Religion is good for your health? Conservative Christianity bad?

Prevalence Of Religious Congregations Affects Mortality Rates:

....Blanchard found that people live longer in areas with a large number of Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches. He offers two key reasons for these findings.

"First, these types of churches have what's known as a 'worldly perspective.' Instead of solely focusing on the afterlife, they place a significant emphasis on the current needs of their communities," he said. These religions commonly organize outreach efforts for the needy and homeless, invest in the health infrastructures of their town and participate in other forms of public charity.

"Secondly, these congregations tend to create bridging ties in communities that lead to greater social cohesion among citizens," said Blanchard. This enhanced sense of connection between people provides collective encouragement for healthy behavior.

In contrast to Catholics and Mainline Protestant congregations, Conservative Protestant churches have a mixed effect on community health. The "otherworldly" character of Conservative Protestantism leads congregations in this tradition to focus on the afterlife. Conservative Protestantism is also a more individualistic faith, one in which the believer's personal relationship with God is paramount. These types of churches are thought to downplay the importance of using collective action, including human institutions, to improve the world. Communities dominated by Conservative Protestant churches tend to have higher mortality rates.

However, this finding has an important caveat, because there are different types of Conservative Protestant churches, namely, Fundamentalist, Pentecostal and Evangelical.

"We find that a greater presence of Fundamentalist and Pentecostal congregations is associated with higher rates of mortality, but communities with a large number of Evangelical congregations have better health outcomes," said Blanchard. "Evangelical congregations do a better job of engaging the broader community and promoting social connectedness that is so essential for longer life expectancies. Fundamentalist congregations tend to be more reclusive, and this insularity is linked with higher mortality rates."

The original paper is Faith, morality and mortality: the ecological impact of religion on population health in the June issue of Social Forces. If anyone has access to this paper, I'd appreciate it if you sent me a copy via email at contactgnxp -at- gmail.com. (thanks!) I'm going to criticize the reasoning above, but perhaps there's nuance I'm missing from the summary. I'll be quick about my objection: I don't think that these denominational differences are the causal factor behind the longevity variation. Rather, it is more likely in my opinion that denomination is correlated with other factors, or, particular types of individuals who are likely to live longer select particular types of congregations. Below are two maps which might give you a clue as to what I'm hinting at.

The first map is from the US Religious Landscape Survey. You can see where Mainline Protestants and Evangelical Protestants concentrate; the Upper Midwest and Southeast respectively. I assume that most readers are aware of Catholic concentration in the Northeast and the industrial cities of the Midwest and on the West coast among Latinos, so I didn't include that map. The second map shows life expectancy of white males and females across the United States, the source is a PLoS ONE paper.

What I'm suggesting here is that the authors above might be confusing a denominational difference with a regional one! Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America chronicles how deep-rooted the regionalism in the United States is. There is an enormous difference in social & psychological patterns such as gun ownership & IQ.

So, I have to add: where does stupidity fall into the equation here??? I have posted over and over and over and over the relationship between the sort of denomination an individual chooses and their intelligence or academic production. Intelligent or educated people are more likely to take a proactive role in their own health management and be more fluent advocates within the system. They're also more likely to take their medications properly and stay on a regime. Note also above that Evangelicals don't have as many issues in regards to low life expectancy as Fundamentalists & Pentecostals. Evangelicals are of course far more socioeconomically diversified (in large part because Fundamentalists and Pentecostals are generally just subsets of the broader Evangelical category, manifesting trends which distinguish Evangelicalism from Mainline Protestantism to a more extreme degree).

A bigger meta-issue here is what role a causal religion plays in shaping behavior. I'm sure it does play a role, but too often social scientists simply assume that religion changes people, instead of people being attracted to particular religions, or peoples changing a religion (e.g., when the Irish became Christian they changed the Roman religion in many fundamental ways in the process of indigenizing it). One could imagine a multiplier-feedback loop where Lutheranism does foster more communitarianism on the margins that Baptism, which results in more communitarian oriented Baptists converting to Lutheranism and vice versa. Over time the two religions might diverge sharply because of a sorting process due to these sorts of dynamics rather than the affect of doctrine or institutional structure on the laity. Or, it could be something as exotic as a pathogen which is common in the southern United States that changes personality and makes people susceptible or attracted to Fundamentalist and Pentecostal modalities of worship, while at the same time also shifting psychological profile so as to engage in more high risk behavior that increases mortality rates.