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.1 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.3

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.

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