Attendance at church linked to longer life
By Larry Witham
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Health enthusiasts may be tempted to put away their running shoes and granola and search for the family Bible.
A new study in Demography magazine suggests that if you go to church, you may live up to 14 years longer. The research follows a growing consensus that religious belief and church attendance are key indicators of health, social behavior, political leanings, lifestyles and morality.
"There is still a sense in much of the scientific community that religious effects are minor at best or are even irrelevant," says a group of researchers on health and population issues. "Our findings help to dispel such a notion."
Another survey, however, raises questions about what these growing congregations may be absorbing from the pulpits. This poll found that three in four churchgoers regard casino gambling as harmless adult fun.
Churchgoers "are pretty much like the rest of America when it comes to attitudes and actions about gaming," said Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., president of the American Gaming Association, which commissioned the poll.
For a half-century, Americans have reported that about four in 10 attend a house of worship weekly and 70 percent have claimed religious affiliation. This makes religion as important as sex, income, race, age, education and region in understanding how Americans act.
Yet given the secular tone of research, the religion factor often was not delved into, says one of the authors of the Demography article, Robert Hummer of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas.
The nation's two largest surveys -- the U.S. Census and the semiannual Current Population Survey -- do not ask about religion.
Mr. Hummer's team studied 21,000 adult Americans over nine years, looking at their religious behavior, along with other factors.
Even taking into account all other factors, "those who never attend [church] exhibit 50 percent higher risks of mortality over the follow-up period than those who attend most frequently," the study found.
"Those who attend weekly or less than once a week display about a 20 percent higher risk of mortality than those who attend more than once a week."
Also, some causes of death appeared more frequently among non-attenders. "Those who never attend are about four times as likely to die from respiratory disease, diabetes or infectious diseases," the researchers said.
The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
In recent years, nongovernmental research is looking at religion with precision because it is turning out to be a "strong predictor" of how Americans act.
"Now, it is a much more detailed breakdown of religion, not only in affiliation, but frequency of attendance or other aspects," said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey, based at the University of Chicago.
He said that as more studies show that religion has an impact on health, behavior and voting, researchers want to go deeper and ask, "What is it about religion that makes this difference?"
The religion factor has been characterized as so-called "social issues" -- from the family to abortion, drugs and crime -- that have dominated the political scene since the 1970s.
In the 1996 presidential election, one group of researchers found in exit polls that the religious affiliation of voters was twice as strong as one's sex or income as a predictor of their ballot choice.
"There have always been those who are more religious and less religious," said Frank Luntz, a political pollster who conducted the survey for the gambling industry. "It's only now that people doing research have realized the importance of this."
With the rise of more publicized social problems -- such as adultery in the White House and the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo. -- people draw on their different sources of values, many of them in religion, he said.
Hence, pollsters are finding it helpful to ask questions about religion and morals to find a correlation with how Americans might vote -- or how they might spend their dollars.
"Those who are more spiritual tend to be more optimistic about the society and about themselves," Mr. Luntz said. "They tend to be more self-reliant. They also tend to oppose increased government intervention."
On the gambling survey, he said, Americans were polled on a range of subjects, but the correlation that seemed interesting was how regular churchgoers were no different than other Americans on accepting casinos.
washingtontimes.com
Posted for discussion and educational purposes only. Not for commercial use. |
