English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese No. Nothing Ben Affleck has said, and no reliable report, ties him to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What he has said, in 2020, is that he goes to a Methodist church and came to Christianity “a little bit later in life.” He has spoken openly of doubt, and in 2023 of an interest in Buddhism.
By his own account, his is a churchgoer’s faith with doubt inside it. He finds Christian teaching “beautiful and moving,” and he admits that when he suffers, he doubts. What holds him is the plain old news that we are all sinners, and the forgiveness that answers it.
What religion is Ben Affleck?
Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a 2011 cover story, The Hollywood Reporter described him as coming “from Protestant stock” and called him agnostic.
His former wife, the actress Jennifer Garner, told the National Post in March 2016: “I grew up going to church every single Sunday. I was a vacation bible school girl. And Ben and I took our three kids to my West Virginia church to be baptized, each individually.” After she finished filming Miracles from Heaven, she began taking the children to the Methodist church nearest their home in Los Angeles.
Affleck went with them. In February 2020, while promoting his film The Way Back, he told the religion site Beliefnet: “I go to the Methodist Church, (my) kids (are) baptized and I got introduced to Christianity a little bit later in life.” No statement or reliable report describes him as Catholic.
Is Ben Affleck a Christian?
He has described Christianity as something he admires and struggles to believe. In the same Beliefnet interview he said: “One of the things that I found most beautiful about it, and I struggle with my faith, I struggle with belief, but I do see there’s something enormously beautiful and elegant about the notion that we are all sinners, and that it’s our job to find our redemption, to find God’s love, to redeem ourselves, to live the best life that we can, to love one another, to not judge one another, and to forgive one another.”
The teaching he described is the one Paul states in Romans: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23–24). He called forgiveness and grace “extremely powerful ideas” and set them against a habit he saw of finding “something somebody did wrong once” and getting rid of the person. “It’s that, ‘He without sin cast the first stone.’ I think that is a very wise proverb,” he said. The words he paraphrased are those of Jesus in John 8:7: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
Before the film opened in March 2020, he also spoke with the pastor Erwin McManus at Mosaic, a church in Los Angeles. CBN News reported him saying: “Faith is something that I have, but has also been a struggle for me. Going to church, I really find Christian teaching beautiful and moving. And the hard thing for me is to really — when I struggle, when I suffer, when I see things that are painful, I have doubts.” He said that one thought had helped him with his regrets over his drinking and his divorce: “If God can forgive me, maybe I can forgive myself.”
In March 2023, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his film Air, he described an interest in Buddhism: “I got really interested in Buddhism because I have a difficult time with the theistic aspects of AA. I’ve just always been a skeptic. One of the things I like about Buddhism is it’s like, believe what you believe.”
Is Ben Affleck related to Zac Affleck of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives?
A reality show links the Affleck name to the Latter-day Saints. In the first season of the Hulu series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which began in 2024, the cast member Jen Affleck said her husband, Zac Affleck, was Ben Affleck’s second cousin. The claim concerned family, not faith. In the second season, in 2025, Zac Affleck said he had never made it himself: “I have no idea if I am or am not related to Ben Affleck. And that had been like a running joke in my family. It had never been something serious.”
So the Mormon link comes from a reality show and a family joke. Affleck’s own words point to a Methodist pew, to honest doubt, and to a hope he put in one sentence: “If God can forgive me, maybe I can forgive myself.” Paul wrote that hope down long ago. We “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and we are “justified by his grace as a gift” (Romans 3:23–24).
Leave a Reply