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Many clients highly value religious and spiritual (R/S) commitments, and many psychotherapists have accommodated secular treatments to R/S perspectives. We meta-analyzed 51 samples from 46 studies (N53,290) that examined the outcomes of religious accommodative therapies and nonreligious spirituality therapies. Comparisons on psychological and spiritual outcomes were made to a control condition, an alternate treatment, or a subset of those studies that used a dismantling design (similar in theory and duration of treatment, but including religious contents). Patients in R/S psychotherapies showed greater improvement than those in alternate secular psychotherapies both on psychological (d5 .26) and on spiritual (d5 .41) outcomes. Religiously accommodated treatments outperformed dismantling-design alternative treatments on spiritual (d5 .33) but not on psychological outcomes. Clinical examples are provided and therapeutic practices are recommended. & 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 67:204–214, 2011.
Worthington et al. (2001) studied this question.