College students active in their faith have better mental health, including sexual minorities

Contrary to popular opinion, new data confirms that religious campus environments can be an especially healthy place for diverse students, including sexual minorities.
In their December 2023 article in the Journal of Affective Disorders, Brigham Young University researchers Justin Dyer and Jenet Erickson note that “no study to date has compared the mental health of students in religious and nonreligious universities.”
Drawing upon the 2020-2021 Healthy Minds dataset of 135,344 students across 140 universities, they compared student anxiety and suicide ideation and anxiety across different kinds of campus environments (nonreligious, Catholic, Evangelical, and “Other Christian”) and student characteristics (personal religiousness and sexual minority status). Latter-day Saint students didn’t figure prominently in the study, with “Other Christian” including Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Nazarene.
In the aggregate, student bodies tended to look similarly in terms of their mental health. But when the researchers dug into individual student characteristics, several interesting patterns emerged. First, they found “certain benefits of being on a religious university campus even when a student’s personal religiousness is low.” For instance, the study found that “those of no religion attending an evangelical university had lower suicide ideation than those at a nonreligious university.”
In terms of mental health, sexual and gender minorities also did better at religious schools compared with nonreligious schools. “A religious campus tends to be protective,” Dyer told Deseret News, including “for people who you wouldn’t think would fit at religious schools.”
Although the environmental influence was notable, the bigger variable for mental health according to the study was students’ own personal commitment to faith. This was true at both religious and nonreligious universities, and across diverse sexual identities.
For instance, sexual minorities who participated in religious extracurricular activities (like prayer) at an evangelical university had a low rate of suicidal ideation (6%), compared with the 20% national average (with suicidal ideation) and 34% of surveyed students who didn’t participate in these same faith practices at religious universities (the highest estimated rate of any subgroup analyzed).
Yet going to a place without religious commitments doesn’t necessarily make things better, since the analysis found nonreligious sexual minority students at nonreligious schools were at much higher risk for anxiety compared with nonreligious students at many Christian religious schools.
Overall, the authors note, minority students most protected from suicide ideation were those at strongly religious schools who also participated in some religious practices. This relationship between faith and mental health was so strong that it reflected a “dose-response” relationship, wherein each unit increase in the personal importance of religion for a student decreased their likelihood of suicidal ideation by 10%.
“Universities may do well to engage with religions in ways that enable their students to access this resource,” Dyer and Erickson conclude.
This isn’t just a campus trend. Tyler Lefevor and colleagues published in 2021 the first meta-analysis (study of studies) exploring the impact of religiosity and spirituality on sexual minorities generally. Combining the results of 73 studies, they found a “small but positive overall relationship” between religiosity/spirituality and health among sexual minorities.
Steven Cranney, a Deseret News contributor, also recently analyzed 2020 survey data from the Cooperative Election Study across over 50,000 participants, including 6,611 sexual minority individuals. Cranney, who also serves as a lecturer at the Catholic University of America and a non-resident fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion, published this last November in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion his findings that sexual minorities benefit from religious activity (service attendance, prayer, importance of religion) in a similar way to heterosexual individuals.
“The health benefits of religion are more broadly applicable to LGBTQ individuals than I would have thought,” Cranney told PsyPost. “Contrary to expectations, the study revealed that being part of religious communities … generally correlates with better health for these individuals.”
These large-scale studies challenge popular wisdom that has been widely shared about faith and sexual minorities. “There is a lot of casual, informal conventional wisdom that has not been empirically tested,” Cranney observed.
This same concern was expressed by seven scholars and researchers in their November 2023 amicus brief before the Ninth Circuit in support of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities and associated universities in defending themselves from an attempt to “nullify” their religious exemption to Title IX that, according to the plaintiffs, allow “widespread discrimination” on these same campuses (Elizabeth Hunter, et al., vs. U.S. Department of Education, et al).
According to these scholars, the plaintiff’s claim that these institutions “differ significantly in their campus climates” is based “primarily on personal stories” from self-selected students, “without any direct research evidence.” Noting that sexual minority students “experience challenges on all types of academic campuses, both religious and secular,” these scholars point out that studies highlighted by the plaintiffs “fail to make any direct comparisons” between sexual minorities at religious versus secular schools, such as the Dyer and Erickson study reviewed above.
Additionally, these authors note that more than 50% of sexual minority students interviewed in a 2018 national study by Wheaton College scholar Mark Yarhouse and colleagues described their campus in positive terms, such as “supportive,” “welcoming,” “warm,” and “safe.”
In collaboration with Janet Dean, Yarhouse also found in 2021 that about half of sexual minority students at religious universities reported no or only mild psychological distress, and only 9.4% reported elevated distress.
Citing years of research reflecting ideological diversity in minority students, the scholars in the amicus brief repeated the caution by Andrew Adelman and colleagues against assuming inescapable conflict between religious and sexual identities, noting that “many LGB people have successfully negotiated the integration of these two aspects of identity in a way that allows them to feel congruent and free from identity conflict.”
Erickson agrees, pointing out that “this isn’t a monolithic story,” writing with Dyer that “we should not see LGBTQ+ students as a monolithic group.”
Yet within popular culture today, those firmly committed to their faith can feel like anomalies. Blake Fisher describes how many people are slow to believe him when he tells them how many other people with same-sex attraction there are on campus who are dedicated to their faith.
Contrary to widespread assumptions about what constitutes the “only helpful support” to minority students, these scholars suggest that “affirming supports” may, in fact, “not be experienced as supportive in light of many of these students’ personal religious values.”
“Hence,” some sexual minority students, they say, choose to attend a faith-based university “where policies and behavior expectations are informed by religious beliefs, rather than a secular institution where policies are ‘affirming.’”
For those arguing that religion is inherently tied to “increased negativity” toward minorities, the scholars say, all too often “this alleged ‘negativity’ is too often anything short of a full-throated affirmation of behavior expression, which, for many religions, is morally impermissible.”
They note that “a person can be highly religious and positive toward LGBTQ+ persons and hold same-sex behavior is morally impermissible simultaneously.”
Erickson describes hearing stories from sexual minority students committed to their faith who say, “this is what I want to do and have chosen to do, this is where I find peace and joy” but no one will believe me.
“We actually make it much harder for LGBT students who can’t be authentic about that faith,” she says — pointing to how common it is for students to hear things that undermine their desire to reconcile faith and sexuality, ‘you’re not being true to yourself, you’re missing out on true happiness, you’ll always be alone, you’re lying to yourself.’” All of this, she said, translates into a “significant disservice to LGBT youth, in the name of trying to help them.”
Some of these lawsuits against religious universities, Dyer notes, are “trying to take away the choice of individuals attending a religious school,” while making it difficult for religious schools to “hold to their religious tenet.”
If successful, these suits could eliminate the option for minority student to attend a university with religious roots, he said, “when, in fact, this may be the very best fit for them.”
Funding questions aside, that “pressure to change and unmoor from religious principles, would seem to put more students at risk,” Dyer concluded, including sexual minorities.
“As well meaning as some of these efforts are, they may do harm if they detach people from their religion.”