Faith healing

Iain Murray says that evidence from America suggests that religious belief is good for you

I HAVE met several bishops in my time. The most charming and effulgent of them was the Rt Revd Hugh Montefiore, formerly Bishop of Birmingham. I sat beside him at a pre-debate dinner at the Oxford Union, where we enjoyed an effortless conversation about the pleasures of Jesmond, in Newcastle upon Tyne, where I had attended school and he had been the parish priest. During the debate, however, he stared almost uncomprehendingly at me across the despatch boxes as I expressed my view that the Church should stick to teaching people about the Word of God and such minor details as right and wrong, rather than getting involved in politics.

I admit that I had, mischievously, chosen to base the biblical content of my speech on passages which had been used to defend the divine right of kings, and that the bishop's speech was powerful in its defence of churchmen's proddings of the Thatcher government. But I remained steadfast in my belief that the teaching of morality was far more important for the Church's flock than the bearding of ministers on their employment policies.

It now seems that there may be some statistical backing for my belief, emanating from the country where I now live, America. Here, despite what you might think from the products of its most successful exporter, the entertainment industry, religion is alive, well and much stronger than in the UK Increasingly frequent claims have been made that religion is good for your health, enough to test the faith of the most devout secularist. But sorting out the causes from the correlations is devilishly difficult.

One story was certainly open to criticism. The Washington Times examined a survey of 21,000 adult Americans and concluded that 'those who never attend [church] exhibit 50 per cent higher risks of mortality than those who attend most frequently'. Unfortunately all that is presented here is a correlation.

People who work are healthier than those who don't, but that does not mean that work makes you healthier. It may be, for example, that those who work are healthier to begin with. The seemingly large difference of 50 per cent is not a figure that would cause most epidemiologists to bite; they normally require a difference of 200-300 per cent before concluding that they have evidence of cause and effect. If the researchers had found that increasing the dose increased the effect (the longer you go to church, the longer you'll live) or a biological pathway of some sort, then the correlation could be classified as causation. But they didn't.

An examination offered in the New Republic in July was more careful. It looked at surveys conducted by Duke University and one published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). These surveys attempted to control for exogenous factors, but still concluded that worshippers were healthier than non-worshippers. In fact, the AJPH study concluded that believers 'tended to start off in worse-than-average health and then gradually improve to superior outcomes.' The Duke studies found equally good results for most forms of Christianity and for Judaism (too few followers of Islam were surveyed to provide enough information about that faith) but some sects prove to have worse health than the general population. This tends to work against a general notion that a religious attitude by itself promotes good health.

One of the main problems with examining the issue of religion and its effects on society is the nature of the data itself. For many years, the only religious datum collected in surveys was the respondent's denomination. Most surveys now ask whether the respondent has been to a worship service in the past 30 days, but even questions such as this do not go far enough into actual religious practices. As a result, we are as yet unable to focus on the common driving factors behind religion's possible benefits.

In addition, most such surveys are crosssectional, looking at a snapshot of the population at one point in time. Longitudinal data, looking at how something affects people throughout the course of their lives, are much less common. (Religion has only recently been added as an element in the longitudinal National Youth Survey.) Those longitudinal surveys that have looked at religion, however, do tend to show that religion's effects hold steady over time. A University of Chicago survey, for instance, has shown that one of the key indicators in assessing whether an area will be a crime `hot spot` is the presence of local churches.

Another survey has shown that the three major indicators of whether or not adolescents will be involved in crime are the strength of their relationships with their parents, their schools, and their religious commitment. Again, however, there are problems of depth in the survey data. The survey does not look at whether these three factors are interdependent or not. Does religious commitment drive the 'connectedness' to school, for example, or does 'connectedness' to parents drive religious commitment?

Again, the data need more work. One thing they do show, however, is that religious 'benefits' do not seem to be influenced by economic status. AfricanAmerican worshippers, for example, live on average 14 years longer than non-worshippers, and the probability of them offending is considerably lower than for both black and white non-worshippers of the same economic status. As the New Republic points out, 'Every mainstream Western denomination encourages the flock to drink in moderation, shun drugs, stop smoking, live circumspectly, practice monogamy, get married, and stay married.' The opposites of all of these behaviours are statistically demonstrated risk factors.

In some ways, that seems to be what I wanted to say at that debate all those years ago. A priest can improve the lot of his (or nowadays her) charges, both individually and collectively, by encouraging the very basic tenets of Christianity. If every priest, in every parish, were to have done this, it would have had far more effect than the countless jibes at a government for which economic objects were far more important than the social ones. To this day, the House of Lords makes a distinction between the temporal and the spiritual. If the Church had realised what its role was, perhaps Britain might be a gentler place now. And one does not have to be divinely inspired to realise what a benefit that would be.

lain Murray is senior policy analyst at the Statistical Assessment Service (Stats) in Washington, DC. Stats is a non-profit, non-partisan organisation dedicated to working with the media to improve public understanding of scientific and quantitative information.

Copyright Spectator Oct 9, 1999
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