Ask a religiously observant American why they practice religion, and you're likely to end up with a host of answers, including spirituality, community, tradition and belief. Few, however, are likely to mention the health benefits.
According to an October Gallup poll of 550,000 people, religious Americans have higher levels of well-being than non-religious Americans. After controlling for variables including age, ethnicity, gender and socio-economic status, the organization, which conducts statistical research and analysis, found that those that self-identified as "very religious" scored 4.5 percent better than those they identified as "moderately religious" or "non-religious" on their well-being index — a statistically significant figure, according to the group.
Gallup's well-being index measures factors such as an individual's self-reported physical and mental health and satisfaction with their work environment.
"I don't think it is necessarily surprising," junior Hillary Sieber, who has served in leadership positions at Tufts Hillel, said about the poll's results. Sieber explained that many religious people in America are members of strong communities of people who share common beliefs and values. The resulting social net and sense of belonging could explain why religious community members have an advantage when it comes to well-being.
Sophomore Stephen Goeman, a member of the Tufts Freethought Society, agreed, noting that the positive effect of membership in a community is one aspect that draws people to religion.
"I wasn't too surprised if you consider what religions are supposed to do for people," he said.
Sieber said that the events and programs that Hillel offers on campus provide a welcoming environment for those who are looking for one. Communal experiences like Sabbath celebrations on Friday nights are definitive of Sieber's life at Tufts and integral to her mental health, she said.
"It's a nice time to relax, a really nice way to recharge," she said. "It makes me a happier person."
Goeman explained that because many communities form around religion, non-religious people often miss out on that group social experience and feel unfulfilled without it.
"Non-believers are sort of out there on their own," Goeman said. "Often they don't have a community looking out for them."
Goeman, however, said that religious communities are not the only organizations that can provide the communal support people seek.
"Organized humanistic communities can also accomplish some of the goals that religions do," he said.
Along with providing people with a community — and a regular communal meeting place — religion offers believers a sense of certainty, James Hoagland, an atheist, pointed out, which can also explain the correlation between religion and well-being, he said.
"I do not speak for all atheists here, but if I knew that what I was doing every day was verifiably the right thing to do, I would certainly feel a lot better about myself," Hoagland, a freshman, said. "One of the problems of being an atheist is that you do have to wonder everyday, ‘Is what I am doing right, and can I justify that,' whereas highly religious people have their justification."
Still, Hoagland was reluctant to believe that any concrete conclusions could be arrived at from the poll's results, explaining that while religion and well-being may be connected, there are a number of possible relationships they may share.
"The first thing to note with any study that anybody does is that correlation does not equal causation," he said. "Just because well-being and religiosity correlate does not make one come from the other."
According to Elizabeth Lemons, a religion lecturer at Tufts, it is also important, when analyzing the poll's findings, to consider how the researchers defined their terms — in this case, religiosity. Gallup categorized all respondents as "very religious," "moderately religious" or "non-religious" by asking two questions — one about how frequently they attended religious services and one about the importance of religion in their lives. People were only classified as "very religious" if they attended services on a regular basis and considered themselves very religious.
But there is a significant problem in defining religiosity based on those two factors alone, Lemons said.
"To say that you are very religious because you go to services once a week as well as that you consider yourself religious is going to skew your data to a particular kind of religious practice among Americans," Lemons said. "For traditions that think that going to services is important, it is a good index. But for other traditions, it is not a very good index."
Lemons explained that Americans embrace a diverse range of religious practices and that within the context of certain religions, weekly service attendance is not essential to religious observance. Some people who do not affiliate with any particular organized religion, she pointed out, regularly engage in spiritual practices and consider themselves deeply spiritual or religious.
The Gallup Poll misrepresents people who practice religion in less traditional ways — like meditation — according to Lemons.
"They may never go to a group setting for meditation, but they might meditate daily," she said. "I would like to have a lot more information before I could draw a conclusion."
