Childhood Experiences Shape Who Feels Punished by God as Adults, Study of 200,000 People Finds

Why do some adults walk through life convinced that God is punishing them, while others experience the divine as benevolent, distant, or absent? A massive new study suggests that the seeds of this troubling perception may be planted decades earlier, in the circumstances of childhood. Drawing on data from more than 200,000 adults across 22 countries, researchers report that a constellation of early-life factors—ranging from childhood abuse and financial hardship to gender and even frequent religious service attendance in youth—predicts whether people later experience one of the most distressing forms of religious struggle: the sense of being divinely punished.

The findings, published in Applied Research in Quality of Life, come from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study, one of the most ambitious efforts ever mounted to understand human well-being across cultures. In this preregistered analysis, a team led by Richard G. Cowden of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University examined associations between 13 individual characteristics and retrospectively assessed childhood factors and the adult experience of perceiving divine punishment. With a sample of 202,898 participants spanning nations on every inhabited continent, the study offers an unusually broad window into how early life may shape one of the most intimate dimensions of religious experience.

Religious and spiritual struggles, as psychologists define them, are tensions and conflicts over spiritual matters. They can take many forms: anger at God, doubts about ultimate meaning, moral struggles, conflicts with fellow believers, or the perception that a malevolent supernatural force is at work. The form examined in this study—divine punishment—is among the most clinically significant. Prior research has linked such struggles to elevated psychological distress, poorer physical health outcomes, and even increased mortality among medically ill patients, making it important to understand where these experiences come from and who is most vulnerable.

Methodologically, the study took an unusually rigorous approach for cross-cultural research. The investigators estimated country-level modified Poisson models, a statistical framework well suited to modeling binary outcomes such as whether or not a person reports perceiving divine punishment. In each country, the outcome was regressed on all candidate predictors simultaneously, allowing the researchers to estimate the unique contribution of each factor while holding the others constant. They then aggregated results for the 11 predictors common across countries using random-effects meta-analysis, a technique that treats each country’s estimate as an observation of a shared underlying effect while formally accounting for variation between nations.

The meta-analytic risk ratios revealed three broad families of predictors. The first was individual characteristics: male gender, for example, was associated with a higher likelihood of perceiving divine punishment in adulthood, a pattern that runs counter to the broader finding in the psychology of religion that women tend to be more religiously engaged than men on most measures. The second family comprised early-life conditions and experiences. Two stood out: childhood abuse and feeling like an outsider within one’s own family. Both were associated with an elevated likelihood of later perceiving divine punishment, echoing a growing literature connecting childhood adversity to religious and spiritual struggles in adulthood.

The third family involved social circumstances and influences. Greater childhood financial difficulty predicted a higher likelihood of adult divine punishment perceptions, suggesting that socioeconomic adversity during the formative years may leave a durable imprint on how people interpret their relationship with the sacred. More surprisingly, more frequent religious service attendance during childhood was also associated with a higher likelihood of adult divine punishment. This finding does not necessarily imply that religion itself breeds spiritual distress. Rather, the researchers note, children raised in highly religious environments may simply have richer conceptual frameworks for understanding suffering in theological terms—including the idea that misfortune reflects divine displeasure—making such appraisals more cognitively available in adulthood.

The theoretical significance of these results lies in what they say about the life course. Drawing on life-course epidemiology and Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development, the authors frame perceiving divine punishment as an outcome patterned by the interplay of individual, relational, and socioeconomic forces that unfold over decades. Attachment theory offers one influential lens: early relationships with caregivers, particularly when marked by abuse or exclusion, may be internalized as templates for later relationships with God. A child who experiences parental figures as harsh, rejecting, or unpredictable may, as an adult, more readily construe the divine along similar lines. Studies of parental attachment and God image have lent support to this correspondence hypothesis, and the new findings extend it to a far larger and more culturally diverse sample.

Yet the picture is not uniform. The associations were somewhat heterogeneous across countries, meaning the strength—and in some cases the direction—of the links varied from one national context to another. This heterogeneity is itself informative. Religious doctrines differ in how prominently divine punishment features, and cultural norms shape whether such experiences are considered normal, shameful, or pathological. Economic conditions, family structures, and the role of religious institutions in public life all differ across the 22 countries studied. A childhood predictor that looms large in one setting may be buffered or amplified in another, a nuance that single-country studies of spiritual struggle have largely been unable to capture.

The practical stakes of this work are considerable. Religious and spiritual struggles are not merely private theological puzzles; growing evidence indicates they can affect whole-person functioning, including mental health, physical health, and social relationships. If childhood factors help pattern who experiences these struggles, then interventions—whether delivered by clergy, chaplains, mental health professionals, or community organizations—could be designed with vulnerable populations in mind. Adults with histories of childhood abuse, family exclusion, or economic deprivation may warrant particular attention in pastoral care and spiritually integrated psychotherapy, not because their perception of divine punishment is irrational, but because it is traceable to identifiable developmental origins that can be addressed.

The study also sets a methodological benchmark. By preregistering its research questions, variables, and analytic plan with the Center for Open Science before accessing data, and by making all analysis code openly available, the team reduced the risk of undisclosed analytic flexibility—a chronic concern in cross-cultural psychology. The data themselves are publicly accessible, inviting independent replication and extension. As the Global Flourishing Study moves into subsequent waves, researchers will be able to examine whether early-life predictors measured more precisely, and outcomes tracked longitudinally, confirm and refine the picture sketched here. For now, the message is striking: the way adults imagine God’s attitude toward them may carry the fingerprints of their earliest years, written differently in every culture but legible across them all.

Subject of Research: Childhood predictors of perceiving divine punishment as a form of religious and spiritual struggle in adulthood across 22 countries

Article Title: Early-Life Predictors of Perceiving Divine Punishment in Adulthood Across 22 Countries

Article References: Cowden, R. G., Henry, J., Harris, C., Johnson, K. A., Case, B., Padgett, R. N., Johnson, B. R., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2026). Early-Life Predictors of Perceiving Divine Punishment in Adulthood Across 22 Countries. Applied Research in Quality of Life. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-026-10644-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-026-10644-0

Keywords: divine punishment, religious struggles, childhood adversity, Global Flourishing Study, life course, psychology of religion, meta-analysis, attachment theory, cross-cultural research, spiritual struggles, childhood abuse, well-being