Financial security in childhood predicts a later loss of religious faith

Young people who grow up in financially secure households are slightly more likely to lose their belief in God by the time they reach adulthood. A newly published analysis follows thousands of teenagers over a decade, showing that early material comfort predicts a later decline in religious faith. The results, detailed in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, suggest that modern secularization might stem in part from a reduced need for the social and psychological support systems that religious traditions traditionally provide.

Religious beliefs and practices are common across different human cultures throughout history. From an evolutionary perspective, this widespread presence presents a puzzle because participating in religious traditions requires extensive time, energy, and resources. Devout individuals might donate portions of their income, abstain from certain foods, or spend hours engaged in prayer and collective ceremonies. Evolutionary anthropologists propose that these substantial costs are offset by unique social and survival benefits. Group rituals and shared supernatural beliefs often foster intense cooperation among members, creating tight-knit communities that share resources during hard times.

Faith can also act as a psychological buffer against anxiety, ultimately improving a person’s general well-being. Environmental stressors tend to reinforce these benefits. When people face natural disasters, regional wars, or severe economic crises, they often display heightened religious devotion. Turning to a higher power and relying on a congregation can provide a sense of control and a safety net when the physical world feels entirely unpredictable.

Over the past century, a contrasting trend has emerged across many parts of the globe. In a process known as secularization, large numbers of people in developed nations have begun abandoning religious institutions and losing their faith in a higher power. Sociologists and evolutionary theorists have proposed the existential insecurity theory to account for this global shift. This idea suggests that as economic development brings financial and political stability, everyday existence becomes safer and more predictable.

Under this theory, a secure environment reduces the immediate need for the cooperative networks and anxiety-relieving practices that religious groups offer. While previous studies have shown that wealthier, more economically equal nations tend to be less religious than poorer, more unequal ones, much of this evidence involves comparing different countries or groups at a single point in time. It is harder to observe exactly how and when individuals lose their faith as their personal environments change.

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Martin Lang, a researcher at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, led a team to investigate how these environmental factors play out over an individual’s life. Lang and his colleagues, Petr Palíšek and Radim Chvaja, wanted to track the development of religious belief from early adolescence into young adulthood. They chose to focus on the teenage years because adolescence is a prime period for human identity formation, where individuals actively construct their worldviews based on their surroundings.

To test the existential insecurity theory, the research team analyzed data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. This longitudinal project tracked a sample of thousands of Americans over roughly ten years. Data collection began in 2002 and spanned four distinct interview waves, concluding around 2013. The researchers focused on an initial group of about 2,800 teenagers, aged between thirteen and seventeen, who identified with a Christian denomination and professed a belief in God during the first wave of interviews.

The team used parent-reported household income during the first data collection wave to represent early adolescent material security. They then mapped this financial data against the teenagers’ responses to questions about their belief in God across the three subsequent interview waves. Instead of trying to prove a direct physical cause, their analysis checked for a predictive association. This is a statistical relationship where a specific starting condition reliably forecasts an outcome over time.

To isolate the specific role of material wealth, the researchers built specialized models that controlled for alternative influences. They adjusted the data to account for parental education, ethnic background, the participant’s gender, general age differences, and specific religious denominations. By holding these demographic factors steady in their equations, the team could look exclusively at the trajectory of adolescents moving from secure or insecure homes into their adult lives.

The data revealed a negative association between early financial security and later religious faith in the young adults. Teenagers who grew up in the highest-income households were more likely to report losing their belief in God by their mid-twenties, compared to their peers in the lowest-income households. The effect size, though present, was relatively modest on a statistical level.

About five percent of participants from the least materially secure backgrounds eventually reported that they no longer believed in God. In contrast, among those from the most secure backgrounds, that figure rose to eleven percent. The research team noted that the negative relationship between early wealth and belief in a higher power grew slightly stronger with each passing wave of the study, suggesting that the ideological associations of a comfortable childhood compound over time.

The researchers also modeled alternative paths that might explain a loss of faith to ensure they were looking at the right variables. For example, previous sociological theories proposed that higher education leads to secularization, based on the assumption that college training focuses on critical thinking that displaces religious thought. In this analysis, logging higher educational attainment did not meaningfully predict a decrease in belief in God, leaving material security as the more stable economic predictor.

A different factor entirely overshadowed the statistical role of material wealth. The frequency of a parent’s participation in religious rituals was a massive predictor of whether a child maintained their faith into adulthood. Anthropologists refer to this as the theory of credibility-enhancing displays. According to this framework, children are skeptical learners who evaluate whether their parents practice what they preach. When parents engage in the costly behaviors of regular religious attendance, children are far more likely to absorb and retain those beliefs.

Still, even when accounting for how often parents attended church, the background level of household financial stability independently predicted a later decline in belief. The researchers interpret this as moderate support for the existential insecurity theory. When young people develop in an environment where basic survival needs are reliably met, they might subconsciously register that they do not need the safety net provided by religious participation.

Like all observational studies, this research contains some limitations that shape how the results should be viewed. The dataset experienced a gradual drop in participation over the decade, meaning the final results rely on statistical techniques used to fill in missing information. The timeline also overlapped with the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis. While this event hit outside the window of early adolescence for the participants, it likely altered the long-term material realities of many households in the study.

Additionally, the project relied on single survey questions to measure complex concepts. Household income was used as the sole stand-in for existential security, and a single question mapped belief in God. The authors recommend that future studies deploy more nuanced tools to measure physiological stress, perceived trust in local communities, and general health challenges. Broadening the scope of the variables could better pinpoint exactly which environmental features uniquely correlate with individuals leaving supernatural belief systems.

Finally, the study population poses limits on how broadly these conclusions can be drawn. The findings apply to individuals who grew up in the United States and within Christian households during a specific historical period. While the United States has seen rising rates of religious disaffiliation, phenomena like spiritual but not religious identities make the landscape difficult to track. The apostasy process might operate very differently in other cultural contexts or within non-Western faith traditions.

The study, “The longitudinal associations of material security and belief in God in young Americans,” was authored by Martin Lang, Petr Palíšek, and Radim Chvaja.