Religious Upbringing and Adult Human Development: Longitudinal Evidence from 22 Study Sites

Does religious upbringing shape adult human development, or do observed differences primarily reflect continued participation later in life? I study this question using three waves of the Global Flourishing Study, covering 202,898 adults across 21 countries and Hong Kong. The data link religious-service attendance around age 12 to detailed measures of childhood conditions, current religious activity, and repeated adult outcomes. Childhood attendance is associated with higher adult flourishing, health, meaning, relationships, character, and selected economic outcomes, although these differences narrow substantially after accounting for family background and parental religiosity. Life-course comparisons sharpen the interpretation. Adults whose frequent participation ended after childhood display no broad advantage, while adults who currently participate frequently have similar profiles whether or not they attended frequently as children. Continued participation from childhood is associated with a modest additional advantage in aggregate nonfinancial flourishing, health, relationships, and some economic outcomes. These activation contrasts retain the same sign across contemporaneous, prospective, and within-person specifications, but they are small relative to the broader gap associated with current participation and cannot be separated from selection into persistence or correlated recall of childhood attendance. Individual fixed-effects estimates further show that income and flourishing move together within person, but childhood religious formation does not systematically moderate this relationship. Thus, religion functions as a continuing life-course institution rather than an independently identified childhood treatment.