Why We Believe: A Global Story of Faith

Researchers asked a simple but profound question: what in our childhood leads us to believe in God, gods, or spiritual forces as adults? They surveyed over 200,000 people across 22 countries, from Tanzania to Japan to the United States, looking at things like family structure, childhood hardship, relationships with parents, abuse, feeling like an outsider, immigration, and how often kids attended religious services around age 12. The results were surprising.

Childhood hardship, from poverty to abuse, does not universally predict whether a person will believe in God.

When averaged across all countries, only three things stood out: attending religious services as a child, being born in an older generation, and being a woman. Everything else — divorce, poverty, abuse, feeling left out, even how close you were to your parents — had almost no overall effect. But here's the twist: that doesn't mean those things don't matter. It means they matter differently depending on where you live.

In less religious countries like Japan and Sweden, childhood experiences like feeling like an outsider or having divorced parents had a real connection to adult belief. In highly religious countries like Tanzania and Egypt, where nearly everyone already believes, those same experiences made little difference. The study suggests that much of what we thought we knew about how faith develops came mostly from Western countries, and those patterns simply don't hold everywhere. Culture, it turns out, changes the whole story.