Sanctified Slack: When Faith Cushions the Strain of Quiet Quitting
Quiet quitting promises workers relief from overwork, but among 1,744 American workers surveyed in late 2023, those who pulled back reported more psychological distress, not less. Religion changed the outcome: belief in divine control closed the distress gap on both measures, while weekly service attendance more than closed it for workers who had stopped going beyond the minimum.
What we studied
Quiet quitting entered the post-pandemic vocabulary as a promise: do what the job description requires and nothing more, decline the extra hours and the unpaid initiative, and reclaim a life outside of work. The promise treats disengagement as self-care, a rational boundary against a culture that makes work the center of identity. That claim has gone largely untested: researchers know little about how quiet quitting relates to psychological distress, and less about whether religion (one of the oldest sources of meaning outside work) changes that relationship.
A new study by Laura Upenieks of Baylor University and Scott Schieman of the University of Toronto puts both questions to national data. The data come from the 2023 wave of the Measuring Employment Sentiments and Social Inequality survey (known as MESSI), a national survey of American workers designed to mirror the workforce as a whole, fielded in the fall of 2023. A randomly selected group of respondents answered an added module on religion, which produced the study's sample of 1,744 workers. Two survey questions captured quiet quitting, one asking how much effort workers put into the job beyond what is required, the other how strongly they agreed that they would work harder than they have to in order to help their organization succeed. Distress came from ten questions about the past month (feeling tense, restless, sad, or unable to get going, among others).
Religiosity entered in two forms. Belief in divine control captures the conviction that God guides the course of one's life according to a plan, while religious service attendance captures something different, weekly membership in a gathered community. The authors set two predictions against each other. Religion might buffer the strain of disengagement by offering a framework in which stepping back reads as trust in a larger plan rather than personal failure. Or it might amplify it, since in traditions that treat work as a sacred calling, doing the bare minimum can register as a spiritual failure that stacks guilt on top of whatever pushed the worker to disengage in the first place.
Conceptual model. Three boxes: 'Quiet quitting (withholding extra effort; unwillingness to work harder)' on the left, a solid arrow pointing right to 'Psychological distress'. Above the arrow, a box labeled 'Belief in divine control (a cognitive resource)' with an arrow pointing down at the main arrow. Below it, a box labeled 'Weekly religious attendance (a communal resource)' with an arrow pointing up at the main arrow. The two moderator arrows mark the buffering pathways the study tested.
What we found
Neither measure of quiet quitting supported the self-care story. Workers who put little or no effort in beyond the minimum (about one in nine of the sample) reported clearly higher distress than workers who put in a lot. The willingness measure ran in steps: each degree of retreat from full willingness came with more distress. Workers who flatly refused the idea of working harder (about 3 in every 100) stood furthest from their most willing colleagues, a wider distress gap than the ones tied to divorce, long hours, or low income in the same survey.
Belief in divine control rewrote that pattern. Among workers with strong divine-control beliefs, quiet quitting lost most of its association with distress on both measures: quiet quitters who believed strongly that God directs their lives looked, on distress, much like everyone else. Quiet quitters with weak divine-control beliefs stood clearly apart. Engaged workers looked about the same whichever way their beliefs ran, which is the signature of a true buffer, a resource that matters most for the people under strain, supporting the study's buffering hypothesis over its guilt-amplification rival.
Weekly religious attendance went further on the effort measure. Quiet quitters who attended services nearly every week (about one in four workers in the sample) reported some of the lowest distress in the study, lower than the average worker. Quiet quitters who attended less often reported the highest. On the willingness measure, attendance made no detectable difference, a null result the authors treat with care rather than explain away. Their cautious reading: withholding extra effort is a private adjustment, while refusing to work harder edges toward an open rejection of workplace norms, visible enough to invite social costs that congregational support may not stretch to cover. The two measures may also tap different things, discretionary behavior on one side and internalized loyalty on the other.
One caution belongs beside all of these results. The survey captured a single moment in time, so the arrows can run in either direction. Distress may drain effort just as plausibly as withheld effort feeds distress. The authors state plainly that their data cannot separate the two. The study establishes the pairing itself, quiet quitting and distress traveling together, along with the finding that religiosity marks out which quiet quitters feel the strain most.
What this means
The findings cut against both sides of the quiet-quitting debate. Workers who pull back are not, on average, finding the relief the trend promises, while treating disengagement as a discipline problem misreads the data from the other direction, because the distress travels with the disengagement rather than waiting for a manager to point it out. What separated quiet quitters who fared well from those who did not was an anchor outside the job, either a belief that life follows a larger plan or a community that gathers weekly and asks nothing about output.
Read quiet quitting as a signal, not a discipline problem
Workers who pull back report more distress than their engaged colleagues, so exhortations to re-engage aim at a symptom. The authors point employers toward structural responses instead (recalibrated workloads, flexible scheduling, recognition for the effort already given) and caution against pathologizing disengagement outright. For some workers, scaling back reflects a deliberate reordering of values rather than apathy. A workplace that treats every quiet quitter as a morale problem will misread the ones for whom the change is working.
Honor work without making it sacred
Congregations buffered the distress of disengaged workers by anchoring worth somewhere other than the job. The authors' advice to faith leaders follows from that pattern: articulate a theology of work that honors diligence without divinizing it, one that treats rest as legitimate rather than as withdrawal. The weekly gathering itself appears to matter, a standing rhythm of ritual, support, and shared narrative that tells members their value does not rise and fall with their output.
Quiet quitting is not free
In this sample, disengagement alone came with more distress rather than the relief the trend advertises. Workers who scaled back and stayed well had an anchor outside the job, a conviction that life follows a larger plan or a community that meets every week. The practical lesson runs through that anchor, whatever form it takes in a given life, sacred or secular. A step back from work that is matched by a step toward something else looks sustainable in these data. A step back into nothing does not.