I don’t know if I’ve ever put it this way to myself this clearly, but it seems to me that sincere, honest, heartfelt religious belief is an extremely, extremely important element both in social relations and individual emotional health.
I suppose this is a very obvious point, but as should be clear, I never hesitate to reiterate the obvious as often as it takes for me to feel like I’ve learned something for myself. Certainly much popular culture tends to emphasize the ways religious drives people crazy, which some forms do in some ways, clearly. But religion also provides much comfort.
You could read every book in the Self Help section of most bookstores, and it’s possible you would not encounter anything that looks like authentic religion. You would get some vague New Agey stuff about positive thinking, and the “power of attraction” and the like, but you would not encounter any rigid moral codes, any clear and non-negotiable behavioral expectations. We are much too “free” for that sort of thing.
Nor would you encounter benign and comforting ideas, such as that God is looking out for you, and that prayer works. That would be in the religion section, which is very much not in the Self Help section.
These sorts of ideas, REGARDLESS OF IF THEY ARE TRUE OR NOT, have a huge impact when they are believed generally.
So I will wonder aloud if much of the psychological distress out there–and there is a lot of it, which I witness daily–would have been mediated and managed much more effectively in a bygone era with religious belief. They had harder lives, objectively. They had less stuff, shorter life expectancies, more disease, etc. Emotionally, though, perhaps they had vastly less chaos. It’s never the objective fact of a circumstance, but the filter through which we pass it. And stress is always the mismatch between the stimulus on the one hand, and our perceived strength and resources on the other. Weak people are overwhelmed by weak stimuli; but, to finish this point for now, weak stimuli are amplified by a sense of being alone in a purposeless universe.