Is religion good or bad for moms?

And why do humans love religion so much anyway?

I am pay-walling the end of this article because it includes some very personal (anonymous) stories from moms in my community but, as always, if you are desperate to read and can’t afford it, just ask for a comp.

The holidays are here and I’m suddenly thinking a lot about religion. I think it’s probably worth acknowledging up front that I’m an atheist. I can’t help it. As Woody Allen says, “If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.” However, I was raised with a good deal of religion, not because my parents are religious, but because my mom wanted me to learn how to sing and the church choir was free. So I went to church five times a week, no joke. We sang Evensong on Tuesday nights and Mass twice on Sundays plus rehearsals another two or three nights a week.

As it turns out, I have incredibly fond memories of church. Our choir was somewhat exceptional. We were well-funded by local patrons and located near a world-famous music academy, from which we regularly drew talent. The choir director was from London. He was funny, just the right amount of religious and sacrilegious, extremely qualified, and knew great choral music like the back of his hand. I loved the music. I still secretly listen to all manner of it on the sly (Mozart, Gabriel Faure, Morten Lauridsen, even a little Leonard Bernstein because, being a relatively progressive Christian church choir that was first and foremost dedicated to singing the good stuff, we performed Chichester Psalms on multiple occasions, in Hebrew!). When I was 12 we went on a tour of England and France and sang in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and dozens of other smaller churches throughout the French and English countryside. I remember one small church in the French countryside where the acoustics were perfect, our singing was really on par that night, and the whole audience was in tears.

Apart from music, I loved the community. Every Thursday night before rehearsal it was someone’s turn to bring in a meal for the whole choir. We were 50 strong, at least. (I remember when it was my family’s turn and my mom and I stayed up half the night making 5 giant lasagnas). At 6 PM sharp on Thursdays the whole choir would spread out at folding tables that had been set up in one of the annex rooms. The adults would drink cheap sherry. There was always a good deal of joking and laughter. At Christmas, everyone would sing Midnight Mass and afterwards there was a famous party at this grumpy old chorister’s home that started at one in the morning and lasted all night.

In suburban California, where I live now, there are no old stone churches like on the East Coast. No one sings Midnight Mass. There’s religion, but without the traditions that I find most appealing about it. As it turns out, the traditions and the community may be the most important part, if what we care about is human flourishing. Research has shown that belonging to a community with shared interests and beliefs is incredibly good for mental health. Ritual practices serve to bond participants. In fact, ritualistic spiritual practices are probably as old as humanity itself. Hunter-gatherer societies all have many group-based rituals that involve a lot of synchronous singing and dancing and these rituals have been shown to lower cortisol levels (a stress hormone) and increase oxytocin levels (a hormone involved in love and attachment). Evolutionary biologists believe that rituals like these were actually selected for by cultural evolution in order to enhance group cooperation, which is essential for human survival in the wild. Our lack of ritualistic ceremony in the modern context is surmised to be one source of evolutionary mismatch contributing to poor mental health. In a study of New York suicides, researchers found that people who belonged to some kind of religious congregation where six times less likely to kill themselves.

!Kung performing a ritual dance (watch the clip here)

If you follow my newsletter or my Instagram, then you know that one of my main talking points is how lack of community in the modern context hurts mothers especially. Could religion help fill that gap? I’ve spoken to a lot of mothers in religious communities and the reviews are mixed. Here are the opposing perspectives of two moms, both from different religious communities.