Religious people probably aren't actually healthier

December 1, 2022 7:53 PM

There are thousands of studies connecting religious belief and practise to health. However, much of this research has failed to include non-believers. In a recent study [paywalled] using data from almost 16,000 Canadians which included non-believers, the researcher "failed to find any evidence that religious believers had better levels of stress, physical health, life satisfaction or mental health compared to non-believers."
posted by clawsoon (14 comments total)

Oh, jeez. Well why do I even bother then. 😢
posted by billjings at 9:45 PM on December 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

I haven't read the article but one obvious exception would be the religions that emphasize healthy choices for religious reasons. Such as the Jehovah Witness (and others) emphasis on vegetarian diets. I've seen a lot of reports that talk about the health benefits of those.

And then there's another kind of exception in Victor Frankle's observations from the concentration camp.

Maybe others...
posted by aleph at 10:59 PM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

The survey also included assessments of self-rated stress, self-rated physical health, life satisfaction, and self-rated mental health.

People don't see themselves in the mirror. Do you know anyone that lies about their weight? You can throw this study away at this point. Self-rated mental health? Self awareness is one of the biggest challenges in treating mental health problems!

Most people can't even define mental illness. I think that if you shun, disown and ostracize your own children because of their sexuality, you're mentally sick. For some people that's perfectly rational behavior according to their faith.
posted by adept256 at 11:13 PM on December 1, 2022 [10 favorites]

Ahem…

God has provided humanity with free will. If religious belief were effective in boosting health and happiness then that would essentially be the same as forcing people to either accept belief in God or else live a shorter, more miserable life.

Therefore the lack of any benefits is contributing evidence for the existence of God.

That’s all we have time for this week but tune in again next week to “Ask a Jesuit”. AMDG, y’all.
posted by fallingbadgers at 11:47 PM on December 1, 2022 [25 favorites]

From the article:

Speed noted that the General Social Survey did not collect data on two factors that could have important effects: social support and personality.

“Research addressing religion and health is almost always correlational, this means that we can’t figure out if religion is actually causing health differences,” Speed said. “For my money, I’d wager that the religion-health relationship is an indirect effect of social support or coherency.”

So, if I'm reading this article right, the study suggests that your personal spiritual beliefs do not seem to have a direct impact on your levels of health and wellness, but that if such a relationship did exist, it's probably less due to the actual beliefs and more due to the individual belonging to a community with a strong sense of support and purpose.

I can believe that. I think it's not controversial to say that community and group involvement among most Western / North American adults has dramatically declined since WWII, and that social churn has made it far less likely that you have strong ties to extended family or community groups. I think it's also not controversial to say that human beings are tribal and social animals and that there are considerable mental and emotional benefits from being part of and accepted by a group (of course there's plenty of evidence that it is terrible when your "group" becomes toxic or dysfunctional).

In this context, I always think about the old Onion article titled something like "Recently Born Again Christian Now Has Thriving Social Life", the joke being that now that the guy has converted to Christianity he's never short of invitations to group events and meals. And the social aspect of any religion is often underrated.
posted by fortitude25 at 4:24 AM on December 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

I have not yet read the article, but an additional consideration that would affect things, at least through much of my lifetime so far, would be societal prejudice against non-believers. For a more extreme and thus more clear example, it’s not that being trans or cis itself has any impact on mental or physical health, but the extreme prejudice against trans people across much of society leads to hugely disproportionate negative health outcomes (both mental and physical) for trans folks. It would be on a quite different scale, but surveys indicate there is still some prejudice against non-believers, with a majority of people at least nominally religious viewing them as less trustworthy or ethical, for example. So that would be a confounding factor that would need to be investigated in any such study. I would also expect and differentials in health outcomes between religious folks and non-believers in North America to have decreased a fair amount over the past decades, eg. comparing the era of the Satanic Panic to present day.
posted by eviemath at 5:00 AM on December 2, 2022 [9 favorites]

I have to agree with fortitude25. If we're looking at religion as just this idea of something you hold to be true, then it's hard to see why it would have any effect on your health at all, unless there's perhaps some minor impact from general optimism. But if religion isn't an idea, but a community, then of course that would have an impact on your health, the same way having a rich family life would. Isolation is bad for people! It feels, then, like we were working kind of backwards--hey, these people with a well-connected social network are healthy, so anyone who shares their ideas must also be healthy!
posted by mittens at 5:29 AM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

This doesn’t surprise me as someone who “converted” to atheism because I realized my religious beliefs were making me miserable. It feels to me like religion could make you happier and healthier if religion is genuinely a positive force in your life (as it is for many people!) rather than a source of shame and judgment (as it is for many people!). I’d be interested in a study on this—the effect not just of “how often do you practice your religion?” but also of “how does it feel to practice it?”
posted by capricorn at 7:16 AM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't have the studies on hand but we've known for a while that it's the community, not the individual beliefs that's the factor. I specifically remember Robert Sapolsky talking about that research in his zebra book 20 years ago. But it's interesting that the research thus far hasn't included non-believers, that seems like a... really weird failure to control.
posted by brook horse at 7:16 AM on December 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

would be societal prejudice against non-believers

Well, or minority religions...
posted by capricorn at 7:17 AM on December 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

There is one very well known exception to this: Seventh Day Adventists. They tend to have less health problems and a longer life expectancy.

People say it is hard to study whether vegetarianism, or really any health practice, is actually improving health or if there is some self-selection bias. For example, are joggers healthier, or is it just that healthy people tend to go jogging? Were vegetarians health conscious before they became vegetarians and have lots of healthy habits in addition to their vegetarianism?

But with Seventh Day Adventists, they are just another evangelical religious group, for the most part living in the same neighborhoods and living the same lives as anyone else. The only difference is that their religion says to not eat meat. And, probably as a result, they have years longer life expectancy.

(The link mentions a predominately Seventh Day Adventist community, but Seventh Day Adventists living in other cities and suburbs show a similar extended life expectancy).
posted by eye of newt at 10:12 AM on December 2, 2022

The only difference is that their religion says to not eat meat.

Aren't they anti-smoking and anti-alcohol too? I may be getting my advent-named denominations mixed up.
posted by mittens at 11:39 AM on December 2, 2022

I don't think any religion gets a free pass for saying that its adherents are healthier. For every health benefit from "clean" living, there will always be someone who just doesn't fit and is stressed trying to live according to the dogma. Certainly most queer people are much healthier and happier living outside the conservative stronghold they may have grown up with.

But feel free to justify your choices to yourselves if it makes you feel better. Post-hoc justification is pretty much all this is good for anyway.
posted by Aleyn at 10:24 PM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

buwhahahahahahahaahaha!

Religious people making it up. Again.

Colour me surprised.
posted by Hugh Routley at 2:57 AM on December 5, 2022