidantly attached — seeking to strike out on their own, cold toward their caregivers, not experiencing much need for them. They could be anxiously attached — constantly needing reassurance from their caregivers, afraid to engage their environment independently, and worried their caregivers might abandon them. Or, they could be securely attached and thus occupy a kind of happy medium in which they felt assured of their caregiver’s support (when needed), which enabled them to explore their world confidently.

Roughly the same attachment orientations, it was theorized, might characterize a person’s relationship (or lack thereof) with God. A person might avoid engaging with God, might be anxious about their relationship with God, or might be secure in their relationship with God. Today, research that has accumulated for nearly 30 years makes it clear that people do vary in their attachment orientations toward God, and that difference makes a difference.

Many studies support the idea that a secure attachment to God is important for a believer’s mental health. Secure attachment is associated with less drug and alcohol abuse, less problematic internet use, less loneliness and depression, and greater satisfaction with life. When believers are instead anxiously or avoidantly attached to God, these same behaviors can be troubled. Moreover, believers’ attachment to God appears to influence outcomes uniquely. In other words, when researchers have conducted studies that control for believers’ attachment relationships to family members or partners, their attachment relationship with God has still proven significant for their mental health and well-being.

Yet, one might wonder whether these benefits are exclusively available to believers. In a 2016 study, psychologist Alyssa Strenger and her colleagues wondered about just this, arguing that research on attachment to God should attend to non-believers as well as believers. Their recommendation that studies give non-believers attention bucked the trend of the time. In Stenger and team’s view, even non-believers might still hold mental representations of God that affect their behaviors, emotions, and cognitions.

From a philosophy of religion perspective, Strenger’s suggestion makes good sense. In philosophy, “theists” are typically understood to be those who believe in God, “atheists” are those who believe God doesn’t exist, and “agnostics” neither believe God exists nor believe God doesn’t. They’re on the fence, as it were.

The emotions, behaviors, and even perceptions that are the stuff of personal relationships can exist and function apart from our beliefs (or the lack thereof).

Notably, this is a purely cognitive characterization. It has only to do with what a person believes or doesn’t believe. Yet, much more is involved in a relationship — whether to another human or to God. Just because a person lacks the sort of evidence they might require in order to believe in God doesn’t mean they won’t take an intellectual risk and try to engage in a relationship with God — just in case God is there. The emotions, behaviors, and even perceptions that are the stuff of personal relationships can exist and function apart from our beliefs (or the lack thereof).

This same idea is echoed in recent work by psychologist Steven Pirutinsky and colleagues. Pirutinsky conducted studies with Jewish populations, for whom cognitive aspects of religion are frequently less important in empirically verifiable ways. An example: weighing actions more heavily than beliefs when judging the religiosity of themselves and others. Because of this, Pirutinsky initially thought that attachment to God may not be significant for his Jewish participants’ mental health. But it turned out he was wrong. His explanation of why attachment to God did matter for Jewish participants was along the lines of what I suggested above: Whether a person cultivates a securely attached relationship to God is not constricted by their cognitive attitudes alone.

Strenger, too, tested her suggestion that attachment to God may be significant for non-believers by focusing on eating disorder symptoms and God attachment. She found that secure attachment to God was important for both believers and non-believers when it came to eating disorder symptoms, and there was no significant difference in the role it played for believers versus non-believers. Specifically, for both believers and non-believers, lower levels of anxious attachment to God weakened the effects of sociocultural pressure.

In my own recent work, I too have found further support for thinking that God attachment may be important for agnostics. I recently took a second look at two studies — here and here — of attachment to God and mental health in which data was collected for agnostics, but was not reported on in the original studies.

In both, I found that attachment to God was significantly related to mental health for agnostics. Further, I found that while theists who are securely attached to God may gain a mental health edge on agnostics who are not securely attached to God, they don’t gain this advantage on agnostics who are securely attached to God. Now, these are only a few studies. They must be interpreted with caution, and more work is needed on the topic. Yet they at least suggest that for some agnostics, cultivating a relationship with God may offer some surprising benefits — even if it isn’t accompanied by belief.