The Science Behind Why Religion Actually Works | David DeSteno
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
People who are genuinely engaged in spiritual practice live longer, experience 30% lower all-cause mortality, report more meaning, and suffer less depression. The data are remarkably clear. And yet, more people are leaving organized religion than at any point in modern history. So what happens when we walk away from the institutions but still carry the hunger for what they provided?
David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University who has spent his career studying the mechanisms behind moral behavior, social emotions, and what he calls spiritual technologies — the rituals and practices baked into faith traditions that science is now showing work on our minds and bodies in measurable, powerful ways, whether or not we believe in God. He is also the author of How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion.
We explore what the research actually shows about why religious engagement improves health outcomes so dramatically, the Hindu concept of vana prastha and why midlife may be the exact moment to shift from accumulating to sharing wisdom, how rituals like contemplating death, practicing gratitude, and moving in synchrony with others change our brains and behavior, why extracting spiritual practices from their original containers can sometimes backfire, and what it might look like to build a new kind of spiritual life if you've left the one you were raised in. A rare conversation that takes both science and the sacred seriously — without asking you to choose between them.
You can find David at: Website | Bluesky | Episode Transcript
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What would happen if you took the world's major religion, set aside the theology for a moment, |
| 0:05.5 | and studied just the rituals? The meditation, the chanting, the prayers of gratitude, the contemplation |
| 0:11.1 | of death, the communal meals, the morning practices, study them as technologies. Technology is designed |
| 0:17.5 | to work on your mind and body in specific, measurable ways. |
| 0:21.6 | That's what my guest today David Destano has done. |
| 0:24.7 | He's a professor of psychology at Northeastern and the author of How God Works, and he runs a |
| 0:30.0 | social emotions group where his lab studies the mechanics behind compassion, gratitude, |
| 0:34.9 | moral behavior, and increasingly, why the data on people who are |
| 0:38.5 | engaged in spiritual practice and often who believe in God are so striking. |
| 0:43.8 | We're talking a 30% lower all-cause mortality, less depressing, greater sense of meaning, |
| 0:50.2 | better health outcomes across the board. |
| 0:53.5 | And here's what makes this conversation land differently |
| 0:55.6 | than most conversations about faith. David is not here to tell you to believe in God. He's not here |
| 1:03.2 | to tell you not to. He's here to say that whether these practices were divinely inspired or figured |
| 1:09.5 | out through thousands of years of human trial |
| 1:11.9 | and error, they work. And we are walking away from them at the exact moment we may need them most. |
| 1:19.2 | In this conversation, we go into what he calls spiritual technologies. The rituals hiding in |
| 1:24.4 | plain sight inside every major faith tradition that science is now revealing |
| 1:28.7 | to be remarkably effective at helping us deal with loss, find meaning, build connection, |
| 1:35.6 | and navigate the exact season of life that most of us listening are in right now. |
| 1:40.7 | We talk about a Hindu concept called Vana Prastha, the midlife pivot from accumulation to |
| 1:46.3 | sharing wisdom, and why making that shift earlier might actually be the single most important |
... |
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