7-to-1: The striking scientific link between religion and better health
Imagine a doctor who checks your blood pressure, weighs you, and asks about your diet, drinking and exercise. She knows the evidence: obesity shortens lives, smoking shortens lives, and inactivity shortens lives. So, she talks about all of it.
Now imagine she has read another body of research, with findings as striking as many of those, pointing to a factor associated with longer life, lower addiction and healthier behavior.
And she says nothing.
Not a recommendation. Not a referral. Not even a question.
That is roughly where American medicine stands on religion.
For decades, policymakers have treated religion as either irrelevant or too private, controversial, or constitutionally delicate to discuss as part of health. In a country committed to religious liberty and governmental neutrality, that caution is understandable. But public health is supposed to follow the evidence, even when the evidence is unexpected or uncomfortable. And the evidence on this subject is not subtle.
Younger generations now report the lowest rates of religious affiliation in American history. Pew finds the religiously unaffiliated have climbed from 16% of U.S. adults in 2007 to roughly 29% today.
This should make us curious.
In a new review from the Wheatley Institute, we analyzed findings drawn from Oxford University’s three Handbooks of Religion and Health, covering the best existing research in the field. Of 1,069 high-quality studies on 15 physical-health domains, 876 found positive associations between religious involvement and physical health and 124 found negative ones.
A roughly 7-to-1 ratio.
The strongest signals come from exactly the areas that American medicine spends the most time and money on. Among high-quality studies of cigarette smoking, positive findings outnumber negative ones by about 90 to 1. On substance abuse and addiction, 43 to 1. On mortality and longevity, 15 to 1.
However, one of the most-cited studies, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which followed more than 74,000 women for 16 years, found that attending religious services more than once a week was associated with a 33% lower risk of death during the study period. Effect sizes of that magnitude usually generate headlines.
Why would religion matter for physical health? Not because faith replaces medicine. The explanation is much simpler.
Religious communities shape behavior, identity, and accountability. They build networks of care that last for decades, not weeks, and certainly not the length of an annual physical. Religious communities give people rituals for coping with stress, reasons to serve others, and somewhere to be known when life falls apart. In major studies, the mortality benefit of religious attendance persists even after researchers control for social support, health behaviors, and civic participation. Secular communities can also strengthen health, especially through volunteering and community service, but religion is one of the rare institutions that integrates these supports in one place, over a lifetime.
Which brings us back to the doctor. We do not think it is intrusive when doctors counsel an overweight patient about GLP-1 medications, a smoker about quitting, or a sedentary patient about walking. We expect them to raise these things. Yet the same physicians, looking at decades of data linking religious participation to longer life and lower mortality from chronic disease, likely feel hesitant to raise the benefits of religion, even when their patient stands in need of those very benefits.
A better approach would be voluntary, evidence-based, and pluralistic. Physicians should be encouraged to ask, sensitively, whether patients draw support from a spiritual or religious community — the way they ask about exercise, diet, or whether anyone is home to help after surgery. Faith-based organizations should be eligible partners for whole-person-care funding when they can demonstrate measurable health benefits and respect for patient choice. And when patients want that support, hospitals and clinics should be able to connect them with chaplains or trusted local faith communities.
For millions of Americans, faith is already part of how they stop problem drinking, overcome addiction, endure chronic pain, care for aging parents, and keep going when the medical system has little more to offer. The American health crisis will not be solved by any one intervention — not exercise, not diet, not religion. But a public health system serious about adding years to American lives should stop overlooking one of the most durable sources of meaning, discipline, and connection we have.
Doctors should not proselytize. Government should not favor a particular religion. But whole-person care should be brave enough to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Shima Baradaran Baughman, Woodruff J. Deem Professor and Distinguished Fellow of Religion, BYU Law School.
Loren D. Marks is a professor at Brigham Young University and co-director of the American Families of Faith project.
Harold G. Koenig, M.D., M.H.Sc., is professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and associate professor of medicine at Duke University and is the founding director of the Duke University’s Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health.
Paul Lambert is a professor and director of the Religion & Human Flourishing Initiative at the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.
