This page is part of “Which Human Needs Are Met by Religions and Spirituality”.

Many religious people find in their tradition a framework that gives their life meaning. Their tradition addresses the big questions of life and existence:

  • What is this world and this universe?
  • How were they created and why?
  • Who are we?
  • What is our purpose in life?
  • What happens to our consciousness after we die?

Believers find in their tradition answers to these questions, so that they don’t have to face them alone, with nothing to hold onto.

Psychologists who study meaning in life often distinguish three aspects of it (Martela & Steger, 2016):

  • Coherence: the sense that the world and one’s life make sense
  • Purpose: the sense that one’s life is directed toward valued goals
  • Significance: the sense that one’s life matters.

Religious people often report finding all three in their faith.

Answers to the big questions

Different traditions give very different answers, but for many of their adherents, what matters is not only the content of the answer, but that there is an answer — a shared one, inherited from generations before them, rather than one each person has to invent alone.

Where did the world come from, and why?

For many Jews and Christians, the world is not an accident but a deliberate creation, and its creator looked at it and “saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Believers find in this a basic trust: the world they live in is, at its root, good and intended.

Example: A creation hymn that ends in doubt

Not every tradition answers with certainty. The Hindu Nasadiya Sukta (“Hymn of Creation”, Rigveda 10.129), over 3,000 years old, wonders how the world arose, and ends with: “Whence this creation has arisen — perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not — the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.” For many Hindus, this hymn shows that wonder at the question can itself be a source of meaning, even without a final answer.

Who are we?

Many believers find in their tradition a view of the human being as precious and significant. Jews and Christians read that “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), and the Mishnah draws from the creation of a single first human the conclusion that “every individual is obligated to say: for my sake the world was created” (Sanhedrin 4:5).

Example: Hindu and Buddhist views of the self

In the Hindu Vedanta tradition, the innermost self (atman) is identical with ultimate reality (Brahman), as in the famous saying of the Chandogya Upanishad, “Tat tvam asi” — “You are that”. Buddhism teaches the opposite, anatta: there is no fixed, permanent self at all. Yet practitioners of both find meaning in their view: the Vedantin in discovering that they are one with the ultimate, the Buddhist in being released from clinging to a self that was never really there.

What is our purpose?

Many believers find in their tradition a clear answer to what they are here for.

Examples: Purpose in several traditions
  • The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), taught to generations of Protestant children, opens with: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
  • The prophet Micah summarizes: “what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8).
  • The Quran says: “And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me” (51:56).
  • In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna to perform his duty (dharma) without being attached to the fruits of his actions (2:47).
  • Many Jews today find their purpose in tikkun olam — “repairing the world”.

What happens after death?

Many believers find in their tradition a way to face their own mortality: death is not simply the end, but a passage to something else. Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the resurrection of the dead. Hindus believe in rebirth (samsara) and the possibility of final liberation from it (moksha). Buddhists aim at nirvana, the end of the cycle of rebirth and suffering. For many believers, this gives their actions in this life lasting weight: what they do now matters beyond their own lifetime.

A place in a larger story

Beyond individual answers, many believers find that their tradition places their life within a great story that began long before them and will continue long after them. For many Christians, this is the story of creation, fall, and redemption; for many Jews, the story of covenant, exile, and redemption; for many Hindus and Buddhists, the wheel of rebirth and the path out of it. Within such a story, ordinary events — work, marriage, raising children, hardship — are not random episodes, but part of the plot.

This sense of a story can also give a person a mission. For example, many Jews and Christians see Abraham as a model of a life with a calling: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Genesis 12:1). In some traditions, believers feel a strong sense of mission and purpose, which leads some of them to acts of kindness and grace toward others.

Meaning in everyday life

Many believers find meaning not only in answers to the big questions, but in ordinary daily life, which their tradition teaches them to see as sacred (see also Practices).

Examples: Making the everyday sacred
  • Observant Jews say blessings before eating, after using the bathroom, on seeing a rainbow, on hearing good or bad news — turning ordinary moments into moments of gratitude.
  • The 17th-century Carmelite friar Brother Lawrence, who worked in his monastery’s kitchen, described in The Practice of the Presence of God how he found God in his daily chores: “in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”
  • The Benedictine motto ora et labora (“pray and work”) treats manual labor as part of the spiritual life.
  • A well-known Zen saying: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The tasks don’t change; the way one experiences them does.

Meaning in suffering

Many believers find that their tradition helps them see meaning even in suffering, rather than experiencing it as senseless. When they hear of a death or a misfortune, many Muslims say “Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return” (Quran 2:156). Many Christians find comfort in the belief that “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28). Buddhism begins with the recognition of suffering, the first of the Four Noble Truths, and offers a path out of it. (See also Comfort and encouragement.)

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, argued in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) that people can endure terrible suffering if they find meaning in it, quoting Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” Frankl’s approach is not specifically religious, but it describes well what many believers find in their faith.

What research shows

Studies support the observation that many people find meaning through religion. Using Gallup data from 132 countries, Oishi and Diener (2014) found that residents of poorer countries report a greater sense of meaning in life than residents of wealthier ones — even though they report lower life satisfaction — and that this difference was largely explained by higher religiosity in poorer countries. Research on coping with trauma and loss (Park, 2010) finds that people often cope by making sense of what happened, and that for religious people, their faith is often a central resource for doing so.

Some distinctions

At the same time, some distinctions are in order.

Meaning without certainty

Some believers find meaning not in firm answers, but in living with the questions. The book of Ecclesiastes opens with “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2) — the Hebrew word hevel literally means “vapor” or “breath”. When Job demands an explanation for his suffering, God answers not with an explanation but with a question: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). Apophatic theology, in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, holds that God can only be described by what God is not. And the Buddha refused to answer metaphysical questions such as whether the universe is eternal, comparing someone who insists on answers first to a man shot by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he learns who shot it (Majjhima Nikaya 63).

This is an important contrast to dogma: a framework of meaning that is offered and explored is very different from one that is imposed and shielded from doubt.

Meaning is not unique to religion

Many non-religious people find deep meaning in their lives — through family, love, work, art, science, activism, or philosophies such as humanism and existentialism. What many religious people find in their tradition is not meaning as such, but a meaning that is shared with a community and inherited from generations before them, so that they don’t have to build it alone from scratch (see The Void in the Modern World).