Religious Affiliation and Health Outcomes

Does having a religious affiliation improve your health?  Here’s a great article on a study which explored this.  Notes follow.

Religious Affiliation and Health Behaviors and Outcomes: Data from the Nashville REACH 2010 Project

After controlling for demographic differences, there was a positive association between religious involvement and several health behaviors and outcomes.

After controlling for demographic differences and individual differences in religious involvement, denominational affiliation was no longer associated with any of the health behaviors or health outcome measures.

NIH has a group Religion, Spirituality, and Health Scientific Interest Group that has a newsletter: Attention! We created an alternative RSH-SIG listserv for those external to the NIH! If you do not have an NIH e-mail account, you can still subscribe to our listserv at https://list.nih.gov/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=RELIGION-SPIRITUALITY-HEALTH-EXT(external link).

The purpose of the NIH Religion, Spirituality, and Health Scientific Interest Group (RSH-SIG) is to foster communication, promote collaboration, and facilitate the exchange of information, understanding, and resources within the NIH to the larger research community on the intersection of religion, spirituality (R/S) and health.

Spirituality, religiousness, and mental health: A review of the current scientific evidence, 2021

On the one hand, religion involves beliefs, practices, and rituals related to the transcendent; on the other hand, spirituality is a broader concept, which includes the personal quest for understanding answers to ultimate questions about life, life meaning, and relationship with the sacred or transcendent[]. Using these definitions, an individual could have high levels of spirituality even with low levels of religiousness.

The field of spirituality/religiousness (S/R) has been growing rapidly as scientific evidence has accumulated on the relationship with mental health[].