Are Atheists More Depressed than Religious People?

In recent years, the view that religious belief and participation in religious acts of worship has a positive effect upon the well-being of man has repeatedly been publicized in the German-speaking sphere by high-circulation magazines such as Der Spiegel and popular-science periodicals like Psychologie Heute, which cite epidemiological inquiries and quantitative research. These articles also suggest that religious people are able to cope with crises in their lives, with stress and psycho-social conflicts, more easily and develop highly effective coping strategies; moreover, they state that faith has a positive effect upon psychological and even physical health. A mass inquiry conducted in 1992 among members of the two major churches in Germany (Roman Catholic and Lutheran Protestant), for example, revealed that self-perceived satisfaction with life was more than 10% higher among regular church-goers than among those who do not go to church. This statement, among others, seemed to confirm the results of previous extensive studies, all of them suggesting that devout and practicing adherents of a religion were generally less prone to depression than persons who were brought up in religious faith but had turned away from church later in their lives.² Other inquiries that were conducted among smaller populations, too, lead to the assumption “that religion has a slight positive sum effect on self-perceptions of happiness.” In his essay “Can Religion Make You Happy?” (FI, Summer 1998), John F. Schumaker gives a survey of seven quantitative studies dealing directly with the two variables, and of 20 others that operated with components of “happiness,” all of them rendering more or less the same results.

These kinds of studies have repeatedly been criticized, and rightly so, pointing out that the effects described are not the result of religious belief but of other factors, such as social support, conformity, etc. On no account does this mean, however, that the results of these studies can be rejected altogether. But the question arises as to whether they were not principally distorted by a systematic error made in designing and performing the studies. All of the studies mentioned have a serious methodological deficiency: none of them examines a control group of determined atheists whose psychic condition is, for example, compared to that of groups of half-hearted wavering atheists and groups of persons ranging from the only slightly religious to religious fanatics. Moreover, the epidemiological studies suppress the fact that the absolute number of determined atheists in the total population is very small in relation to the number of more or less religious people. By no means, however, may the unequal distribution of the two groups within the basic total number play a part in a qualitative comparison between them. This fact has to be given due consideration with any experimental design if it really is to meet the methodological criteria.

A study we conducted ourselves among determined atheists is very well suited to the purpose of putting the debate of whether there is a statistically substantiable relation between religiousness and depression on a more objective level, a debate that is also quite often influenced by ideological views. Our study, which was conducted on the basis of a comprehensive questionnaire, comprises a population of 174 persons of all ages and both sexes, who, in order to be considered for our evaluation, had to fulfill the following preconditions: all test persons must come from religious families and must also have received the religious education of the average citizen (as far as the imparting of religious doctrines and the performance of certain rituals are concerned); they must also have left the church later in their lives. Furthermore, they were categorized as determined atheists only if they were also subscribers to a German anticlerical periodical. With this latter criterion we wanted to ensure that the test persons had left church not “only” for financial reasons but also from inner conviction and, moreover, manifested more or less openly that they were opposed to religion. For the measurement of the average emotional condition of our test persons, we used Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI), which is widely applied in psychology. We had chosen this standardized measuring method especially for the reason that it would enable us to compare the values obtained from our test population with those obtained from test groups of religious persons.

In a study conducted almost at the same time as ours among Catholic students (all of whom were, of course, church members), the assessment of the test persons’ statements by means of the BDI scale, where higher values also mean a higher proneness to depression, suggests that significantly fewer (in statistical terms) signs of depressive conditions were to be noted with strictly religious persons than with those to whom faith is of relatively little importance.The authors determined an average value of 4.6 for all church members they had questioned. Moreover, they subdivided the test groups according to how close their emotional ties with religion and church were. The values they determined were 3.4 for the strictly religious group, 6.0 for the less religious group, and 4.0 for the group of moderately religious people, which means the highest degree of depression was found in the sub-group of the least religious persons. From this, the investigators—like the studies cited above—draw the conclusion that “depression is the price that has to be paid for giving up religious convictions.” This conclusion, however, is entirely dubious, as the values determined in the group of less religious people, i.e. the “lukewarm” Christians, are—in a suggestive manner—taken as a comparative value for all those who have freed themselves from the religious beliefs in which they were brought up, and the investigators are simply taking advantage of the fact that, in statistical terms, the number of determined atheists is small in comparison to the relatively great number of more or less religious people, as we have already mentioned above. Our study has proved that determined atheists actually show a significantly lower depression score: 3.2. If we transfer these values into a coordinate system and take the inverse value for depression as the ordinate and the degree of (ir-)religiousness as the abscissa, we obtain an asymmetrical U-shaped curve. This means that fanatical Christians and militant atheists are least prone to depression, whereas wavering atheists and the half-heartedly religious are literally “washed out”—or, to illustrate it by a quotation from the Bible: “But the half-hearted I shall spew.” The asymmetry is due to the fact that, on the average, even with devout Christians depressions occur more frequently than with determined atheists. The most distinct contrast, however, is to be noted between the group of determined atheists and the group of slightly religious people.