Religion as Meaning-Making: Psychological Models and Evidence
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Religion, Spirituality & Meaning-Making · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Religion can function psychologically as a system of meaning: a network of beliefs, values, goals, identities, practices, narratives, relationships, and sacred reference points through which a person interprets life and responds to events. This formulation does not ask psychology to decide whether a religious belief is true or false. It identifies a psychological function that can be studied empirically while the theological meaning of a belief remains within the person’s religious tradition.
The modern meaning-making literature is especially useful when life becomes difficult. A serious illness, bereavement, relationship rupture, displacement, failure, moral conflict, or other major stressor can challenge what a person assumed about the world, the self, the future, justice, control, responsibility, or the sacred. Crystal Park’s influential model distinguishes a person’s broad system of global meaning from the meaning assigned to a particular event and describes coping partly as an attempt to reconcile the two when they conflict. Park’s 2005 religion-and-meaning framework and her later integrative review of meaning making provide the core scientific architecture for this account.
The evidence supports a precise conclusion. Religious meaning-making can be an important resource for many people, especially when religion is central to identity and worldview, and it can also become a site of doubt, guilt, conflict, anger, or spiritual struggle. Research does not support a universal claim that religion automatically improves mental health, nor does it support treating religious struggle as evidence of pathology. Effects vary with the form of belief and coping, the stressor, community, culture, personal history, and the meanings a person actually constructs.
What Does Meaning-Making Mean in Psychology?
Meaning-making is the psychological process through which people interpret events in relation to broader beliefs, goals, values, identities, and expectations. The term is most useful when an event matters enough to challenge an existing understanding of life. A person may ask what happened, why it matters, what it says about the self or the world, what can still be controlled, what must be accepted, which values remain binding, and what future is now possible.
In Park’s model, meaning is organized at two interacting levels. Global meaning is the broader orienting system through which a person understands life. Situational meaning is the appraisal and interpretation of a particular event. When the event as appraised fits the person’s global meaning, the event may be painful without destabilizing the larger worldview. When the two conflict sharply, the discrepancy can intensify distress and activate meaning-making efforts. Park (2010) distinguishes these components because searching for meaning, finding meaning, and already possessing a stable sense of meaning are psychologically different states.
This distinction prevents a common error. Meaning-making is not simply positive thinking and it is not the demand to find a lesson in suffering. It may involve reappraisal, acceptance of uncertainty, revision of goals, a changed view of responsibility, renewed commitment to a value, a transformed religious understanding, or the recognition that some questions remain unanswered. The outcome can be stabilizing, destabilizing, or mixed.
Religion as a Global Meaning System
A global meaning system includes fundamental beliefs about how reality is ordered, what matters, what a good life requires, who a person is, what relationships or duties are central, what goals deserve commitment, and what makes events intelligible. Religious traditions can contribute to this system through sacred narratives, moral frameworks, concepts of human purpose, practices of remembrance and worship, communities of interpretation, and beliefs about suffering, hope, responsibility, death, continuity, or transcendence.
For a person whose faith is central, religious meaning may organize many domains at once rather than existing as one isolated opinion. It can shape identity, family roles, moral priorities, time, ritual, belonging, understandings of adversity, and expectations about how one should respond. This breadth is one reason religion can become especially salient under stress. The APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality treats religion and spirituality as multidimensional phenomena expressed across individuals, relationships, institutions, communities, and cultures rather than as a single variable.
Religious meaning is therefore best understood as embedded meaning. A prayer may simultaneously be an act of worship, a coping practice, a way of expressing emotion, a ritual learned in a family, a relationship with the sacred, and a way of organizing attention. Participation in a congregation may involve doctrine, identity, friendship, obligation, status, care, ritual, and cultural continuity. Psychological research becomes more accurate when it preserves these layers instead of reducing religion to one score.
The Meaning-Making Model: From Global Meaning to a Specific Event
Global meaning: beliefs, goals, values, and identity
Global meaning refers to the relatively enduring framework through which a person interprets life. It includes broad beliefs about the self and the world, valued goals, moral commitments, expectations, and the felt sense that life has coherence or significance. Religious commitments may be central to this framework for some people and peripheral for others. Two people who identify with the same tradition may therefore rely on religion very differently when facing the same kind of stress.
Situational meaning: what this event means now
Situational meaning concerns the event itself: how threatening, controllable, unjust, consequential, comprehensible, or identity-relevant it appears. The same diagnosis, loss, migration, or relationship crisis can be appraised in very different ways. A religious interpretation may enter at this stage, but it is only one possible component. Practical facts, social conditions, medical information, family expectations, and prior experiences also shape appraisal.
Discrepancy: when the event collides with the worldview
Distress can increase when an event violates assumptions or goals that matter deeply. A person who believes life is orderly may encounter an event that feels radically unpredictable. Someone whose identity depends on a role may lose that role. A believer may find that an experience does not fit an existing understanding of justice, providence, responsibility, community, or the sacred. The model treats this discrepancy as a psychological problem of integration, not as evidence that the underlying religious belief is defective. Park’s review emphasizes that the perceived gap between global and situational meaning is a central trigger for meaning-making efforts.
Meaning-making efforts: attempts to restore or revise coherence
Meaning-making efforts are the processes used to reduce the discrepancy. They can include reinterpreting the event, reconsidering one’s own responsibility, revising goals, changing assumptions about control, talking with trusted others, prayer, ritual, study, counseling, acts of service, or integrating the event into a larger life narrative. In religious contexts, a person may turn toward clergy, family, a congregation, sacred texts, devotional practices, or private reflection. These behaviors do not all operate through the same psychological mechanism, and their religious meaning should not be reduced to symptom management.
Meanings made: what changes after the process
A meaning-making process can produce several kinds of outcome: a more coherent explanation, acceptance that no complete explanation is available, revised goals, changed priorities, stronger or weaker identification with a religious community, a transformed understanding of the sacred, renewed agency, a different sense of responsibility, or a new narrative about the event. Meaning may also remain unsettled. Park’s 2010 review found that the field’s theory was more developed than its empirical testing and stressed that the quality of meaning-making efforts and meanings made may matter at least as much as how much meaning-making occurs. Park (2010).
How Religion Can Shape Appraisal Without Determining It
Religion can influence how a person appraises an event by supplying categories for interpreting suffering, responsibility, mortality, obligation, hope, or continuity. Yet religious identity never predicts one fixed appraisal. Within a single tradition, one person may interpret adversity as a call to patience, another as a test of responsibility, another as an occasion for lament, another as morally neutral misfortune, and another may experience profound uncertainty. Personal theology, family teaching, community norms, developmental history, and the specific event all matter.
This variability is scientifically important. Researchers often measure broad labels such as religiousness, spirituality, attendance, or religious coping, but these variables can represent different psychological processes in different populations. A culturally adequate account therefore asks what a belief, practice, or community means to the person rather than assigning a function from the outside.
Cross-cultural work illustrates this point. A comparative qualitative study of cancer patients in Sweden and South Korea found both similarities and differences in existential, spiritual, and religious forms of coping, including different emphases on prayer, meditation, relaxation, and other practices. Ahmadi and colleagues’ comparative study shows why meaning-making should be interpreted within sociocultural context. A separate Turkish study likewise found a distinctive pattern in which religious belief interacted with both religious and nonreligious coping methods. The Turkish cancer study.
Meaning-Making and Religious Coping Are Related but Not Identical
Religious coping refers to the ways religion or spirituality becomes part of understanding and dealing with stress. Meaning-making is broader: it describes how people relate a stressful event to global beliefs, goals, values, and identity. Religious coping can serve meaning-making, but it can also serve emotional regulation, social connection, behavioral guidance, ritual continuity, or a felt relationship with the sacred.
The distinction matters because the same outward behavior can have different functions. Attending a service may help a person feel connected to a community, reaffirm a moral identity, create a predictable ritual structure, seek sacred support, remember a deceased relative, or make sense of a crisis. Prayer can express gratitude, petition, lament, confession, contemplation, surrender, or relational closeness. Psychological interpretation should begin with function and context rather than assuming that one practice has one universal effect.
Positive and negative religious coping as research categories
Researchers often distinguish positive and negative religious coping. These are technical categories, not judgments about whether a religion or person is morally positive or negative. Positive religious coping commonly includes patterns such as seeking spiritual support, benevolent religious reappraisal, collaborative coping, or connection with a religious community. Negative religious coping commonly includes patterns such as spiritual discontent, punitive interpretations, interpersonal religious conflict, or a strained relationship with the sacred.
A meta-analysis of 49 studies with 105 effect sizes found that positive and negative religious coping were generally associated with more positive and more negative psychological adjustment, respectively, while also reporting mixed results and methodological limitations. Ano and Vasconcelles (2005). These associations do not mean that a coping label determines an individual outcome, and they do not establish that religious coping alone caused the adjustment pattern.
Recent evidence reinforces the importance of distinguishing coping styles. A 2026 pooled analysis of 5,059 participants across three U.S. cohorts found that positive religious coping attenuated, while negative religious coping strengthened, the association between perceived stress and poorer mental health in the combined analysis; patterns varied across cohorts. Britt and colleagues (2026). The cohort differences are important because they argue against treating one average effect as universal.
When Religious Meaning-Making Can Support Adaptation
Religious meaning-making may support adaptation when it helps a person maintain coherence without denying reality, connects hardship with enduring values, supports workable goals, preserves belonging, or creates a narrative in which the person can continue acting. It may also provide language for grief, lament, gratitude, duty, forgiveness, hope, mortality, or uncertainty. These functions can coexist with medical care, psychotherapy, practical problem-solving, and secular sources of meaning.
Several pathways are plausible and partly supported by research. Meaning can influence appraisal; community can supply social support and shared interpretation; ritual can organize time and action; identity can stabilize a sense of continuity; moral commitments can guide decisions; and coping practices can regulate emotion or sustain effort. No single pathway explains all associations between religion and well-being, and the same practice can work differently depending on context.
Longitudinal evidence supports modest rather than dramatic general effects. A meta-analysis of 48 longitudinal studies representing 59 independent samples reported a small overall prospective association between religion or spirituality and mental health, r = .08, with significant associations for public religious participation and importance of religion among the eight predictors analyzed. Garssen, Visser, and Pool (2021). This is evidence of a small average relationship across heterogeneous measures, not proof that religion guarantees better mental health.
When Meaning-Making Becomes a Site of Struggle
The same domain that provides meaning can also become the place where meaning is threatened. People may experience anger toward God or the sacred, moral conflict, doubt, conflict with religious people or institutions, uncertainty about ultimate meaning, or fear that an event has religious significance they cannot understand. These experiences can be painful precisely because the religious domain matters deeply.
The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale was developed to measure six domains of struggle: divine, demonic, interpersonal, moral, doubt, and ultimate meaning. The measure records psychological concerns and interpretations; it does not determine the objective truth of a sacred explanation. Exline, Pargament, Grubbs, and Yali (2014). Religious struggle can occur within ordinary faith development, during major stress, or alongside mental-health symptoms. Its clinical significance depends on distress, persistence, functioning, safety, and the wider context.
Struggle is therefore not the opposite of religion and not automatically a sign that faith has failed. For some people, doubt or conflict becomes part of a long-term reorganization of beliefs and identity. For others, it remains unresolved or becomes associated with worsening distress. Psychological science can study these trajectories without deciding which theological conclusion a person should reach.
Narrative, Identity, Community, and Ritual
Narrative: placing the event within a life story
Meaning-making often has a narrative form. People connect an event with what came before, what it says about who they are now, and what future remains possible. Religious narratives can provide inherited stories, symbols, exemplars, and moral vocabularies that help organize this process. A person may interpret adversity through themes of vocation, endurance, repentance, compassion, service, exile, renewal, or mystery, depending on tradition and personal belief.
Narrative coherence should not be confused with factual certainty. A psychologically workable narrative can include ambiguity, grief, unanswered questions, and competing emotions. Pressuring someone to produce a redemptive story too quickly can interfere with honest processing, particularly when the event is recent or traumatic.
Identity: meaning is also about who the person is
Religious identity can connect personal biography to family history, community membership, moral commitments, and sacred belonging. A major event may therefore challenge not only beliefs about why something happened but also the person’s sense of self. Conversion, deconversion, renewed commitment, migration between communities, or a change in practice can all involve meaning reconstruction because identity and worldview change together.
Identity effects are especially difficult to generalize because religions and forms of nonreligion are highly diverse. Norenzayan’s review of theodiversity argues that psychological research must take seriously variation among religious beliefs, practices, traditions, and secular contexts rather than treating religion as a uniform human category. Norenzayan (2016).
Community: shared meaning can support and constrain
Religious communities can offer practical help, companionship, ritual participation, moral recognition, and a shared language for suffering. They can also create expectations about what a member should believe, feel, or do. Support is most useful when it fits the person’s own needs and values. Pressure to adopt a particular explanation, suppress doubt, or perform emotional certainty can increase distress even when the intention is supportive.
Ritual: organizing emotion, attention, and social time
Ritual can give form to transitions that are otherwise difficult to organize psychologically. Worship, mourning rites, fasting, pilgrimage, confession, remembrance, communal prayer, or other practices may structure time, coordinate group attention, mark status changes, and connect private emotion with a shared tradition. Their significance cannot be inferred from outward form alone. The psychological question is how the ritual functions for the participant and community.
Religious Meaning-Making Across Traditions and Cultures
A major limitation in the literature is overrepresentation of Western and often Christian samples. Concepts such as collaboration with God, divine support, or punitive God reappraisal are highly relevant in some theistic settings but cannot simply be exported to traditions organized differently around the sacred, selfhood, causality, ritual, ancestors, ethical cultivation, or transcendence.
A 2025 review and bibliometric analysis of 2,403 religious-coping publications concluded that Western monotheistic contexts remain disproportionately represented and that non-theocentric traditions are comparatively understudied. The cross-tradition religious-coping review. This does not invalidate established measures; it establishes a boundary on their generalizability.
Measurement itself can carry cultural assumptions. A 2024 review of the Brief RCOPE outside the United States found substantial international use while emphasizing the need to examine reliability, validity, and cultural fit rather than assuming that a scale developed in one context transfers unchanged to another. Saunders and Stephenson (2024).
For readers and clinicians, the practical implication is straightforward: ask what the person’s religion, spirituality, or nonreligious worldview actually means in their life. The name of a tradition does not reveal the person’s theology, level of observance, relationship with community, family expectations, or current spiritual state.
What Does the Evidence Actually Show?
The meaning-making model has strong conceptual influence and uneven direct testing
The global-meaning versus situational-meaning distinction has become influential because it organizes many observations about stress and adaptation into one coherent model. Yet Park’s major 2010 review explicitly concluded that empirical research had not kept pace with theory. Some components were well supported and others remained insufficiently tested. Park (2010). The model is therefore best treated as a well-established framework for organizing research rather than as a fully verified causal mechanism in every detail.
Religious coping shows patterned associations, not universal effects
The religious-coping literature repeatedly finds that the form of coping matters. Ano and Vasconcelles’s meta-analysis found the expected average pattern for positive and negative coping, and Britt and colleagues’ 2026 pooled study found distinct moderation patterns in mental health. These results support differentiation within religion rather than a simple religious-versus-nonreligious comparison.
Broader religion/spirituality effects on mental health are generally small and heterogeneous
The longitudinal meta-analysis by Garssen and colleagues reported a small overall association. This is a critical calibration point. Religious participation, importance, coping, spirituality, and meaning are not interchangeable measures, and average effects can conceal important differences by tradition, age, culture, health status, social support, and the type of stressor.
Correlation and mediation do not automatically establish causation
Many studies in this field are observational. A finding that religious meaning is associated with better adjustment can reflect multiple pathways: religion may support coping, people with stronger well-being may participate more, social support may account for part of the association, personality and culture may influence both variables, or several mechanisms may operate together. Mediation models can test whether data are consistent with an indirect pathway, but cross-sectional mediation does not by itself prove the temporal causal sequence.
Meaning-Making After Loss, Illness, and Other Major Stressors
Major stressors often intensify meaning questions because they alter both facts and assumptions. Bereavement can change identity, roles, expectations, and beliefs about continuity. Illness can change control, dependence, bodily identity, future plans, and moral interpretation. Displacement can disrupt place, community, routine, language, and belonging. Relationship loss can change attachment, self-concept, and anticipated future.
Religion can enter any of these processes, but the psychological task remains individualized. A bereaved believer may find comfort in ritual and community while still feeling anger, confusion, or doubt. Someone with serious illness may experience faith as stabilizing at one moment and conflicted at another. Mixed states are psychologically coherent and should not be forced into a simple category of strong faith or weak faith.
For the psychology of bereavement itself, including normal variation, prolonged grief, and evidence-based distinctions, see Grief: Psychological Responses to Loss. Meaning-making can be part of grief, but grief has its own canonical clinical and scientific domain.
Religious Meaning-Making and Mental Health
Religion and spirituality can be associated with well-being, distress, or both. The direction depends partly on what is being measured. A secure sense of sacred support, community belonging, or coherent values is psychologically different from severe guilt, interpersonal religious conflict, or persistent spiritual struggle. A single global question such as whether someone is religious cannot capture these distinctions.
Religious meaning should also not be used as a substitute for clinical assessment. A person can be deeply religious and have depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, trauma-related symptoms, psychosis, or another condition; a person can also experience intense religious or spiritual emotion without having a mental disorder. Diagnosis requires the full clinical pattern, including symptoms, duration, context, impairment, medical considerations, and differential assessment.
This distinction is especially important when fear, guilt, morality, or certainty become repetitive and compulsive. Scrupulosity is an OCD presentation in which religious or moral themes can become the content of obsessions and compulsions. The clinical mechanism is OCD, not religion itself. The Hub’s Scrupulosity OCD guide explains that boundary in detail.
Risks in Meaning-Making: When an Explanation Adds Burden
Meaning can help people orient themselves, yet an explanation can also add burden. A person may interpret adversity in a way that creates excessive self-blame, irreversible shame, fear of punishment, or a sense that suffering must be endured without seeking help. A community may unintentionally intensify distress by insisting that the person should already understand why an event occurred or should experience a prescribed emotion.
Psychologically, the important question is whether the interpretation supports realistic coping, connection, agency, and functioning or contributes to escalating distress, avoidance, conflict, or loss of needed care. This is an empirical and clinical question about consequences. It does not require a psychologist to rule on the sacred truth of the belief.
Another risk is premature meaning. After trauma or loss, people may be pressured to identify growth, gratitude, forgiveness, or a positive lesson before they are ready. Meaning-making research does not require that outcome. An honest conclusion that an event remains painful, unjust, mysterious, or partly unintelligible can coexist with adaptation.
Culturally Competent Psychotherapy and Religious Meaning
When religion or spirituality matters to a client, competent psychotherapy can include it as part of assessment and formulation. The therapist’s task is to understand how the client’s worldview functions, what resources and conflicts are present, and whether the client wants these issues addressed. The therapist should not impose personal religious or secular values, prescribe theology, or treat disagreement with the therapist’s worldview as pathology.
Vieten and Lukoff argue that spiritual and religious diversity belongs within multicultural competence and identify the need for specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills in psychology. Vieten and Lukoff (2022). The APA’s major handbook likewise treats religion and spirituality as domains that can be constructive, difficult, or mixed and that require attention to culture and context. APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality.
In practice, useful questions are descriptive rather than doctrinal: What does this event mean to you? Has it changed your relationship with your faith or community? Are there beliefs or practices that feel supportive? Are there religious concerns that increase distress? Is there a clergy member or community resource you want involved? These questions preserve the client’s authority over the meaning of their tradition while giving clinically relevant information.
How to Think About Religious Meaning-Making Without Oversimplifying It
A scientifically responsible account holds several facts together. Religious meaning can be psychologically real and consequential. It can organize appraisal, identity, coping, narrative, ritual, and belonging. It can support adaptation and it can become a domain of struggle. Effects differ across people and contexts. Broad mental-health associations are usually modest. Cultural and theological diversity is substantial. Measurement tools capture constructs rather than sacred truth.
This approach also protects the limits of psychology. Psychological science can ask how a belief changes attention, emotion, behavior, social connection, coping, or identity. It can test associations between religious coping and adjustment. It can study whether particular interpretations predict distress or recovery. It cannot convert those findings into a scientific verdict on God, transcendence, revelation, prayer as sacred practice, or the ultimate meaning of suffering.
Practical Implications
For an individual facing stress, the most useful starting point is not to force a meaning but to identify the meanings already operating. What assumptions has the event challenged? Which values remain important? Which goals have become impossible, and which can be revised? Which religious practices or relationships feel sustaining? Which interpretations increase fear, guilt, or helplessness? Where is uncertainty still present?
For families and communities, support improves when it makes room for the person’s own pace and language. Shared prayer, ritual, discussion, practical help, silence, study, or professional care can all be meaningful when they are wanted. Prescribed explanations are less reliable because the same statement can comfort one person and burden another.
For clinicians, meaning should be assessed alongside symptoms, functioning, medical context, safety, relationships, culture, and the person’s own goals. Religious meaning-making can be clinically relevant without becoming the entire case formulation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is religious meaning-making in psychology?
Religious meaning-making is the use or reorganization of religious beliefs, values, identities, practices, relationships, and sacred reference points to understand an event and its place within a larger life framework. It can involve both stability and change. The concept describes psychological processes; it does not evaluate the theological truth of the beliefs involved.
What is the difference between global meaning and situational meaning?
Global meaning is the broader system of beliefs, goals, values, identity, and assumptions through which a person understands life. Situational meaning is the appraisal and interpretation of a specific event. Meaning-making becomes especially active when the event’s situational meaning conflicts with global meaning. Park (2010).
Does religion help people cope with stress?
It can. Research shows that religious coping is associated with adjustment, but the direction and size of the association depend on the form of coping and the context. Positive and negative religious coping show different average relationships with outcomes, and broader longitudinal effects of religion or spirituality on mental health are small. Ano and Vasconcelles (2005); Garssen et al. (2021).
Can religious meaning-making make distress worse?
Yes. Meaning-making can become painful when it involves severe spiritual conflict, interpersonal religious conflict, persistent guilt, a threatening interpretation, or an unresolved clash between an event and the person’s worldview. That does not make religion itself pathological. The relevant question is how the particular meaning process affects distress, functioning, relationships, safety, and coping.
Is religious doubt a mental-health symptom?
Religious doubt by itself is not a psychiatric symptom or diagnosis. Doubt can occur in ordinary reflection, faith development, moral conflict, life transition, or spiritual struggle. Clinical concern depends on the wider pattern: severity of distress, impairment, compulsive processes, mood symptoms, trauma symptoms, loss of reality testing, safety concerns, or other clinically relevant features.
Is meaning-making the same as finding a positive lesson?
No. Meaning-making can result in a positive reappraisal, but it can also involve accepting uncertainty, changing goals, revising assumptions, recognizing limits of control, or integrating a painful event into one’s biography without declaring the event good. Research does not require people to discover growth or gratitude after adversity.
Do all religions support meaning in the same way?
No. Traditions differ in theology, ritual, concepts of self, community structure, moral reasoning, sacred authority, and understandings of suffering and transcendence. Individuals within the same tradition also differ. Cross-cultural research and measurement reviews caution against treating findings from one population as universal. Saunders and Stephenson (2024); Norenzayan (2016).
Should a therapist discuss religion or spirituality?
When these domains matter to the client, they can be relevant to culturally competent assessment and treatment. Discussion should be guided by the client’s goals and worldview, with respect for autonomy and without imposing the therapist’s religious or secular convictions. Vieten and Lukoff (2022).
When should meaning-related distress receive professional assessment?
Professional assessment is appropriate when distress is intense or persistent, daily functioning is substantially impaired, sleep or self-care is seriously disrupted, compulsive rituals or intrusive thoughts are taking over, substance use is escalating, reality testing is impaired, or there are concerns about self-harm or safety. Religious content does not determine a diagnosis; the full clinical pattern does.
Related Articles
Grief: Psychological Responses to Loss — the psychology of bereavement, normal variation, prolonged grief, and adjustment after loss.
Scrupulosity OCD: What Is It? Religious Obsessions, Moral Fear, Rituals, Guilt, and Treatment — the clinical boundary between ordinary religious concern and obsessive-compulsive certainty-seeking.
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