Health and the God Factor

When David Larson was training for a career in psychiatry, faculty advisers warned him, “You’ll harm your patients if you try to combine your Christian faith with the practice of psychiatry.” Instructors insisted that religion usually hurts a person’s mental health.

Does research confirm that notion? Larson wondered. Or is it a myth passed around in academic circles? His curiosity led him on a quest he has followed for 15 years. He spends his time poring over academic journals and obscure research reports, pondering “negative curvilinear variables” and seeking clues into how religion affects mental and physical health.

At once Larson noticed that most research studies ignored the subject of religion altogether. This seemed odd, since 90 percent of Americans believe in God, 40 percent attend religious services weekly, and a large minority claim religion is “very important” in their lives. Could the omission reflect the antireligious bias of the field? Studies reveal that fewer than half of psychiatrists and psychologists believe in God, and one survey found that 40 percent regard organized religion as “always, or usually, psychologically harmful.”

The Low-Salt, High-Faith Diet

Even though surveys tended to avoid explicit questions on faith, some had asked basic questions about religious involvement. Larson examined these findings, then broadened his search to include anything that might indicate the effect of Christian commitment on health. What he found shocked him:

• Regular church attenders live longer. Religiousness markedly reduces the incidence of heart attack, arteriosclerosis, high blood pressure, and hypertension.

• Religious people are less likely to abuse alcohol and far less likely to use illicit drugs. Conversely, one study found that 89 percent of alcoholics had lost interest in religion during their teenage years.

• Prison inmates who make a religious commitment are less likely than their counterparts to return to jail.

• Marital satisfaction and overall well-being tend to increase with church attendance; depression rates decline.

• Religious commitment offers some protection against one of the nation’s greatest health problems: divorce. People who attend church regularly are more than twice as likely to remain married. Protection against divorce is important for many reasons. First, divorce dramatically increases the likelihood of early death from strokes, hypertension, respiratory cancer, and intestinal cancer. Astonishingly, being divorced and a nonsmoker is only slightly less dangerous than smoking a pack or more a day and staying married! Second, divorce disrupts mental health, especially for men. The suicide rate for white males goes up by a factor of four with divorce, and they have ten times the probability of needing psychiatric care. Finally, divorce takes a devastating toll on children. Children from broken homes are more likely to commit crimes, do poorly in school, abuse drugs, and attempt suicide.

In short, Larson found that religious commitment, far from causing health problems, has a pronounced effect on reducing them. “In essence the studies empirically verify the wisdom of the book of Proverbs,” he says. “Those who follow biblical values live longer, enjoy life more, and are less diseased. The facts are in; we need to get the word out.” As a consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health and a fellow of the newly formed Paul Tournier Institute (sponsored by the Christian Medical and Dental Society), he seeks to do just that.

Lights On The Hill

Larson also believes the research data should influence public policy. “Decision makers can’t be expected to write laws that reflect biblical values,” he admits. “But I’ve found they do respond to two things: (1) staying alive and (2) saving money. We know beyond doubt that divorce, for example, hurts all parties and costs society dearly—shouldn’t public policy somehow favor stable marriages?”

Larson points out that the key factor is the degree of religious commitment, not any particular affiliation. Dedicated Mormons, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants all manifest improved health. Lifestyle issues account for some of the difference. Utah, populated by Mormons who don’t drink, smoke, or even take caffeine, has one of the lowest rates of heart attack. Its neighbor Nevada, where people stay up all night in smoky casinos with a martini in one hand and gambling dice in the other, has one of the highest.

Yet Larson argues that religious faith offers much more than a barrier against harmful vices. Many medical studies have revealed that a person’s attitudes and overall well-being have a great impact on physical and emotional health. As Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and Miracles, says, “I feel that all disease is ultimately related to a lack of love.… The truth is: love heals.”

It would be difficult to concoct a better recipe for health than the nine-word prescription given in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Paul playfully comments, “Against such things there is no law.” In view of Larson’s findings, perhaps we should add a footnote, “To promote such things there should be a law.”

I have my doubts whether any amount of empirical data will persuade Congress to enact legislation along the lines Larson’s research suggests. As a nation, we seem far more interested in preserving the right to destroy ourselves. However, the findings do hint at an approach that may prove useful to the church in the twenty-first century.

In the not-so-distant past, the American church and state recognized many of the same values: sacredness and dignity of human life, sexual fidelity, family stability, discipline, moderation. Increasingly, those values have been drifting apart, and the church may not be able to stop that trend in a secularized society. But we can strive to fulfill Jesus’ original challenge: to serve as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill. Although we may not convert the whole hill, we need not be ashamed of erecting a different kind of city on the landscape of our troubled planet. As the research clearly shows, what is “good” in the moral sense, in the city of God, is also good in the pragmatic sense, in the city of man.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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