Religious Development Across the Lifespan
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Religion, Spirituality & Meaning-Making · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Religious development is the way a person’s religious and spiritual life changes, persists, becomes more differentiated, or is reorganized across time. In psychology, the subject includes changes in religious identity, affiliation, belief, practice, prayer, participation in religious communities, spiritual self-understanding, moral and existential meaning, and the place religion holds within a person’s relationships and life story. It is a developmental field because these dimensions can change as people grow, enter new social roles, encounter new communities, and reinterpret earlier experiences.
The central finding of contemporary research is that there is no single religious trajectory that everyone follows. Different dimensions can move in different directions within the same person. Someone may attend services less often while continuing to pray; remain affiliated while giving religion less personal importance; become more personally religious while becoming less institutionally involved; or maintain a stable identity while changing the way that identity is understood. Longitudinal work has repeatedly shown this multidimensional pattern, including research following people from adolescence into adulthood (Lee, Pearce, & Schorpp, 2017; Hayward, 2021).
Psychology studies these patterns as human development. It does not decide whether a religious belief is true, whether a spiritual experience has a supernatural source, or whether one religious tradition represents a more advanced form of faith than another. The scientific questions concern change, continuity, identity, relationships, cognition, emotion, behavior, culture, and meaning.
What Is Religious Development?
Religious development refers to change and continuity over time in the psychological and social dimensions of religion. The broader psychology of religion treats religion and spirituality as multidimensional phenomena expressed through beliefs, practices, experiences, identities, relationships, communities, values, and meaning systems rather than as a single trait (American Psychological Association, 2013). Developmental research applies that same multidimensional perspective across the life course.
This means that “becoming more religious” or “becoming less religious” is often too simple a description. Researchers may separately measure:
religious affiliation or identification;
the personal importance or salience of religion;
attendance at communal worship or other religious gatherings;
private practices such as prayer;
knowledge, interpretation, or cognitive representations of religious ideas;
belonging and participation in a religious community;
spiritual self-identification;
religious or spiritual meaning-making;
religious identity as part of the broader self-concept.
A longitudinal study can therefore find stability in one dimension and change in another. In a three-year study of 477 adolescents from Latin American, Asian, and European backgrounds in the United States, religious identity remained comparatively stable while organized religious participation declined; changes in religious identity were also associated with changes in family and ethnic identities (Lopez, Huynh, & Fuligni, 2011). In a much larger U.S. longitudinal sample followed from adolescence into adulthood, service attendance declined on average, reported importance of religion increased, and prayer was relatively stable (Dew, Fuemmeler, & Koenig, 2020).
These findings are important because they show why no single behavior is an adequate measure of religious development. Attendance can change because of school, work schedules, disability, migration, transportation, marriage, caregiving, or access to a religious community. Private devotion can change independently. Identity may remain strong despite reduced participation, or participation may continue after identity has become more uncertain.
Religious Development, Spiritual Development, and Religious Identity
Religious development, spiritual development, and religious identity development overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
Religious development is the broadest term in this article. It concerns developmental change in a person’s relation to religion as expressed through identity, belief, practice, affiliation, community, meaning, and related dimensions.
Spiritual development usually focuses more specifically on changes in experiences, orientations, practices, and forms of meaning that a person understands as spiritual. Spirituality can be expressed inside an organized religious tradition, alongside it, or outside formal affiliation. A 2024 review of childhood and adolescent spiritual development emphasizes that definitions remain contested and that family, culture, parent-child communication, and other ecological contexts matter greatly (Boyatzis, 2024).
Religious identity development concerns the place of religion in the self: how a person understands religious belonging, commitment, identification, and the relation of religious identity to family, ethnicity, nationality, gender, relationships, and other domains of identity. It is one major component of religious development rather than the whole of it.
Religious socialization concerns the processes through which families, communities, institutions, peers, and cultural environments transmit or model religious beliefs, practices, language, stories, rituals, and expectations. Socialization strongly shapes development, especially early in life, but development also includes the individual’s active interpretation, acceptance, questioning, modification, integration, or rejection of what has been received.
Conversion and deconversion are particular forms of religious change. They may reorganize identity, community membership, practice, and meaning, sometimes rapidly and sometimes over a long period. They are important developmental pathways, but they are not synonyms for religious development as a whole.
Religious Development Is Multidimensional
One of the strongest advances in the field has been the move away from treating religiosity as a single score. Religious life contains dimensions that are correlated without being identical. A person can change on one dimension without changing on another.
Hayward’s longitudinal work with the National Study of Youth and Religion supported a multidimensional model that remained meaningful across adolescence and young adulthood, while also showing that some measurement relationships shift over time (Hayward, 2021). Lee and colleagues analyzed affiliation, attendance, personal importance, and prayer together rather than collapsing them into one scale and identified seven distinct pathways from adolescence into adulthood (Lee et al., 2017).
This multidimensional view changes how lifespan findings should be interpreted. If a population shows declining attendance, it does not follow that belief, identity, prayer, spirituality, or religious meaning declined at the same rate. If religious importance increases, it does not follow that institutional participation increased. The psychology of religious development therefore asks which dimension changed, for whom, in what cultural setting, during which period of life, and under what social conditions.
Is There One Universal Sequence of Religious Development?
No empirically established universal sequence describes the religious development of all people, traditions, and cultures.
The most famous stage account is James W. Fowler’s faith development theory. Fowler’s 1981 book Stages of Faith proposed a sequence extending from infancy through increasingly differentiated forms of meaning-making (Fowler, 1981). His model was influenced by structural-developmental theories associated with Piaget and Kohlberg and used “faith” in a broad sense involving meaning, value, commitment, and orientation rather than simply assent to religious doctrines.
Fowler described an early primal or undifferentiated phase, followed by intuitive-projective, mythic-literal, synthetic-conventional, individuative-reflective, conjunctive, and universalizing forms of faith. The model became highly influential in pastoral care, religious education, counseling, and the academic study of faith development.
Its historical importance does not make it a settled developmental law. Psychological critiques have questioned its stage logic, cognitive emphasis, cultural specificity, treatment of gender, and assumptions about developmental direction (Coyle, 2011). More recent work on measuring Fowler-related constructs explicitly treats assumptions of fixed stages, synchronized development, and cultural universality as hypotheses rather than givens (Mallery & Mallery, 2022).
Contemporary lifespan research therefore places greater emphasis on trajectories, processes, transitions, social contexts, and multiple dimensions. Fowler remains useful for understanding the history of the field and for generating questions about meaning-making. He should not be used as a universal ranking system for religions, cultures, or individual believers.
How Psychologists Study Religious Development
The method matters because religious development unfolds over time.
Cross-sectional research compares people of different ages at one moment. It can reveal age differences, but it cannot by itself show that people changed because they aged. A 70-year-old and a 20-year-old also belong to different historical generations. They grew up with different institutions, technologies, migration patterns, family structures, educational systems, and religious environments.
Longitudinal research follows the same people across multiple time points. This makes it possible to estimate within-person change and identify distinct trajectories. Several major studies of religion across adolescence and adulthood use repeated measurements to separate stability from change (Petts, 2009; Lee et al., 2017; Dew et al., 2020).
Person-centered methods are especially useful because averages can hide very different developmental pathways. A mean decline in attendance could be produced by one group remaining consistently high, another consistently low, another declining, and another returning after a period of lower involvement. Lee and colleagues found exactly this kind of heterogeneity in the U.S. Add Health data, identifying stable-high, stable-low, affiliated-but-inactive, early-declining, late-declining, increasing, and returning pathways (Lee et al., 2017).
Qualitative research adds another layer by examining how people describe religious change, continuity, doubt, commitment, family influence, and meaning in their own words. Reviews of the field increasingly call for more culturally diverse, qualitative, and longitudinal designs because much of the evidence still comes from Western samples and self-report measures (Boyatzis, 2024; Hardy & Taylor, 2024).
Childhood: Learning Religious Worlds
In childhood, religious development occurs within relationships and cultural environments long before a child can articulate an abstract theology. Children encounter religious language, stories, rituals, music, symbols, places, calendars, practices, moral narratives, and explanations through families and communities. They also actively interpret what they hear.
A major review of the development of religious cognition emphasizes that religious concepts are culturally transmitted and often concern entities or claims that children cannot directly observe. Children therefore rely on social information, testimony, language, and cues about what trusted adults and communities regard as real or important (Richert & Corriveau, 2022). This does not imply that children merely copy adults. Development involves active learning, interpretation, memory, inference, imagination, and conversation.
Family context is especially important, but family influence is not deterministic. Boyatzis’s 2024 review emphasizes a social-ecological view in which parent-child communication, culture, and interactions among multiple environments shape spiritual and religious development (Boyatzis, 2024). The same religious tradition can therefore be learned very differently across households, communities, and cultural settings.
Childhood research also requires care with adult assumptions. A child’s concrete language about sacred concepts should not automatically be interpreted as deficient religion. Developmental psychology asks how children understand ideas with the cognitive, linguistic, relational, and cultural resources available to them at that age.
Adolescence: Identity, Autonomy, Belonging, and Interpretation
Adolescence is one of the most intensively studied periods of religious and spiritual development. It brings changes in abstract reasoning, social perspective-taking, autonomy, peer relationships, identity, and the ability to reflect on inherited commitments. Religious life can become more personally articulated during this period, but the direction of change varies.
A systematic review covering 241 empirical studies published from 1988 through 2017 found a large and methodologically diverse literature on religious and spiritual processes in adolescence (Hardy, Nelson, Moore, & King, 2019). The review shows that adolescent religion is embedded in developmental processes involving family, peers, identity, social contexts, and behavior rather than functioning as an isolated variable.
Questioning, reinterpretation, stronger commitment, stable continuity, and reduced participation can all occur during adolescence. None is a universal developmental requirement. The longitudinal study by Lopez and colleagues found relatively stable religious identity across high school alongside declining organized participation, with meaningful differences across Latin American, Asian, and European-background adolescents and links between religious, ethnic, and family identities (Lopez et al., 2011).
Research across religious groups also cautions against assuming that patterns observed in North American Christian samples are universal. A seven-wave study of 4,080 Muslim and Christian young people in Germany, ages 15 to 22, identified different trajectory patterns across Muslim, immigrant-origin Christian, and non-immigrant Christian groups (Spiegler, Jonsson, & Bracegirdle, 2025). The study is a clear demonstration that national context, migration history, religious tradition, and minority status can alter the developmental patterns researchers observe.
Emerging Adulthood and the Transition to Adult Roles
The transition from adolescence into adulthood often changes the settings in which religious life occurs. People may leave the family home, enter higher education or employment, migrate, form romantic relationships, marry, become parents, change friendship networks, or gain more control over how they spend time. These changes can alter religious participation even when personal belief or identity remains stable.
Petts’s longitudinal life-course research identified distinct trajectories of religious participation from early adolescence into young adulthood and showed that family characteristics, religious background, and life events were associated with those trajectories (Petts, 2009). Later analyses using multidimensional approaches have reinforced the idea that young adulthood is characterized by several pathways rather than one standard decline (Lee et al., 2017).
In the Add Health analysis by Lee and colleagues, approximately half of the sample belonged to pathways involving meaningful change rather than stability. Some declined earlier, some later, some increased, and some showed a returning pattern. Affiliation, attendance, prayer, and personal importance did not always move together (Lee et al., 2017).
This is why leaving a childhood congregation, attending less often, or changing religious labels should not automatically be treated as evidence that a person has lost all religious or spiritual commitment. Likewise, stronger participation after marriage, parenthood, migration, or entry into a new community does not necessarily mean every dimension of belief changed at the same time.
Adulthood: Stability, Change, and Multiple Pathways
Religious development continues after young adulthood. Adult development includes new relationships, family roles, work, caregiving, illness, migration, community involvement, loss, retirement, and changing perceptions of time and mortality. These experiences can become contexts for continuity, intensification, reinterpretation, disengagement, or renewed participation.
Longitudinal research provides strong evidence against a single adult trajectory. McCullough and colleagues followed adults from ages 27 to 80 in a historically distinctive sample of people identified as intellectually gifted in childhood. They identified three different religious trajectories: one characterized by increases until midlife followed by later decline, one with very low early-adult religiousness and further age-related decline, and one with high early religiousness followed by further increases (McCullough, Enders, Brion, & Jain, 2005).
The exact percentages from that study should not be generalized to all populations because the sample was unusual in education, historical cohort, and selection. Its broader contribution is methodological: adulthood contains multiple pathways that can be modeled longitudinally.
Life events can coincide with religious change, but the direction of causality is often difficult to establish. Marriage, parenthood, illness, migration, bereavement, or retirement may alter religious opportunities, relationships, or meaning-making. Religious communities and commitments may also influence how people approach those same transitions. Developmental interpretation therefore requires attention to bidirectional processes rather than assuming that a single event automatically causes a predictable religious outcome.
Later Adulthood: Age, Cohort, Health, and Continuity
The question “Do people become more religious as they age?” has no single answer because age, historical generation, and specific dimensions of religiosity must be separated.
A 35-year study of 420 members of four-generation families found an overall upward drift in religious intensity and strength of belief across adulthood, while religious attendance was relatively stable until declining in later life. The same study also found substantial cohort and historical differences, including greater separation between spirituality and institutional religion among later-born generations (Bengtson, Silverstein, Putney, & Harris, 2015).
That pattern should not be converted into a rule that aging naturally makes everyone more religious. Older adults belong to different birth cohorts, and late-life attendance can be affected by mobility, disability, transportation, caregiving, sensory changes, or access to religious communities. Private practices, belief, identity, and meaning can follow different paths from public attendance.
Longitudinal adult research likewise shows heterogeneity rather than a universal increase (McCullough et al., 2005). The best-supported conclusion is that later adulthood can involve both continuity and change, and that researchers must distinguish aging effects from cohort effects and historical change.
Family and Intergenerational Transmission
Family is one of the most important developmental contexts for religion, especially in childhood and adolescence. Parents and caregivers can provide language, practices, ritual participation, moral narratives, models of commitment, access to religious communities, and opportunities for conversation. Children and adolescents also respond actively: they ask questions, interpret experiences, notice inconsistencies, compare family beliefs with peers and institutions, and make choices as autonomy increases.
Intergenerational transmission is therefore better understood as a developmental relationship than as mechanical inheritance. Recent longitudinal research with thousands of parent-child dyads across four generations found that transmission of religious intensity varied by historical cohort, relationship type, and emotional closeness (Kim, Cheng, & Brown, 2026). Parent-child similarity is real at the population level, but its strength depends on relational and historical conditions.
This distinction matters clinically and educationally. A young person who continues a family tradition has not necessarily failed to develop an individual identity. A young person who questions, modifies, or leaves a family tradition has not necessarily rejected the family as a whole. Religious and family identities can be closely connected, but they are not identical.
The more specific mechanisms by which families pass on beliefs and practices belong to the topic of religious socialization. Religious development is the broader lifespan process in which that socialization is received, interpreted, integrated, transformed, or sometimes rejected.
Culture, Migration, Minority Status, and Historical Change
Religious development always occurs within culture. A trajectory that appears common in one national or religious context may be uncommon in another.
This is one of the major limitations of older developmental theories. Stage models were often built from culturally narrow samples and then described in universal terms. Contemporary research increasingly treats cultural context as part of the developmental process itself. The APA Handbook emphasizes religion and spirituality in relation to families, communities, institutions, and cultures (American Psychological Association, 2013), while recent developmental reviews explicitly call for broader cultural sampling (Boyatzis, 2024; Hardy & Taylor, 2024).
Migration can alter religious development in several ways. It may change access to congregations, strengthen the importance of religion as a marker of ethnic or family continuity, expose a person to new religious diversity, or create tension between home and majority-culture expectations. Minority status can make religious identity more socially visible. In other settings, religious identity may be so culturally normative that it is less salient as a consciously chosen personal label.
The German longitudinal study by Spiegler and colleagues illustrates why comparisons must be made carefully. Muslim and Christian groups showed different developmental profiles, and immigrant-origin Christian youth differed from non-immigrant Christian youth (Spiegler et al., 2025). Findings from one group should therefore not be generalized to “religious adolescents” or “religious adults” everywhere.
Historical period also matters. Economic change, war, migration, secularization, revival movements, legal conditions, media environments, and institutional change can affect entire generations. A lifespan account that ignores history risks mistaking cohort differences for effects of aging.
What Can Trigger Religious Change?
Religious development can be gradual or organized around transitions. Research supports examining clusters of influences rather than searching for one universal cause.
Common developmental contexts include:
changes in family relationships and parental influence;
entry into adolescence and greater autonomy;
leaving home, higher education, work, or military service;
new friendships or romantic relationships;
marriage, partnership, parenthood, and caregiving;
migration and changes in cultural or religious minority status;
joining or leaving a religious community;
exposure to religious diversity;
illness, disability, bereavement, or other major life events;
retirement and changes in mobility or social networks;
conversion, deconversion, or major reinterpretation of an existing identity.
The presence of a life event does not establish causality. The same event can have different meanings for different people. A bereavement may deepen existing religious practice for one person, prompt questioning for another, and produce little religious change for someone else. Psychological research can study patterns of response without deciding which theological interpretation of the event is correct.
Continuity Is Also Development
Development does not require visible change. Stability across time is itself an important developmental pattern.
Longitudinal studies repeatedly identify groups whose religious identity or involvement remains comparatively stable. Lee and colleagues found stable-high, stable-low, and affiliated-but-inactive pathways alongside changing pathways (Lee et al., 2017). Lopez and colleagues found substantial stability in religious identity during high school even while participation changed (Lopez et al., 2011).
Continuity can also become more reflective. A person may retain the same religious affiliation while understanding it differently at age 40 than at age 15. The public label can remain unchanged while meanings, practices, relationships, and priorities become reorganized. This is one reason that developmental research needs repeated, multidimensional measures rather than a single question about affiliation.
Religious Development and Meaning-Making
Religion can provide language for purpose, identity, moral commitments, suffering, hope, mortality, belonging, and the interpretation of major life events. Development therefore includes changes in how religious meanings are understood and used.
Meaning-making is not limited to periods of crisis. It can be embedded in ordinary practices: prayer, worship, rituals, sacred texts, family traditions, communal narratives, ethical commitments, and repeated participation in religious calendars. Over time, people may reinterpret familiar practices without abandoning them.
Psychologists can study the functions and developmental organization of these meanings while remaining neutral about theological truth. A prayer can be studied as a practice involving attention, emotion, relationship, ritual, coping, or identity without reducing its religious significance for the person praying. A sacred text can be studied as part of memory, identity, moral reasoning, community, or meaning without treating it merely as a psychological stimulus.
This approach is consistent with the broader psychology of religion, which examines religion and spirituality as psychologically meaningful domains expressed across individual, relational, communal, and cultural levels (American Psychological Association, 2013).
Religious Development and Mental Health
Changes in religion are not diagnoses.
Questioning a belief, becoming more devout, changing denominations, becoming unaffiliated, returning to religious practice, praying frequently, participating in ritual, or describing a spiritual experience does not by itself establish a mental disorder. Clinical assessment requires attention to the person’s broader symptoms, distress, functioning, cultural and religious context, duration, impairment, and the meaning of the experience within the person’s community and life.
Research on religion and mental health also requires multidimensional interpretation. In the Add Health study by Dew and colleagues, associations between measures of religiosity and mental health varied over time, and the authors emphasized psychosocial context and potentially bidirectional relationships rather than a single causal effect (Dew et al., 2020).
For clinicians, the developmental question is often more useful than a simple “religious or not?” question. Has the person’s current belief or practice been stable for years? Is it a recent change? Does it fit the person’s tradition and community? Does it provide belonging or create conflict? Is distress coming from the religious content itself, from family or community relationships, from a separate mental-health condition, or from several processes at once?
Religious development can intersect with clinical topics while remaining distinct from them. For example, religious or moral themes can become the content of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in scrupulosity, but ordinary religious commitment, conscience, ritual, and prayer should not be reclassified as OCD simply because they are religious. Clinical differentiation depends on the structure of symptoms, compulsions, distress, impairment, and context.
Clinical and Counseling Implications
A lifespan perspective can improve culturally competent psychological work because it adds history to the client’s present religious or spiritual identity.
Useful assessment questions may include:
What religious or spiritual traditions, if any, were present in childhood?
How did family members practice or talk about religion?
Which religious communities have been important at different periods of life?
Has the person’s affiliation, practice, identity, or spiritual self-description changed?
Were there major periods of questioning, intensification, conversion, deconversion, or return?
How do current beliefs and practices relate to family, culture, migration, ethnicity, relationships, and community?
Does the person experience religion primarily as support, obligation, conflict, identity, meaning, community, or some combination?
Are current concerns religious questions that the person wants explored psychologically, or are they theological questions better addressed with an appropriate religious advisor?
These questions should be asked with permission and genuine curiosity rather than used as a checklist for judging the person’s faith. The clinician’s task is to understand the role of religion or spirituality in the person’s life and treatment goals.
Lifespan awareness also prevents two opposite errors: treating every religious change as pathology and assuming that religion is always beneficial. Religious communities and beliefs can be sources of belonging, continuity, identity, coping, conflict, exclusion, obligation, or distress depending on the person and context. Psychological assessment should describe the actual function in the individual case.
What the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us
The evidence base on religious development is substantial but uneven.
First, many studies rely on self-report. Measures such as attendance, prayer frequency, religious importance, affiliation, and spiritual identity are useful, but they capture only selected dimensions of religious life.
Second, much of the classic literature is culturally concentrated. U.S. Christian samples have been especially prominent. Studies including Muslim youth, immigrant families, religious minorities, and non-Western contexts show why universal generalization is risky (Spiegler et al., 2025).
Third, longitudinal studies are more informative about change than cross-sectional studies, but they still do not automatically prove causality. Family formation, social networks, personality, culture, socioeconomic conditions, mental health, and religious participation can influence one another over time.
Fourth, age effects are difficult to separate from cohort and historical-period effects. Bengtson and colleagues demonstrated this problem directly in their 35-year multigenerational study (Bengtson et al., 2015).
Fifth, the field continues to debate definitions. “Religion,” “religiosity,” “faith,” and “spirituality” are not interchangeable constructs, and measures developed in one tradition may not function identically in another. Contemporary reviews therefore call for better theory, stronger longitudinal designs, diverse samples, and closer attention to actual developmental processes rather than only correlations between religion and outcomes (Hardy & Taylor, 2024).
A Lifespan Model Without a Universal Ladder
The most defensible scientific picture is a life-course model with multiple possible pathways.
Childhood often introduces religious language, practice, relationships, and cultural frameworks. Adolescence can make identity, autonomy, belonging, and interpretation more explicit. Emerging adulthood often changes social environments and participation opportunities. Adult roles can stabilize, intensify, reduce, or reorganize religious involvement. Later adulthood can bring continuity, changing community access, revised meaning, and cohort-specific patterns.
At every stage, development is shaped by the interaction of person and context. Family matters. Community matters. Culture matters. Historical period matters. Cognitive and emotional development matter. Life events matter. The person’s own interpretations and choices matter.
This model accommodates continuity, intensification, decline, differentiation, conversion, deconversion, return, and mixed patterns without treating any one pathway as the universal endpoint of psychological maturity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is religious development in psychology?
Religious development is the study of how religious and spiritual identity, belief, practice, affiliation, community involvement, and meaning change or remain stable across time. Contemporary research treats religion as multidimensional, so development can look different across attendance, prayer, identity, belief, and personal importance (Hayward, 2021).
What are Fowler’s stages of faith?
James Fowler proposed a historically influential stage model moving from early undifferentiated and intuitive forms of faith through mythic-literal, synthetic-conventional, individuative-reflective, conjunctive, and universalizing forms (Fowler, 1981). The model remains important in the history of faith-development theory, but its stage logic and claims of broad applicability have received substantial criticism, so it should not be treated as a universally established developmental sequence (Coyle, 2011).
Does religiosity usually decline during adolescence?
Some dimensions often decline in some samples, especially organized participation, but there is no universal adolescent decline. Religious identity can remain stable while participation changes, and trajectories differ across cultural and religious groups (Lopez et al., 2011; Spiegler et al., 2025).
Is questioning religion during adolescence psychologically abnormal?
No. Questioning, continuity, stronger commitment, reinterpretation, and reduced participation can all occur during adolescent identity development. A change in religious belief or practice is not by itself evidence of a mental disorder. Clinical concern depends on broader symptoms, distress, impairment, functioning, and cultural context.
Do people become more religious as they age?
Some studies find increases in certain dimensions of religiousness with age, but the pattern is not universal. Belief, personal importance, private practice, and attendance can follow different trajectories, and age effects are difficult to separate from birth-cohort and historical-period differences (Bengtson et al., 2015; McCullough et al., 2005).
Can religious identity remain stable while religious practice changes?
Yes. Longitudinal studies show that identity, attendance, prayer, affiliation, and personal importance can change independently. In one adolescent study, religious identity remained comparatively stable while organized participation declined (Lopez et al., 2011).
How much do parents influence a child’s religion?
Parents and caregivers are major sources of religious socialization, especially in childhood, but transmission is not automatic. Children and adolescents actively interpret what they receive, and parent-child similarity varies with relationships, culture, historical cohort, and social environment. A large multigenerational study found that transmission strength differed across cohorts and was stronger in emotionally closer parent-child relationships (Kim et al., 2026).
What is the difference between religious development and religious socialization?
Religious socialization concerns how beliefs, practices, identities, and religious culture are transmitted through family, community, institutions, and other social relationships. Religious development is broader: it includes how a person changes or remains stable across the lifespan, including how socialization is interpreted, integrated, revised, or rejected.
Are conversion and deconversion part of religious development?
Yes. Conversion and deconversion can be major developmental transitions involving identity, practice, affiliation, relationships, community, and meaning. They are particular pathways within the wider field of religious development rather than the whole field.
Is spiritual development the same as religious development?
They overlap but are not identical. Spiritual development can occur inside or outside formal religious affiliation and may focus more strongly on spiritual identity, meaning, experiences, practices, or perceived relation to the sacred. Religious development additionally includes institutional affiliation, communal practice, religious identity, and tradition-specific participation.
Related Articles
References
American Psychological Association. (2013). APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4311506
Bengtson, V. L., Silverstein, M., Putney, N. M., & Harris, S. C. (2015). Does religiousness increase with age? Age changes and generational differences over 35 years. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 54, 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12183
Boyatzis, C. J. (2024). Spiritual development during childhood and adolescence. In L. J. Miller (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality (2nd ed., pp. 100–124). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190905538.013.5
Coyle, A. (2011). Critical responses to faith development theory: A useful agenda for change? Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 33(3), 281–298. https://doi.org/10.1163/157361211X608162
Dew, R. E., Fuemmeler, B., & Koenig, H. G. (2020). Trajectories of religious change from adolescence to adulthood, and demographic, environmental, and psychiatric correlates. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 208(6), 466–475. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000001154
Fowler, J. W. (1981). Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Harper & Row. https://search.worldcat.org/title/7196920
Hardy, S. A., Nelson, J. M., Moore, J. P., & King, P. E. (2019). Processes of religious and spiritual influence in adolescence: A systematic review of 30 years of research. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 29(2), 254–275. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12486
Hardy, S. A., & Taylor, E. M. (2024). The past, present, and future of research on religious and spiritual development in adolescence, young adulthood, and beyond. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 46(2), 109–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/00846724241235172
Hayward, G. M. (2021). A multidimensional model of religiosity from adolescence through the transition to adulthood. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 60(3), 653–668. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12729
Kim, J. H., Cheng, K. J., & Brown, M. T. (2026). Transmission of religiosity across generations: Historical, cohort, and relational dynamics. Sociology of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf029
Lee, B. H. J., Pearce, L. D., & Schorpp, K. M. (2017). Religious pathways from adolescence to adulthood. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56(3), 678–689. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12367
Lopez, A. B., Huynh, V. W., & Fuligni, A. J. (2011). A longitudinal study of religious identity and participation during adolescence. Child Development, 82(4), 1297–1309. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01609.x
Mallery, S. T., & Mallery, P. (2022). Centers of value and the quest for meaning in faith development: A measurement approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 975160. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.975160
McCullough, M. E., Enders, C. K., Brion, S. L., & Jain, A. R. (2005). The varieties of religious development in adulthood: A longitudinal investigation of religion and rational choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(1), 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.1.78
Petts, R. J. (2009). Trajectories of religious participation from adolescence to young adulthood. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 48(3), 552–571. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01465.x
Richert, R. A., & Corriveau, K. H. (2022). Development of religious cognition. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 4, 185–206. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-120920-041303
Spiegler, O., Jonsson, J. O., & Bracegirdle, C. (2025). Religious development from adolescence to early adulthood among Muslim and Christian youth in Germany: A person-oriented approach. Child Development, 96(1), 141–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14151