Unravelling ageing: Taking a social identity approach to understanding religion and health across the life-course

Do religion and spirituality play a part in ageing well? Might religious identity help us cope with age-related stressors or illness? How do we – or how do most people – define healthy ageing? These questions give rise to many answers. Some have characterized ageing in purely biological terms as a disease itself, thereby launching efforts to treat it. However, this discourse fails to consider the diverse experiences of ageing based on an array of social factors, including religious (or non-religious) belief and identity. Taking an intersectional approach, I argue that ageing is better conceptualized as an identity transition and provide evidence that the decussate role of religious identity may be particularly important in navigating various life stages and stressors associated with ageing, including retirement, caregiving, and illness. I end with an acknowledgement that although older adults have historically been more religious compared with their younger counterparts, preliminary findings suggest that this too may be changing with increasing trends of secularization globally, with potential implications for health and well-being for all of us. ‘Unravelling ageing’ is therefore a useful metaphor in helping us to challenge some of our pre-existing assumptions about what it means to age well, and to critically explore how the uniqueness of social identities related to religion and spirituality may intersect with healthy ageing in diverse contexts and across identity transitions. This article is the text that accompanied a keynote address given at the International Association for the Psychology of Religion meeting in 2025 in Birmingham, England.