STUDY: Does Religion Make Children Mean And Judgmental?


A new study has found that children raised in religious households are less kind and more punitive than those raised in secular households. This was a joint study among seven different universities around the world. They studied children from Christian, Muslim, and non-religious households. The authors concluded:

“Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others.”

The study, The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World, was published in Current Biology. In the study,

“More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.”

The subjects included around 1200 children from the United States, Canada, China, Turkey, Jordan, and South Africa. Twenty four percent were Christian, forty-three percent were Muslim, and twenty seven percent were non-religious.

The children were given a pile of stickers and told that there wasn’t enough for everyone to see if they would share. They were also shown films of children fighting and shoving each other and gauged their responses. The older children that were exposed to religion longer had the greatest negative reactions. The religious children did demonstrate more empathy than the others, but the non-religious children were more generous.

Shocker (NOT!), the religious children were more judgemental of people’s actions than those from secular houses. More of the Muslim children thought the kids that fought were mean than the Christian ones did.


Hopefully, more religious thinkers can put the defensiveness aside and take these research findings into account. This could help many parents raise nicer children. Judging the actions of others is definitely not good behavior for children to copy. To be very blunt, we do not need a belief in God to be good people. People were loving each other and doing good deeds long before Christianity. Scaring people into to being moral is not a way to have better morals.

Featured image by Emil via flickr.com, available under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Hi, I'm from Huntsville, AL. I'm a Liberal living in the Bible Belt, which can be quite challenging at times. I'm passionate about many issues including mental health, women's rights, gay rights, and many others. Check out my blog weneedtotalkaboutmentalhealth.com