In my ministry, I have accompanied many people through different stages of life. I have seen moments of joy, illness, grief, uncertainty, and loss. Over the years, I have seen how faith can become an important source of hope and strength, especially when people face circumstances they cannot control.
For many people, faith is not simply a private belief. It connects them with a community. It gives them opportunities to pray with others, form friendships, serve, find meaning in suffering, and remain hopeful during difficult times.
These pastoral experiences have made me curious about a question that researchers have also explored: Is religious or spiritual involvement associated with living longer?
Science cannot measure the supernatural realities of faith, nor can it tell us the ultimate meaning of religious belief. It can, however, study observable aspects of religious life, such as attendance at religious services, and examine whether they are associated with health and longevity. What researchers have found is worth considering.
What Did the Researchers Study?
In 2009, researchers Yoichi Chida, Andrew Steptoe, and Lynda H. Powell published a systematic quantitative review in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics examining the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and mortality.
Rather than studying a single population, the researchers reviewed prospective observational studies identified through major scientific databases. Their analysis included 69 studies reported in 28 articles involving initially healthy populations. They separately examined 22 studies from 11 articles involving people who already had illnesses.
Religious and Spiritual Involvement and Mortality
The researchers found a significant association between religiosity or spirituality and survival among initially healthy people.
The combined hazard ratio was 0.82. Put more simply, greater religiosity or spirituality was associated with approximately an 18 percent lower mortality risk across these studies.
The association persisted after adjustment for factors that could influence longevity, including smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, socioeconomic status, negative emotions, and social support.
This suggests that healthier lifestyles and social support alone may not fully account for the observed association between religious or spiritual involvement and longevity. However, because these were observational studies, other explanations and unmeasured factors remain possible.
Church Attendance May Matter
One particularly interesting finding concerned organized religious participation. When the researchers examined different dimensions of religiosity and spirituality, organizational religious activities such as attending religious services were associated with greater survival among initially healthy populations.
The researchers also reported an association between religiosity or spirituality and lower cardiovascular mortality in healthy populations.
Later research provided additional evidence of this association.
In 2016, Shanshan Li, Meir Stampfer, David Williams, and Tyler VanderWeele examined 74,534 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study. During follow-up, 13,537 participants died.
Women who attended religious services more than once per week had a 33 percent lower rate of all-cause mortality compared with women who never attended religious services, after adjustment for numerous health, lifestyle, and demographic factors.
Frequent religious-service attendance was also associated with a 27 percent lower rate of cardiovascular mortality and a 21 percent lower rate of cancer mortality compared with never attending. The researchers conducted sensitivity analyses to investigate whether factors such as poorer health preventing people from attending services might account for the findings, and the overall association remained.
Why Might Religious Participation Be Associated With Longer Life?
The 2016 study explored several possible pathways. Social support accounted for an estimated 23 percent of the association between religious-service attendance and mortality, smoking for 22 percent, depressive symptoms for 11 percent, and optimism for 9 percent. No single factor explained the entire association.
From my experience in ministry, this makes intuitive sense.
A faith community can be much more than a place people visit for an hour each week. It can become a network of relationships. People pray together, check on one another when someone is sick, bring meals to grieving families, volunteer, celebrate important moments together, and accompany one another through difficult seasons of life.
Religious faith may also foster meaning, purpose, hope, and belonging. These dimensions of human life are difficult to separate completely from our physical and emotional well-being.
Research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2017 examined religious-service attendance, prayer, religious coping, religious or spiritual identity, and all-cause mortality among participants in the Black Women’s Health Study. This illustrates an important point: researchers are examining several dimensions of religious life, rather than simply asking whether someone identifies with a religion.
Does This Mean Faith Makes Us Live Longer?
These studies are observational. They can demonstrate an association between religious or spiritual involvement and mortality, but they cannot definitively prove that faith itself causes people to live longer.
Chida and colleagues also identified evidence of publication bias and cautioned readers about interpreting their findings.
There is another important distinction. The 2009 review did not find a significant overall association between religiosity or spirituality and reduced mortality among populations who were already ill. Faith, therefore, should never be presented as a substitute for appropriate medical care.
Nor should we conclude that someone who becomes ill or dies at a younger age somehow lacked sufficient faith. Christian faith does not promise that believers will avoid illness, suffering, or death.
Faith Is About More Than Living Longer
As a priest, I would never encourage someone to practice faith simply because it might add years to their life. That would reduce faith to a health strategy, and faith is about something much deeper.
Still, this research invites us to recognize something important about the human person. Our spiritual, social, psychological, and physical lives are not completely separate.
Perhaps science is helping us appreciate something faith communities have long experienced: human beings flourish through prayers, relationships, meaning, hope, service, belonging, and connection with others.
Whether these things add years to our lives remains a question researchers continue to study.
But faith can certainly help us consider what we do with the years we are given and how we accompany one another through them.
Sources
Chida, Yoichi, Andrew Steptoe, and Lynda H. Powell. “Religiosity/Spirituality and Mortality: A Systematic Quantitative Review.” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 78, no. 2 (2009): 81–90. https://doi.org/10.1159/000190791.
Li, Shanshan, Meir J. Stampfer, David R. Williams, and Tyler J. VanderWeele. “Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women.” JAMA Internal Medicine 176, no. 6 (2016): 777–785. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.1615.
VanderWeele, Tyler J., Julie Yu, Yvette C. Cozier, et al. “Attendance at Religious Services, Prayer, Religious Coping, and Religious/Spiritual Identity as Predictors of All-Cause Mortality in the Black Women’s Health Study.” American Journal of Epidemiology 185, no. 7 (2017): 515–522. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kww179.