Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?
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.
Kemp Mill, Md., where Kaplan lives, is not exclusively religious or Jewish, but its 1,200 Orthodox Jewish families (which are politically diverse) are especially focused on community building. The community is small enough for everyone to know one another but big enough to make sure all the amenities are there: schools, restaurants, supermarkets, synagogues, and community centers. “People are constantly doing things for each other: delivering groceries to the elderly, mentoring youth, joining park cleanups,” he says. “I wouldn’t call it volunteering. . . . It’s just what’s expected.”
His three kids live near their classmates, and there’s no shortage of neighborhood-based camps and after-school activities. He says because the neighbors trust one another, the kids go freely between houses, to the parks, or to the pizza parlor without adult supervision. The children are also expected to be contributing members of the community from an early age, from babysitting to tutoring and becoming camp counselors. “Everyone has a role.”
Kaplan’s description of his kids’ lives in their religious community strongly reflected what Haidt and I found likely to help solve the nation’s youth mental health crisis: real-world community.
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
That today’s youths are experiencing a mental health crisis is now common knowledge. Young people are struggling with higher rates of mental illness than any previous generation on record. Concerned parents, educators, politicians, and others are desperately seeking explanations and solutions.
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?
At first, I thought the differences could be a result of self-reporting. Perhaps religious conservatives were as distressed as others but less likely to admit it. However, the data consistently show that this is unlikely to be the explanation. 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.
In “The Anxious Generation” and our related posts on our Substack newsletter, After Babel, Haidt and I argue that much of the decline in mental health among adolescents since 2010 can be tied to the rapid transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015. Adolescents traded their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps, and their play-based childhoods became disembodied and placeless phone-based childhoods. The new phone-based childhood pushes out most of teens’ real-world play and social interaction and brings young people a variety of harms, from loneliness and anxiety to attention fragmentation and sleep deprivation. The transformation of childhood has made many kids more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to self-harm, especially adolescent girls.
So, what are religious conservative teens doing differently?
What religious communities are getting right
The secret is likely not any particular belief system itself but the way organized religion and shared beliefs bind communities together.
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.
The difference in how teens spend their time matters. Experts have extensively documented the mental health and social benefits of strong real-world communities and the unique contribution of religion in binding such communities together (partly due to the collective rituals that are key components of religious life). As Kaplan explained to me, based on his own research, real-world communities help foster social trust, social capital, and social support. Any developmental psychology textbook will tell you that healthy child development requires these features.
Although most of us understand that community is beneficial, many have not experienced the kinds of tight-knit local communities that Kaplan describes. We often mistake social networks for communities. As he noted in an email to me, “An understanding of what community is has been lost to . . . people who have never experienced it. . . . Until very recently, human communities were always rooted in specific places — places imbued with meaning, places with history and a shared identity. Such communities may have constrained their members in various ways — limiting, as
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.
What about kids who don’t have a real-world community?
One common objection to the claim that real-world communities are better than virtual networks is that social media platforms offer marginalized youth many social benefits — they can find the like-minded peers they don’t have in their real-world communities.
Of course, that’s a good thing. This is a major advantage of the internet and, sometimes, of social media, too. However, kids from marginalized groups are also far more likely to experience the risks of the phone-based childhood — from cyberbullying and predation from peers and strangers to being fed self-harm content by the platforms’ algorithms. Until some guardrails are put in place, I worry that this solution may, at times, be worse than the problem it is trying to solve. These online networks are often unstable, transient, and full of unknown people — and they are embedded within platforms designed to fuel outrage and keep their users online much longer than they intend. Giving our most vulnerable teens unfettered access to an unregulated world with no guardrails or support does not outweigh the meager social benefits. We can do better than this.
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.
This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with our desire to give them a stable, tight-knit community? It’s a difficult question to answer, though many organizations, like Outward Bound, Block Party USA, and the Girl Scouts, are creatively trying to do just this. My hope is that we can learn from the communities that have done this best and work together to end phone-based childhood, restore play-based childhood, and give all kids more deeply rooted, tight-knit, and loving communities in the real world.
Zach Rausch is an associate research scientist at New York University, the lead researcher for the book “The Anxious Generation,” and managing editor of the Substack newsletter After Babel.
