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Key points
- Religious affiliation appears to prolong life.
- Even when correcting for social integration and volunteer activity, religious affiliation appears to confer a longevity benefit.
- Religious affiliation may offer a relatively inexpensive means of promoting health, yet no genuinely religious person could use it this way.
It would be noteworthy if religious faith or regular attendance at worship services prevented disease, improved health, and prolonged life. For one thing, the United States now spends an average of more than $13,000 per person per year on health care, so if religious observance could enhance health, it might provide a comparatively inexpensive means of tackling many contemporary health challenges, such as declining life expectancy. Moreover, many religious people are probably unaware of an important benefit they may be deriving from their faith. And, yet, no matter how useful religion turned out to be as a means of promoting health, no sincere person could turn to religion with this goal in mind.
First, the case that religion might promote health: Consider evidence from a 2018 study by University of Chicago researcher Laura Wallace and colleagues. They looked at more than 500 obituaries published in Des Moines, Iowa, comparing the age at death of individuals whose obituaries mentioned a religious affiliation with those that did not, and correlating these results with other factors known to influence longevity, such as gender (on average, U.S. women live almost 6 years longer than men), marital status (the married live about two years longer than singles), and social and volunteer activities (which lower mortality rates by 4 years).
The researchers found that religious affiliation was significantly associated with longevity. Alone, it was associated with an almost 10-year increase in longevity. Even after controlling for gender and marital status, the effect was still 6.5 years.
To test these findings, the researchers then examined obituaries from online newspapers in 42 metropolitan areas around the United States. This approach would help to compensate for the fact that there are large regional variations in religious affiliation. Analysis of nearly 1,100 obituaries showed that religious affiliation was associated with a 5-year increase in longevity. And even when the researchers corrected for the effects of known benefits of religious affiliation, such as social integration and volunteer activity, the relationship between religious affiliation and longevity persisted. To be sure, those who are involved in social groups and who volunteer experience advantages, but religious affiliation alone appears to increase the number of years persons live.
Could people achieve similar results without going to church? The answer might be yes. For example, they could become deeply involved in one or more social networks, devote considerable time to volunteer activities, and engage in some form of nonreligious stress reduction, such as meditation. Perhaps when it comes to the aspects of religion that enhance health and prolong life, belief in God by itself does not constitute a “special sauce” that adds extra value beyond other health-related practices.
But if we take the findings of Wallace and colleagues at face value—that religious affiliation seems to offer a significant length-of-life benefit, independent of other factors that might be invoked to account for it—what practical conclusion might someone wishing to lead a longer, healthier life draw from such research? One might be that religious affiliation is an attractive and relatively inexpensive way to prolong life. Such a person might decide to join a faith community, to begin attending worship services regularly, and to become involved in the congregation’s volunteer activities.
Of course, to promote religious practices for any reason other than sincere piety is to use religion as a means to some other end, and, by extension, to use God as a tool. We would be attending worship, praying, or engaging in a faith community’s activities not because we believe it is bringing us closer to God or enabling us to participate in God’s work but because we believe godly modes of conduct might bring us what we really desire—namely, a longer, healthier, more stable, richer, or even happier life. God could be likened to vitamin G—just one among many factors that, if properly exploited in the appropriate dose and on the appropriate schedule, can make our lives better.
Suppose, however, that there is something about religion and God that resists such attempts to repurpose them as means to some other end. Perhaps God does not exist for our convenience, welfare, or even happiness. Perhaps God has other purposes in creation that exceed not only our own benefit but even our own comprehension. Perhaps those who attempt to put God in such a box, or in such a pill, are engaged in a fundamentally irreligious endeavor. Perhaps God, as the Book of Job so eloquently indicates, refuses to be placed in any humanly erected boundaries or serve any strictly human purposes. Perhaps the human problem is not how to make God do our bidding but to discern and align ourselves with God’s purposes.
Josef Pieper had much the same thing in mind when he wrote in Leisure: the Basis of Culture, “The man who says his nightly prayers may sleep the better for it, but no one could say his nightly prayers with that in mind.” We may derive all sorts of benefits from going through the motions of religious observance, but doing so is in no way a true expression of faith. Perhaps God cannot be put to any human purpose, for in so doing, we would be placing something higher below something lower, supposing that the overarching end of all things can somehow become a mere means for something lesser.
