290 mind
medical and behavioral sciences, and each with a more or less intimate or
distant relationship to one or another religious culture. While the argument
that religion is good for one’s health is generally seen as the common conclu-
sion of all four claims, on a deeper level, it is actually not clear that the four
arguments, taken together, add up to a fully coherent whole. There is more
complexity and ambiguity lurking in and between the spaces of these four
arguments than at first meets the eye.
Let us therefore look at the four arguments in turn.
Going to Church Increases Longevity and Enhances Health
The origins of this claim lie in epidemiological work that began in the late
1960s: a time of great medical interest specifically in rising incidence of heart
disease in the United States, and what lifestyle and environmental factors
might be contributing to it. Out of this work,social isolationemerged as one
of the new big watchwords. Some research suggested, for example, that living
in traditional close-knit communities acted as a protection against heart dis-
ease—and, possibly, other common forms of morbidity and mortality. Other
research suggested that more isolated people within a community tended to
be sicker and to die earlier than those who were more socially embedded.^7 In
the context of the time—dominated by all sorts of talk about the alienation of
the American worker and the breakdown of traditional community and the
family—the interpretation seemed straightforward. Heart disease was on the
rise because we were literally a nation of broken, lonely hearts.^8
From the beginning, epidemiologists had included membership in a re-
ligious community as one independent variable among many that might let
them assess a person’s relative degree of social embeddedness or isolation.
This work did not originally see itself as asking whether or not religion was
good medicine. After a while, though, it became increasingly clear that one of
the variables that seemed particularly highly associated with protection against
mortality and morbidity—especially in the elderly—was being a member of a
church or other religious community. Then over some twenty years, beginning
in the 1970s, more than eighteen different epidemiological studies were pub-
lished collectively making the case that, when all other variables were controlled
for, an active religious life was independently associated with lower blood pres-
sure, less hypertension, fewer health problems generally in old age, and even
overall longer life.^9
What might be the reason for this? Initially, the tendency still was to reduce
church going to social support. Churches, people seemed to want to say, are
good for one’s health because they providereally good community: they reduce
stress, they look after their members, they tend to frown on unhealthy behav-
iors like excessive use of alcohol and drugs, and—in being publicly concerned
about their members’ health—they might even tend to create a culture in