uneasy alliances 291which individuals seek medical assistance earlier than they otherwise might
have.
Nevertheless, not everyone was satisfied with this essentially reductionist
understanding of why church going might be good for one’s health. In 1996,
an Israeli epidemiologist named Jeremy Kark and his colleagues looked at
mortality rates in a cluster of secular and a cluster of religious kibbutzim be-
tween 1970 and 1985, and found that mortality in the secular kibbutzim was
nearly twice that of mortality on the religious kibbutzim. At the same time, the
authors said, “There was no difference in social support or frequency of social
contact between religious and secular kibbutzim.” The implications were clear:
social support alone could not account for the health benefits of a religious
over a secular lifestyle.^10
How else might one make scientific sense of those health benefits? We
come now to the next two research traditions concerned with the health ben-
efits of religion. Both of these are explicitly psychobiological in nature—con-
cerned with the ways in which changes in the mind might affect the body in
health and disease—but one is focused on the effects ofpracticeand the other
is focused on the effects ofattitude. Again, I take each in turn.
Meditation Reduces StressAdvocates of this claim point out that virtually all religions advocate or facili-
tate opportunities for adherents to participate regularly in contemplative activ-
ities like focused prayer and meditation. These practices, they say, enhance
health by reducing stress, which, when chronic, increases one’s susceptibility
to any number of both common and serious maladies.^11 What is the evidence
that meditation and similar contemplative practices reduce stress and thereby
enhance health? The roots of the claim lie culturally in the rise of medical in-
terest in the claims for enhanced health and performance being made by ad-
herents of popular mantra-based Hindu meditative practices like transcenden-
tal meditation (TM), originally developed for modern Westerners in the late
1950s by the Maharishi Maresh Yogi of India. A turning point in the cultural
fortunes of TM came when the cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard in the
1970s began to argue that all people who practiced this technique experienced
a characteristic set of physiological changes that could fairly be contrasted,
point by point, with those associated with the well-characterized stress re-
sponse.^12
Benson called the physiological changes produced by meditation the “re-
laxation response,” and went on (to the displeasure of the Maharishi) to insist
that there was nothing about TM itself as a unique practice that was health
enhancing. All the health benefits seen in people who practice TM could be
elicited using any number of meditative techniques practiced by religious
traditions around the world. All of them, in different ways, had recognized and