Religious Teens Are Happier Than Their Secular Peers — Dramatically So For Religious Conservatives

Zach Rausch (NYU; Google Scholar), Why Are Religious Teens Happier Than Their Secular Peers?:

Seth Kaplan, an author [Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (2023)] and lecturer [Johns Hopkins], spent more than two decades traveling the world. He lived or worked in 75 countries before settling down in a small Orthodox Jewish community about an hour north of Washington, D.C. Although he was raised Jewish, Kaplan told me the faith wasn’t a central part of his identity while growing up. In fact, it isn’t even the reason he now lives in an Orthodox community. “I moved here for the lifestyle,” he says.

I laughed. I’ve always been resistant to the idea of living a religious life. It feels constraining, with too many rigid and seemingly arbitrary rules. The idea that someone would move to an Orthodox community for the lifestyle sounded, well, crazy. But as Kaplan explained his story in more detail, it began to make more sense — and it resonated with my research.

I’ve spent much of the last few years as the lead researcher for Jonathan Haidt’s recently published book “The Anxious Generation,” which explains how we’ve inadvertently deprived Gen Z (those born after 1995) of real-world community, independence, and free play, and replaced those things with smartphones and social media, contributing to a precipitous decline in their mental health. Kaplan isn’t part of the generation we’re most concerned about, but as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in his 2001 book “Bowling Alone,” the disintegration of communal life in the United States began in the 1960s as fewer adults attended religious services and civic engagement fell. The introduction of the smartphone and digital life has only exacerbated these existing problems: loneliness, lack of civic engagement, and the erosion of local communities.

But this disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community—and free-play-based childhoods. This is the kind of childhood Kaplan wanted for his kids. ...

Kaplan believes, more than anyone I have ever met, in the power of strong, tight-knit communities to solve our personal and social ills. In fact, Kaplan has become one of the world’s leading experts on what makes some societies and communities thrive and others not. He has come to believe that many of the crises we face today — the youth mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the drug overdose crisis, and political polarization — can be traced back to the deterioration of local communities.

The more I have talked with him and members of other religious communities, and the more I have dug into the research, the more I think he might be onto something.

Religion protects young people’s mental health. ...

Teens without a religious affiliation across the political spectrum started reporting that they felt lonely, worthless, anxious, and depressed at much higher rates starting in the early 2010s. However, religious teens, especially those who report being more conservative, did not.

How did this one group of young people manage to mostly buck the trend? ...

Social scientists have shown — for as long as we have been collecting data — that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, and religious people have better mental health than their secular peers. People who are religious have lower rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and suicide (for both men and women). We see this around the world: Nations where a larger percentage of people identify as religious tend to have lower suicide rates. This protective effect appears to be even stronger for those who are both conservative and religious.

Haidt and I took a look at how these trends apply to Gen Z. We used data from Monitoring the Future, a yearly survey conducted among thousands of American high school students since 1977. The survey asks students how much they agree with these statements: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of”; “Sometimes I think I am no good at all”; “I feel that I can’t do anything right”; and “I feel that my life is not very useful.”

Before 2010, teens agreed with those statements at similar rates across political and religious divides, with religious conservatives slightly less likely to agree. But after 2010, the gap between religious conservatives and everyone else grew rapidly. By 2019, it became clear that secular liberals were the most likely to agree with these self-disparaging statements.

So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently? ...

As Haidt describes in his 2012 book “The Righteous Mind,” conservatives typically value loyalty, authority, and sanctity, which tend to foster openness to religion and its traditions and structure. In contrast, liberals generally prioritize individual rights and freedoms, which can lead to a rejection of organized religion.

We see this in the data: The percentage of liberal teens who report that religion is important in their lives and who regularly attend religious services has dropped from 40 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2019. In comparison, those numbers have changed much less for conservative teens, from 50 percent in 1979 to 42 percent in 2019.

These value differences often play out in the home. I’m making some broad generalizations here, but research shows that conservative (and religious) families tend to emphasize structure and duty, providing children with clear boundaries and roles to play in the home and community. Liberal (and secular) families, however, tend to emphasize personal expression and exploration, encouraging children to discover diverse aspects of their identities. Each approach has strengths — secular liberals foster more self-expression, while religious conservatives offer more structure. Of course, either approach can go too far, leading to challenges like rigid and authoritarian parenting in conservative families or boundary-less parenting in liberal families.

These dynamics can play out with technology, too. Liberal and secular parents tend to be less restrictive about technology use than conservative and religious parents, and liberal and secular teens report spending more time on social media. At the same time, conservative teens report spending more time engaging in their local community — attending religious services, working, spending more time with trusted adults, and spending more time with their friends in person. ...

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

This is the key point: Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities. ...

When Kaplan told me he moved into an Orthodox Jewish community “for the lifestyle,” he helped me see that there is more to religious life than faith itself. He showed me that even if we’re lucky enough not to suffer from economic poverty, we often suffer from social poverty, with frail and shallow social ties to friends, family, and the local community.

Now, I personally don’t want to live in a highly religious community, and I don’t expect to move into one “for the lifestyle.” At the same time, I want to give my kids — when I have them — the kind of community that Kaplan is able to provide his children.

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