Religion as Psychotherapy

Mental Health through Faith and Focus

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today's topic explores the tools that structured religion offers that can counter our current mental health degradation. We’ll uncover all the mechanisms that religious services provide, and how so many needs go unmet when we separate from those structures. Let’s dive into how Religion provides Psychotherapy.

Caveat: I’m specifically focusing on the Christian tradition as the foundation of this investigation. Similar findings exist in other religions and are reflected in the cited studies, but since I’m more familiar with Christianity, my focus is there, so I don’t misstate the others.

Intro

My brother surprised the family over a decade ago by announcing that he was going to become a Benedictine Monk cloistered in the Monastery of the Holy Cross within the Catholic Church. Being raised in more of a non-denominational church that was not quite evangelical, this was quite a shock.

Catholicism seemed so structured and dogmatic vs. the Christianity I was raised with. Yet, over the past years of becoming more familiar with Catholicism and really starting to study the structures, I’ve come to appreciate how they’re not as restrictive as I’d thought. In fact, it’s that very structure that helps bulwark against the chaos in the world and provides meaning.

It’s an important topic because we have a crisis in the Western World today regarding our sense of self, our sense of community, and our sense of meaning. This is something

Lucy Tabrizi

explored in the essay Western liberals killed God — and they call it progress.

Christian tradition, once the West’s moral cornerstone, is now a cultural prop — mocked, sidelined, or briefly revived at Christmas. The result is a vacuum. As English philosopher G. K. Chesterton warned: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing; he believes in anything.”

It’s a powerful point, and what Chesterton describes is why I say that Religion is more of a psychology than a theology. If you remove a God, you don’t remove the psychology. You still have a sense of meaning to fill and, without the structures, guidance, and rules that surround religions, you find yourself desperately trying not to drown in a chaotic world.

Religion as a Psychology

Adding to this challenge is that, in addition to a desire for the meaning, structure, and community of religion, we also have an inclination to desire a Benevolent Dictator. Consider that the US Declaration of Independence states that “Nature’s God” bestows the unalienable Rights on people. The U.S. is founded on the idea of a higher power, a benevolent dictator of sorts who bestows our rights and holds us accountable.

Benevolent Dictatorship

Our rejection of God and the subsequent rejection of theistic religious structure hasn’t resulted in a more enlightened, fulfilled, or, especially, mentally healthy culture. What happens is that psychology is filled with proxies, and when those don’t fill the void, the result is anxiety and depression.

Hannah Spier, MD

and

Carrie Gress

recently wrote on the more spiritual nature of women and how, with the shift from organized religion, women end up replacing that with therapy, mindfulness, and other spiritual practices:

When women don’t have an ordered relationship with God, they will find surrogates, they will seek out, however unwittingly, something to fill it.¹

You can see this all around in the “I support the current thing” whiplash of social media, where, without a grounding structure, we are at the whim of whatever fills our psychological needs. The result isn’t pretty, and it’s worth noting that practitioners within religions suffer significantly fewer mental health issues than their atheist counterparts.²³⁴⁵

Clearly, Atheism isn’t meeting the need and is resulting in more people turning back to religion, and not the fluffy evangelical churches, but the highly structured and orthodox religions. Case in point, after years of decline, church attendance, especially at Catholic churches, is on the rise, particularly in England and Wales, driven largely by Gen Z. French Catholics have also seen a 45% increase in conversions over the last year. It’s not just the formal structures of Catholicism; we are also seeing a rise in the popularity of the more conservative services and a resurgence in women wearing veils by their own volition.

Another recent article, How Catholicism Got Cool, suggests this is driven by the observation that: “Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community.” While they delve into personal examples of why people are returning, let’s step back and examine the larger structure that religion offers, which meets and exceeds the capabilities and outcomes of modern psychotherapy.

What Religion Offers in Psychotherapy

The following list is focused on Catholicism because it’s the best known to me. It is not intended to be exclusive, and I’d love your ideas for what else can be added and what other religious traditions have insights that can be added. I view this as just a start to appreciate how many things are baked into conservative, structured religion:

• It starts with Awe - you realize that there are bigger things out there. Additionally, the churches are designed for the glorification of something greater. It’s a higher calling beyond the world and you. You feel small in a church and part of something larger. As a replacement, psychology protocols are recommending “awe walks” to break out of your own thoughts, and studies show dramatic reductions in depressive symptoms.⁶⁷

• Religion promises Salvation. You aren’t irredeemable, you can be forgiven, and you are valuable. You are one fallen human among everyone else and have a path to salvation; a feature critically lacking from the humanist religions like ‘woke.’ Cognitive-behavioural therapies use the same reappraisal loop; self-forgiveness is a core predictor of recovery from shame-based disorders.⁸

• It demands Aiming toward a higher behavior. The commandments in the Bible are captured in the Hebrew word Torah, whose root is the archery term “yareh,” meaning to shoot an arrow in order to hit a mark. The commandments are instructions in righteousness; a call to a higher aim and action. In dialectical behavior therapy, clients clarify their values and set committed actions. Religion provides the participant with a ready-made starting point.

• Religion contains a Community where you are surrounded by people who live your values, help you up, hold you accountable, and support you. This is why group therapy, like Alcoholics Anonymous and Weight Watchers, is beneficial because Long-term cohort studies indicate that weekly communal worship predicts lower suicidality and substance abuse.⁹

• The Sermons or Homilies provide Wisdom into what it means to be human. The examples and history help contextualize our personal experience and suffering against 6,000 years of history. This framing lowers suicide risk.¹⁰

• Singing hymns, either alone or in a group, combines Beauty with awe, community, and cadence, which raises oxytocin, reduces cortisol, and stabilizes breathing.¹¹¹² Related is the breathwork of the Catholic Rosary, where the repetition and structured breathing center the mind on the body and stimulate a nervous system reset. It’s so powerful that breath-paced chanting is used in modern trauma treatment to stabilise autonomic arousal.¹³¹⁴

• Prayer has two functions: Meditation and Articulation. Meditation prepares the heart, prayer verbalises it, and action completes it. Meditation centers your perspective and connects to something larger, which encourages pro-social thoughts.¹⁵¹⁶ Articulation is intentionally verbalizing your wants and desires while being reminded that you’re asking the creator of the universe for help, not a friend. This self-distancing and acknowledgment of authority is a moral mirror that dissolves ego and drives improved self-action and connection with others.¹⁷

• Confession provides Therapy - It provides the ability to discuss your failings, get guidance, and receive forgiveness. It blends elements of exposure, motivational interviewing, and grief work. Proven tools that reduce guilt-laden rumination.¹⁸¹⁹

• Communion Externalises the promise that you are grafted into a body larger than your ego. It’s precisely what attachment-based therapies build with an internal sense of a secure base, and sacramental participation gives the same somatic imprint but at scale and with centuries of repetition.

• Sabbath/Sunday provides ritualized Rest. It’s akin to “digital detox retreats” and “four-day-work-week” pilots but with two extra advantages:

  • Moral authority makes the boundary stick, and

  • The day of rest is collective, preventing the guilt that sabotages individual self-care plans.

  The result is reduced burnout, improved mental health, and more²⁰²¹

• Kneeling, standing, and bowing, known as embodied posture, Align the body and mind, and the motions have meaning that broadcasts hierarchy (head below heart), openness (palms up), or surrender (forehead to ground). They also align the limbic system, where downward, constrictive postures amplify humility while expansive, upward postures boost positive affect and perceived agency. The cycle between the two resets your system, potentially lowering blood pressure, improving focus, and regulating emotions.²²

I could keep going, but that’s already a pretty long list! It’s incredible, once you start to recognize and characterize elements of religious structure and ceremony, how much you get out of a single service and how many critical mental health enablers you have to replace without it.

Summary

Mental health in the Western World is collapsing, and most notably in those who do not have an active participation in a structured religion. This trend even extends between the conservative orthodox services, suffering fewer mental health issues compared to their more contemporary, evangelical fellow Christians.²³²⁴ There’s clearly something that we’ve lost in our flight from structured religion.

This analysis helped me understand why my brother took such a drastic step, and it forced me to evaluate and measure the benefits of that extreme structure. I have a much better appreciation for the value religion provides and how it provides an antidote to so many of the mental health issues we face. I’m not suggesting you run off and join a monastery; I hope you can appreciate that religion can genuinely be a full-spectrum psychotherapy.

What would you add to this list? Where have you found religion to be a benefit to your mental health? (or a detriment, and why?)

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For those who aren’t ready for the deep dive into a formal church structure, there are apps like Hallow for Christians, Pillars for Muslims, Plum Village for Buddhists, ShalomSpace for Jews, Sattva for Hindus, SikhNet for Sikhs, and Baha'i Prayers and Writings. These are a great place to start, and I’m not promoting any one of them, merely providing an entry point to those who may need it.

Hallowed Be Thy App

1. Monroy, M., Amster, M., Eagle, J., Zerwas, F., et al. (2025). Awe reduces depressive symptoms and improves well-being in a randomized controlled clinical trial. Scientific Reports, 15(1).

2. Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., et al. (2020). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044-1058.

3. Gao, F., Li, Y., & Bai, X. (2022). Forgiveness and subjective well-being: A meta-analysis review. Personality and Individual Differences, 186, 111350.

4. Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. (2020). Regularly attending religious services associated with lower risk of “deaths of despair.” News release.

5. VanderWeele, T. J., Li, S., Tsai, A. C., & Kawachi, I. (2016). Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among US women. JAMA Psychiatry, 73(8), 845-851.

6. Bowling, D. L., Gahr, J., Graf Ancochea, P., Hoeschele, M., Canoine, V., Fusani, L., & Fitch, W. T. (2022). Endogenous oxytocin, cortisol, and testosterone in response to group singing. Hormones and Behavior, 139, 105105.

7. Fancourt, D., Williamon, A., Lewis, I., Dow, R., Carvalho, L. A., & Steptoe, A. (2016). Singing modulates mood, stress, cortisol, cytokine and neuropeptide activity in cancer patients and carers. ecancermedicalscience, 10, 631.

8. Bernardi, L., Sleight, P., Bandinelli, G., Cencetti, S., Fattorini, L., Wdowczyk-Szulc, J., & Lagi, A. (2001). Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: Comparative study. BMJ, 323(7327), 1446-1449.

9. Donald, J. N., et al. (2019). Does your mindfulness benefit others? British Journal of Psychology, 110, 101-125.

10. Greenway, T. S. (2018). Prayer and Prosocial Behavior: A Review. Psychology of Religion & Spirituality, 12, 66-76.

11. Grossmann, I., & Kross, E. (2021). Self-distancing: Theory, Research, and Current Directions. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 63.

12. Upenieks, L., Ellison, C. G., & Krause, N. (2022). Humble with God? How Education and Race Shape the Association Between God-Mediated Control and Humility in Later Life. Review of Religious Research, 64, 687-709.

13. Cheng, A., Lee, M.H., & Djita, R. (2023). A cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between Sabbath practices and teachers’ burnout. Journal of Religion & Health, 62, 1090–1113.

14. Fernández-Sotos A., Fernández-Caballero A., Latorre J. M. (2016). Influence of tempo and rhythmic unit in musical emotion regulation. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 10, 80.

15. Hough, H., Proeschold-Bell, R.J., et al. (2019). Relationships between Sabbath observance and mental, physical, and spiritual health in clergy. Pastoral Psychology, 68, 171-193.

16. Rufa’i, A.A., et al. (2013). Cardiovascular responses during head-down crooked kneeling position assumed in Muslim prayers. Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences, 38, 174-179.

17. Stone-Ross, S., et al. (2024). Interoceptive posture awareness and accuracy: A photographic strategy toward making posture actionable. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 18.

18. Gonsalves, P. P., et al. (2023). Self-disclosure as an active ingredient in interventions for youth depression: A systematic review. Administration & Policy in Mental Health, 50, 488–505.

19. Abban A. O. (2024) The Effects of Sacramental Confession on Emotional Well-Being. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies and Innovative Research, 12(2), 1825–1837.

20. This fascinates me because in Chaos and Order, we describe how the feminine ‘chaos’ is best paired with the masculine ‘order’ to create anti-fragile systems.

21. Aggarwal, S., Wright, J., Morgan, A., Patton, G., & Reavley, N. (2023). Religiosity and spirituality in the prevention and management of depression and anxiety in young people: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychiatry, 23, 729.

22. London School of Economics & Erasmus University Medical Center. (2015). Attending a church, synagogue or mosque is uniquely linked to sustained happiness. News release summarising findings from American Journal of Epidemiology analysis of 9,000 Europeans.

23. Meador K. G., Koenig H. G., Hughes D. C., Blazer D. G., George L. K. (1992). Religious affiliation and major depression. Hospital & Community Psychiatry, 43(12), 1204 – 1208.

24. Koenig H. G., George L. K., Meador K. G., Blazer D. G., Dyck P. B. (1994). Religious affiliation and psychiatric disorder among Protestant baby boomers. Hospital & Community Psychiatry, 45(6), 586 – 596.