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Good for All? Hardly! Attending Church Does Not Benefit Religiously Unaffiliated

DOI:10.1007/s10943-016-0317-5
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David Speed at University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
David Speed
  • University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
Ken Fowler
Ken Fowler
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Abstract and Figures

The existing literature addressing Religion and Spirituality supports the idea that attending church is positively associated with health outcomes. However, within this literature there has been an impoverished effort to determine whether the Religiously Unaffiliated will report these positive relationships. Using representative data from Ontario (N = 3620), the relationships between Religious/Spiritual variables (Attendance, Prayer/Meditation, and Religiosity) and health outcomes (Happiness, Self-Rated Health, and Satisfaction with Life) were assessed. Results focused on three recurring trends: the Religiously Unaffiliated experienced attending church less positively than Christians; when compared at the highest level of Attendance, the Religiously Unaffiliated were less healthy than Christians; and when only considering the Religiously Unaffiliated, Religious/Spiritual variables were not significant and positive predictors of health outcomes. The discussion focused on the need to delineate between how Christians and the Religiously Unaffiliated experience Religious/Spiritual variables, and the need to stop over-generalizing the positive relationship between Religious/Spiritual variables and health.
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Good for All? Hardly! Attending Church Does Not
Benefit Religiously Unaffiliated
David Speed
1
•Ken Fowler
1
Published online: 19 October 2016
ÓSpringer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract The existing literature addressing Religion and Spirituality supports the idea that
attending church is positively associated with health outcomes. However, within this lit-
erature there has been an impoverished effort to determine whether the Religiously
Unaffiliated will report these positive relationships. Using representative data from Ontario
(N=3620), the relationships between Religious/Spiritual variables (Attendance, Prayer/
Meditation, and Religiosity) and health outcomes (Happiness, Self-Rated Health, and
Satisfaction with Life) were assessed. Results focused on three recurring trends: the
Religiously Unaffiliated experienced attending church less positively than Christians; when
compared at the highest level of Attendance, the Religiously Unaffiliated were less healthy
than Christians; and when only considering the Religiously Unaffiliated, Religious/Spiri-
tual variables were not significant and positive predictors of health outcomes. The dis-
cussion focused on the need to delineate between how Christians and the Religiously
Unaffiliated experience Religious/Spiritual variables, and the need to stop over-general-
izing the positive relationship between Religious/Spiritual variables and health.
Keywords Religion Health Happiness Self-Rated Health Satisfaction with Life
Attendance Church Religiously Unaffiliated Non-religious Statistical moderation
Homoscedasticity
Introduction
Religion/Spirituality (R/S) is connected with positive health outcomes within the existing
health literature (Idler and Kasl 1992; Krause 2003). However, within this body of liter-
ature, it is unclear as to why people experience specific benefits from R/S (Dyer 2007;
Perry 1998). A contender for explaining why subjective health is improved by R/S is that
&David Speed
d.t.a.speed@mun.ca
1
Department of Psychology, Science Building, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s,
NL A1B 3X9, Canada
123
J Relig Health (2017) 56:986–1002
DOI 10.1007/s10943-016-0317-5
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Furthermore, the benefits of attending church do not seem to translate to those who are non-believers and the religiously unaffiliated. Speed and Fowler (2017) looked at happiness and life satisfaction in data from the Canadian General Social Survey focusing on Ontario. Their analysis showed that church attendance and prayer were not significant predictors of happiness in the religiously unaffiliated, suggesting that attending church does not have inherent value to everyone. ...
... This information arose naturally from interviews; childhood religious affiliation or any changes in religious affiliation were not specifically addressed in either the demographic information collected or the initial questions. As Speed and Fowler (2017) identified, the religiously unaffiliated and non-believers do not seem to gain the psychological benefits of attending church. So it would seem here that the participants have tried to find something else to fill a potential gap. ...
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Purpose Religion is an important part of many people’s lives and there is some evidence that attending church or other religious congregations is positively associated with psychological well-being. However, religious participation is declining in Western Europe and North America. Sunday Assembly is a non-religious gathering that intends to provide a similar communal experience and a sense of spirituality to the church, but without the religious element. In the current study, we aimed to explore the experiences of and motivations for attending a non-religious congregation in relation to well-being. Methods A qualitative approach was taken, gathering data through semi-structured interviews with participants from Sunday Assembly congregations across England. Results Thematic analysis was used and three key themes were found: (1) searching for meaning and community, (2) Sunday Assembly as protective of mental health, and (3) loneliness in a crowd. Conclusions Sunday Assembly can provide a sense of belonging and improvement in mental health through shared experience and spirituality, and it can act as a coping mechanism during difficult times. Further research could explore the benefits of Sunday Assembly upon attendee’s mental health, test the effectiveness of Sunday Assembly as a coping mechanism, and whether continued attendance improves mood over time.
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... On the other hand, however, prior work also shows that incongruence between one's religious beliefs and practice might be also detrimental for well-being (Baker et al., 2018;Mannheimer & Hill, 2015). For instance, it was previously found that attending church is bene cial only for religious Christians but not for the religiously una liated (Speed & Fowler, 2017) and that atheists and "nones" who reported higher rates of religious practice had effectively poorer health outcomes (Speed & Hwang, 2019). ...
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... It is possible that the linear model applies to the religious/spiritualized population, but does not support itself when unbelievers are considered together (Galen & Kloet, 2011;Weber et al., 2012). For example, Speed and Fowler (2017) found a positive prediction for R/S regarding happiness and satisfaction with life, but only among religious people. Interestingly, participation in religious meetings negatively predicted satisfaction with the lives of the non-religious participants in their sample. ...
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... But that is not the case when societies do not value religiosity. Similarly, Speed and Fowler (2017), using a large, representative sample from Ontario, Canada, and, in a more recent study, a representative sample of Canadian atheists in several provinces (Speed in press), find that atheists do not substantively differ from religious groups in terms of health outcomes. ...
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... For example, objective measures of church attendance in the United States have suggested that the actual percentage of weekly church attendance may be only half of what people report in surveys (20). Second, people's religious beliefs and behaviors may be differently motivated (e.g., fear of vengeful god vs. love of merciful god), which may partly determine the mental health correlates of religiosity, but the current measures did not query people's religious beliefs in detail (21,22). The analysis also did not include other possible moderator variables, such as stressful life events (23). ...
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