Does Religion Poison Everything?

The late lamented Christopher Hitchens once asserted, with utter confidence, that religion poisons everything. He should have known better than to offer up such an absurd generalization, one that can be dispelled by any evidence that shows religion to be beneficial. After all, don’t we all know that patients on chemotherapy who are religious do better than their irreligious brethren. So, religion does not poison poison. Who would have guessed?

Of course, Hitchens was seeking sales and attention. In that he succeeded. In a time when entertainment value often drowns out the truth value, Hitchens was a master of his craft. More power to him, wherever he is today.

Anyway, Melvin Konner brought the topic to our attention in the Wall Street Journal:

But a flood of recent research has shown how faith strengthens resilience to stress, including illness.…

Research published in May found that among over 5,000 American adults, regular churchgoers had better physiological stress measures and lower mortality. The Black Women’s Health Study reported in April that it had found a similar mortality benefit among 36,600 women. A 2015 article on 32,000 cancer patients found better physical health in those with greater religion and spirituality.

Similar outcomes have been seen in Japan:

 Among 37,000 patients in Japan, the more religious had fewer cardiovascular risk factors and were less likely to get diabetes; likewise Orthodox Christians in Greece. Religiousness was associated with better compliance in dialysis patients in Saudi Arabia; in Northern India, Hindu identification predicted better stress coping. Both Buddhist and Muslim women in Thailand managed their diabetes better if they were religious. Even in secular Denmark, religion protected health.

It isn’t or should not be news. Jonathan Gruber, before he became an apostle for health care reform, did groundbreaking research into the effects that religion had on everyday life. His original paper, from 2005, is here. 

In Gruber’s words:

Doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 percent, decreases welfare participation by 16 percent from baseline rates, decreases the odds of being divorced by 4 percent, and increases the odds of being married by 4.4 percent.

Linda Gorman reports for the National Bureau of Economic Research:

A number of researchers have found striking correlations between religion and various measures of well being. For example, religious participation is correlated with lower levels of deviant behavior and better health. And, attending religious services weekly, rather than not at all, has the same effect on individuals' reported happiness as moving from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution.

However, the same factors that determine religious attendance may also determine these outcomes; for example, it may be that happier people go to church, not that going to church makes you happier. In Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You? (NBER Working Paper No. 11377), NBER Research Associate Jonathan Gruber seeks to solve the problem of estimating the effects of religious participation on earnings and other economic measures.

Apparently, people who live in neighborhoods where there are more members of their religion are more likely to participate in services. In this context, diversity does not prove to be beneficial. Apparently, people have a positive reason for living in homogeneous communities, a reason that transcends bigotry:

Gorman summarizes:

Gruber's results suggest a "very strong positive correlation" between religious market density, religious participation, and positive economic outcomes." People living in an area with a higher density of co-religionists have higher incomes, they are less likely to be high school dropouts, and more likely to have a college degree." Living in such an area also reduces the odds of receiving welfare, decreases the odds of being divorced, and increases the odds of being married.

Gruber does not know why actively participating in community life and feel like  you belong to something beyond you provides so many benefits. He offers his own hypotheses:

Although this paper does not investigate the mechanism through which religiosity creates these results, Gruber suggests four possibilities: that religious attendance increases the number of social interactions in a way peculiar to religious settings; that religious institutions provide financial and emotional "insurance" that help people mitigate their losses when setbacks occur; that attendance at religious schools may be an advantage; and, finally, that religious faith may simply improve well-being directly by enabling the faithful to be "less stressed out" by the problems of every day life.

One is intrigued by the notion that a larger number of social interactions with people who share the same code produces psychosocial benefits. It provides a bulwark against feelings of abandonment and anomie. But, religion also teaches us principles that can guide us through life. (Something that, incidentally, science cannot do.)