The costs of secularism
Story by Jack Elbaum, Washington Examiner, 6/13/23
On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published an essay titled “Is Religion Good for Your Health?” In it, Northeastern University professor David DeSteno details the academic research that consistently shows a “strong association between being religious and good health.”
Some of the conclusions were striking. For example, he writes about a Mayo Clinic analysis that found higher death rates “among people who never attend religious services compared with those who attend several times a week is comparable to that associated with smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.”
He also discusses a massive study, led by a Harvard epidemiologist and published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which found “that those who attended religious services at least once a week had 33% lower mortality, from any cause, over a 16-year period. In particular, deaths due to cancer or cardiovascular disease were 75% the rate among non-attenders.” Also, “Using data from other large-scale, longitudinal studies, VanderWeele found that religiosity improves mental health.”
Even more remarkable seems to be the finding that those “attending services at least once a week or more cut the suicide rate by 80%, even when controlling for diagnoses of depression, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.”
As the author notes, researchers are asking if these benefits “are due to religious observance itself or some related factor.” These factors could include socioeconomic status or age, but also involvement with civil society, social support, “meeting and making friends” at houses of worship, or a sense of meaning. The question is whether there is something inherent in religion that improves health outcomes or whether better health is an indirect consequence of religious observance.
But the question seems to be missing something important: It is almost impossible to separate religion from the social factors associated with it because, in many ways, the benefit of religion is its intentional cultivation of community, altruism, and meaning. These are not secondary factors, as academics seem to suggest. Civic involvement, charity, and community have such a deep and intimate connection to religion that it is almost pointless to ask which one causes the practical benefit. In the real world, they operate as one and the same.
For example, research shows that religiosity is significantly associated with gratitude, involvement in civic society, happiness, and charity. In some cases, religion is the best predictor of these favorable attributes. This is not to say those who aren’t religious do not engage in charity and cannot be a part of a truly strong community. It is well-documented that this is possible. But rather, these findings point to religion’s unique position vis-a-vis these important societal characteristics.
Interestingly, one study found that even after controlling for a variety of different factors such as “reductions in smoking and increases in social support (…) the data suggested that religion worked through other, as yet unexplained, avenues too.”
In other words, religion’s total benefit is greater than the sum of its parts.
This suggests that the modern view of religion is deeply flawed. If one believes, as many today do, that religion is anachronistic and nothing more than superstition, then religion’s rapid retreat from American life is a sign of moral and intellectual progress. However, this research points us to a different reality. It instead indicates that when we lose religion, we lose something much deeper as well. We lose strong communities, social support, charity, and civic society involvement.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks pointed out that we now live in a world where “every function that was once performed by religion can now be done by something else.” However, he writes, “Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning.”
American society may well continue down the path of decreased religiosity, which includes ever-decreasing rates of religious services attendance and other forms of engagement with religious communities. However, we should not be naive, as it does not come without a cost.
Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.