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Youth temple attendance correlated with better mental health and more lasting faith

The mental health crisis, especially among youth, has filled headlines in recent years. Researchers have begun to take note of how religious and spiritual practices relate to greater mental health.
Scholar Jonathan Haidt notes the “efficacy of spiritual practices such as meditation, prayer, confession, and atonement rituals” and that “there is abundant evidence that keeping up certain spiritual practices improves well-being” often because these practices “reduc[e] self-focus and selfishness, which prepares a person to merge with or be open to something beyond the self.”
Indeed, there is now broad scholarly recognition of the potential benefits of spiritual practices (even among atheist scholars such as Haidt).
Yet there is one religious practice that has not, until now, been examined for its connection to mental health: temple attendance for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A recently conducted, extensive, randomly-sampled study of Latter-day Saint youth found that temple attendance is positively related to mental health. It is also related to sustained faith over time for many.
After a 30-second summary of this research on temple attendance received over 250,000 views on social media, it seemed useful to provide additional information.
In 2016 we launched the Family Foundations of Youth Development study, which was designed to better understand adolescent well-being and how faith develops across adolescence and into young adulthood.
Up to this point, there have been few studies on Latter-day Saint youth, and the studies that do exist often have small samples of Latter-day Saints. Unfortunately, to get a representative sample of Latter-day Saint youth is both difficult and expensive.
As a Foundations team, we determined with our limited resources that we would research Latter-day Saint youth within the largest and most concentrated area of Latter-day Saints — Utah — and later branching out into Arizona and California. Although this obviously misses the important differences between Latter-day Saints in these locations and other parts of the U.S. and world, it seemed the best place to begin such a study.
Youth were surveyed every other year since 2016, picking up the Arizona sample in 2018, and the California sample in 2020. We re-surveyed all participants in 2020, 2022, and 2024 (we’re just finishing up 2024 data collection). In total, we had over 2,000 youth and one of their parents participate. About half our sample is Latter-day Saint youth and the other half is youth of other religions or no religion.
We worked with a research firm Data Axel to obtain the sample. They collect publicly available data providing information on over 200 million households. We identified the areas in which we wanted to survey and purchased a random sample of households with teenagers and recruited by letter and phone. A person could only participate if they had been randomly selected (no “snowball sampling”).
One of the things we were interested in was temple attendance: how often youth went to the temple, what predicted whether they went to the temple and what may be the effect of temple attendance.
Temples are an important part of worship in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Temples are being built all around the world at a historic pace. Starting the year Latter-day Saint youth turn 12, they are able to enter the temple to participate in some of the ordinances.
For analyses of youth temple attendance in this research report we used the Utah and Arizona samples. Because we only had two waves of data on California, there would have been too much missing data to make an accurate assessment. However, with our 2024 data collection, we’ll soon be incorporating California as well.
So, what did we find?
The first is that for 12- and 14-year-olds, around 90% of them attended the temple at least a few times a year with only about 10% not going at all. For 12-year-olds, 61% were going at least once a month. However, this dropped dramatically by age 18. Thirty two percent of 18-year-olds hadn’t been to the temple in the last year and only about 28% were going at least once a month.
We also examined whether there were aspects of religiosity (family prayer, personal prayer, scripture study, belief in the restoration, etc.) that related to temple attendance from ages 12 to 18.
However, in looking at all of this, the question arises of what causes what? For example, do religious beliefs and practices lead to increased temple attendance, or does temple attendance lead to increased religious beliefs and practices?
This is the perennial “chicken and egg” problem with this kind of research. Aside from an experiment (which is impractical with this kind of research), the best we can do is to follow people over time and see what precedes what. This is what we call establishing “temporal ordering,” and provides some evidence for causality.
So, in our “chicken and egg” analyses, we found evidence that throughout adolescence, family prayer reinforced and was reinforced by temple attendance. Those families that are praying together also seem to helps their kids get to the temple and, in turn, that temple attendance seems to reinforce their family prayers.
For 14- and 16-year-olds, their scripture study was related to increased temple attendance two years later. In other words, the more they read their scriptures, the greater the likelihood they would be attending the temple more over time. However, there was little evidence that temple attendance increased scripture study.
We also examined whether kids who went to the temple were less likely to leave the church at some point during their adolescence. Our analyses did indeed find a link.
Of those kids who never attended the temple in 2018, an estimated 33% of them reported being disaffiliated from the Church by 2022 (that is, in 2018 they selected they were a Latter-day Saint but then selected that they were not a Latter-day Saint in 2022).
However, of those who attended the temple once a month in 2018, only an estimated 12% had disaffiliated by 2022.
Additional analyses suggest that one of the reasons temple attendance predicted disaffiliation is because temple attendance was connected with increased beliefs in the restoration including the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith and President Russell M. Nelson as a prophet.
We finally looked at how temple attendance was related to mental health. At ages 12, 14, 16 and 18, temple attendance was related to less depression and at age 18, it was related to lower anxiety. But what about the “chicken and egg” question? Might temple attendance predict better mental health, but also might worse mental health predict less temple attendance?
From our analyses, we found that depression at age 14 was related to decreased temple attendance at age 16. But greater temple attendance at age 16 was related to less depression at age 18. It may be that at younger ages, mental health difficulties influence youth to shy away from temple attendance. At older ages, it may be that temple attendance has a helpful effect on mental health.
That temple attendance would positively influence mental health is not surprising. For decades, the majority of research has found religion related to better mental health. That temple attendance would be connected to better mental health is, therefore, of no surprise.
It’s crucial we understand that this research is about averages. Although those who attend the temple are more likely to experience less depression over time, we can’t determine causality for certain and there are likely individuals for whom temple attendance has a different relationship to depression. For instance, there may be some individuals who experience challenges in their temple worship and struggle to find the positive effects described here.
We caution against those who may interpret this as suggesting temple attendance alone will somehow cure their own or their loved one’s depression. The problem with that is, if someone doesn’t find their depression lifted in a similar course, they might think “what’s wrong with me?” and fall into an even deeper depression.
As with any other mental health interventions (exercise, good sleep, healthy eating, therapy, medicine, etc.) we shouldn’t: 1) Think they are a silver bullet, 2) Take them to extremes, or 3) Assume that everyone will be affected in the same way.
There are also individuals who experience scrupulosity (a category of OCD centered on religious behaviors) who may take this research to mean that if they obsessively attend the temple, their mental health will improve. If we are using the temple as simply a tool for improving our mental health, we will likely be disappointed and miss central purposes of the temple — gathering Israel on both sides of the veil and worshiping the Lord.
Better mental health would simply be an outgrowth of those central purposes. In the process of temple worship, we are reminded of our covenants and can be filled with gratitude for them and determination to live them. As President Nelson said in April 2024: “The temple is the gateway to the greatest blessings God has in store for each of us.”
The fact that research finds temple attendance related to better mental health is unsurprising. While we acknowledge individual differences, we needn’t be shy about acknowledging the positive effects most people experience. Parents and leaders are well advised to emphasize temple attendance broadly while ministering individually to those who may struggle.
Justin Dyer is a Professor of Religious Education at Brigham Young University and is a Fellow with the BYU Wheatley Institute. His current research focus is on the relationship between religion and mental health.
Sam Hardy is a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. He is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on religious development across adolescence and adulthood.
Michael A. Goodman is a Professor of Religion at Brigham Young University and is the Associate Publications Director for the Religious Studies Center. His research focus is on adolescent and young adult well-being with a special emphasis on suicidality.

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