The Emptiness of Being Culturally Religious
Research shows benefits associated with being religious, but only if you're actually religious.
About 25 percent of Americans are “culturally religious.” Like the 22 to 28 percent who say they have no religious affiliations, the culturally religious are not religious in any conventional sense. They don’t usually pray, or follow religious rules, or practice religion. In some cases, they may not even believe in God. Nevertheless, they identify with a particular religion and simultaneously flock to their local house of worship once or twice a year like migratory birds. These folks are not to be confused with the now-dated valley girl affirmation, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” As Bill Maher once joked, “The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren’t pregnant.” No, the culturally religious are the opposite. They aren’t spiritual, yet they cling to the façade of organized religion.
Growing up, I watched Jewish congregants make their annual 20-minute pilgrimage to synagogue, arriving late during Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur services, and leaving early after about an hour. As they disappeared back into their Volvos, not to be seen again for another revolution of the sun, I found myself asking, “Why bother?” If they believed in God and their religion, why would they only show up for an hour or two a year? And if they didn’t really believe, why come at all? Why would anyone identify with a religion if they clearly don’t believe in its teachings enough to put in the time?
As puzzling as cultural religiosity has always seemed to me, I assumed that it still conferred some measure of the benefits people turn to religion for — meaning, purpose, community, connection, etc. But it turns out that isn’t the case. On a variety of metrics, research shows that being culturally religious is associated with worse life outcomes compared to being conventionally religious or being irreligious.
The links between religiosity of wellbeing are incredibly well established. Over decades, study after study has shown that religious people are, on average, happier, less anxious, and less depressed than nonbelievers. Atheists may be tempted to reach for George Bernard Shaw’s famous retort, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”1 Nevertheless, the fact remains — in most measurements of wellbeing, religious people do better than the non-religious. A 2023 study from Gallup and the Radiant Foundation reported that religious folks score higher in positive experiences, social life, optimism, and community. Two areas where the non-religious had better outcomes were in negative experiences (religious people had more), and in personal health.
Most of the research that looks at the effects of religious belief and behavior tends to be broken down in a similarly binary way that examines religious versus non-religious people. As religiosity has declined in recent years, however, social scientists have begun to take a more fine-grained look that breaks religious belief/behavior down into more than two categories, which allows us to tease out a third group: the culturally religious.
In 2019, Pew Research compiled data from 26 countries comparing actively religious people, the religiously unaffiliated, and those who belong to a religion but are “inactive” (in other words, culturally religious). In line with previous studies, the religiously active cohort rated their happiness higher than the other groups in most of the countries. The unaffiliated came in first (or tied for first) in just five of the 26 countries, compared to the inactive group, which came in first only twice. In the US specifically, there was no difference in happiness between the unaffiliated and culturally religious. In terms of health, however, the unaffiliated were the least obese and the inactive the most by a margin of nine points.
Pew published a more granular US-focused report on religion in 2014. They asked respondents some interesting questions most pollsters don’t measure, such as how often one feels a “sense of wonder about the universe” — a proxy for both spirituality and intellectual curiosity. Among those who said that religion is “very important”, 49 percent said they feel a sense of wonder about the universe at least once a week. For those that said religion is “not at all important”, this figure was 47 percent. For those who said religion is “somewhat important” or “not too important”, categories which roughly represent religious moderates and the culturally religious, only 39 and 40 percent, respectively, said the same. Measured by religious service attendance, 39 percent of those who attend every week experience a weekly sense of wonder, compared to 32 percent of those who never attend, and 29 percent of those who attend “several times a year.”
A 2020 study published in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior examined the links between religious attendance, wellbeing, and social engagement. When it comes to the size of one’s support network and their communal connections, again, no surprise that religious people score the highest. But when we compare those who never attend versus those who attend only rarely, the “never” group has slightly larger support networks, and both groups virtually tie in community connections. Similarly, both groups tie when it comes to their connection to their congregation. In other words, attending once a year is tantamount to not belonging to a religious congregation at all, in terms of building a community for oneself. As the researchers conclude:
“The results strongly suggest that it is active participation in the religious services that is important, rather than merely a sense of being religious. [...] It is the active participation in communal rituals, not the belief state or predisposition to believe, that is instrumental in creating these psycho-social effects and benefits [size of support networks and communal connections].”
Most people may not consciously practice a religion or belong to a congregation in order to reap the “psycho-social benefits”, but these play an undeniable role. Of course, conviction, faith, upbringing, social pressure, and inertia are important factors as well. The point is, when someone decides to start going to church more regularly, they don’t think to themselves, “10 percent decline in risk of anxiety, here I come!” But the social connections and sense of community and meaning derived from their participation likely keeps them coming back week after week as much if not more than anything else.
With religion, as with life itself, you really do have to put in the time and effort. You have to actually show up to the building every week if you want to create something resembling a religious community. You have to actually believe the core tenets to extract any kind of spiritual solace. That’s the only way this works. If you want to reap the benefits of running, it’s not enough to buy running shoes or call yourself a runner. Attending a 5K once a year only to absently mill around and then leave early won’t cut it — you actually have to run.
Cultural religiosity, on this score, seems a rather empty and pointless gesture. If you believe in the central claims of a religion, you’re probably better off practicing your religion in earnest. If you don’t, you might as well just leave the religion, because there is no benefit to nominal religious membership in the absence of real participation and conviction. This is one area where it makes sense to either get on the bus or get off. Hanging halfway out the door is a recipe for becoming spiritual road pizza.
We hear a lot about the “crisis of meaning” in modern society, but we also have a crisis of sincerity and an epidemic of phoniness. We spend our lives increasingly hidden behind anonymous online avatars, “ghosting” people, weaseling our way out of commitments, and generally posturing about the kind of people we are while quietly flaking out. It’s one thing to pull one over on society, but I think many of us are pulling one over on ourselves. The twice-a-year “religious” crowd aren’t really fooling anyone. Not the devout, not the atheists, and not the scientists and statisticians who can plainly see how cultural religiosity is working out for them. The beauty of a free society, and what authoritarians the world over most despise about it, is that you’re free to “do you.” I merely suggest that you do the real you — the you that truly reflects where your heart is.
See also: “Meaning Junkies”
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That Shaw penned these words in 1912 only underscores how long the religion-happiness link has been common knowledge.
I live in what at least used to be the most Baptist county in America per capita. We have a few "space churches" so big you can see them from orbit (so to speak). But most people are like my dad. There's a Bible in their house somewhere, but they don't read it. There's a church down the road in any direction, but they've never been inside. They're generally down-home moral people, good neighbors, hard working, with a good sense of right and wrong. But yeah, they live in a grey area where they shrug off morality because of course it comes from a religion they don't practice.
I'd say get your ass in church and read your own book. After all, taking it seriously is what made me an atheist.
You remind me of something I heard a while ago, and have been coming back to: the purpose of sacrifice. Historically, religions have always involved some cost, some expensive proof of faith. And that binds the group members together. I'm not certain why; it seems like a sunk-cost fallacy or "misery loves company" to me. But then, I walked away from the (largely cultural) Christianity I grew up in, in part because I saw no benefit to the costs it incurred. Which was blasphemy to the True Believers I left behind.
Maybe that's why modern culture war seems so shallow; it's full of casuals. People without any real commitment, just joined a side because their friends did or because they like the vibes.