Faith as Social Capital and Psychosocial Resource: Substance Use Prevention

Anthropological and sociological inquiry into religion has long asked whether faith functions as a mechanism of social control capable of shaping deviant behaviour, including substance use and crime. Contemporary public health and criminological evidence, synthesised across meta-analytic, ethnographic, and theoretical literatures, now converges on an answer: religious and spiritual participation exerts a measurable, largely protective influence on substance use trajectories, criminal involvement, and psychological resilience. This synopsis integrates five bodies of evidence — large-scale longitudinal meta-analysis, faith-community intervention literature, criminological theory on religion and crime, classical sociological theory (Stark and Bainbridge), and psychological-health scholarship on sustainable spirituality — to construct an evidence-based account of the anthropological function of Christian and broader religious life in drug prevention and behavioural regulation.