For many people attending religious services is a part of daily life. You wouldn't want to go a day with out praising thanks to the supreme being or beings which you believe have graced you with the very essence that is your life. Regardless of your religious affiliation for many this process involves attending services at a church/synagogue/mosque/temple etc. Believers ascribe this action of attending services as necessary to attain the good graces from the god(s) which they may worship.
Non-believers ascribe these actions to be a fools errand, pointless, a waste of time. The intelligent from either group (believers and non-believers) know that it's best to let others live their lives and not be confrontational about any of this, because if believing or not believing make you happy and your beliefs or personal mantra do not involve harming others, then both courses are a net positive for the world because they are instilling happiness.
Science and religion, contrary to the thoughts of some, can intermix (and oftentimes do mix well) as in many cases both are attempting to explain the natural world. Many of humanities great thinkers of old were religious people and the evidence driven scientific method can be well applied to provide a physical and testable justification to many long held religious beliefs. It can also be utilized to prove the impossibility of others. However I digress, today we discuss the concept of lifespan, church attendance, and utilizing the scientific method to look at the correlation between the two.
To get at this we will (very briefly) look at a recent study published in the journal PLoS One titled "Church attendance, allostatic load and mortality in middle aged adults".
In this study the authors were analyzing the mortality data of two groups of people, those who regularly attended religious services and those who did not.
Who lives longer? After answering that question, the next level is to think about why. Lets take a look at the study:
Studying The Relationship Between Health And Religion Is As Old As The Hills
This isn't exactly a new concept, religion and health. People love to study what is important to them and it should be of no surprise to anyone that both religion and personal health are quite important to many people! So it should also be of no surprise that there have been prior studies looking for relationships between the two, where researchers have described both a beneficial link ([2], [3]), as well as a lack of a benefit. [4]
Conflicting results in the literature are like a homing beacon for researchers, because controversy breeds impactful results. Researchers in the past have hypothesized that a link between religious participation and health benefits could be due to behavioral changes that are a part of being religious (you don't do certain things because the code of the religion tells you not to, so you live longer, would be an example of this line of thinking). Regular attendance of church services may also reduce stress levels (and we all know stress is very bad for our health). [5]
The researchers in todays article wanted to take this a step further, they wanted to take a look at whether a reduced risk of death was associated with a lower amount of "allostatic load." This term (allostatic load or AL) basically just refers to the accumulation of the effects of stress on the body. It can be measured by looking at hormone levels [6], and higher amounts of AL are indeed associated with earlier death.
To simplify things they focused on adults between the ages of 40 and 65 years.
What Did They Find?
This first (and only plot) I will show you is pretty easy to interpret. Here the authors were studying a subset of 5549 adults in this age range (3782 were church going people, and 1667 were not church going). You can see above that the amount of people who survived between the ages of 40 and 65 decreased faster for non church goers then it did for people who regularly attended services.
There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when looking at data like this
Many of those factors pertain to this "allostatic load" that we discussed above. There are a lot of contributors including blood pressure, cholestrol... etc. What you can take away from all of this data is that the non-church goers had more issues with blood pressure and cholesterol levels then did people who attended church services.
The authors also did a direct comparison
The authors compared the two groups directly and adjusted the data to account for factors like age, gender and whether or not people had chronic medical issues. When they did this they found that people who went to church regularly had a reduction in mortality rates from "any cause" by 46%. That is a lot.
What was most surprising is that when controlling for these "allostatic load" contributors, there was still a benefit to lifespan for those who attended religious services vs. those who did not.
Conclusions
The authors conclude that their findings are consistent with the hypothesis that people who go to church more have lower stress levels and this in part contributes to their longer lifespans. However the authors observed that when controlling for these factors there was still an additional benefit observed for the church goers. Based on this the authors concluded that there are other potential factors outside the reduction in stress that also contribute to longevity.
The authors have shown here that there is a clear association between religious participation and health benefits. However that's just an association, and further studies would need to be done to look at what specifically CAUSES this apparent relationship. Looks like Science and Religion will have to team up some more to better dive into understanding the why. Appropriate, as that same question is what drives both science and religion to begin with.
Acknowledged Limitations
The biological markers studied by researchers here are not a complete picture of what constitutes health, and don't examine things like how people immune systems are functioning, or what their inflammation levels are. Additionally the authors took care to control for educational background and socioeconomic status of the participants. The religious participants in this study consistently scored higher in both of those two areas, and this still may skew the results.
TL;DR?
People who attend church services live longer than those who do not. It is not yet clear what the underlying reason is for this observation. There is a lot of studying left to be done!
Sources
- http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177618
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2654362/
- http://www.annalsofepidemiology.org/article/S1047-2797(05)00379-0/fulltext
- https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/geront/gnt002
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18282566
- http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307
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