Abstract
This chapter reviews theories and empirical evidence on relations between religion and spirituality (R/S) and social factors. Religion and spirituality are conceived as evolving over time and residing at both collective and individual levels .
We first examine how community-level measures of R/S have predicted health outcomes, finding evidence in diverse ethnic groups for largely favorable effects on longevity, suicide, depression, psychological well-being, and/or self-rated health. Religious involvement is an enormous source of social capital, but different R/S dimensions and traditions are linked to different forms of social capital with different implications. Studies link R/S to higher US adolescent educational attainment, but R/S relations with socioeconomic status vary considerably across nations and cultures. Income inequality appears to spur religiousness, but R/S measures correlate little with economic attitudes. Evidence links community and individual R/S to lower crime and violence and buffering against diverse community-level stressors. Religion/spirituality also serve as resources for responding to disasters. We conclude by discussing the bases and promise of multi-level interventions that address R/S factors, and potential benefits from more broadly salutogenic approaches.
This chapter is one of thirteen reviews in this volume providing a public health perspective on the empirical evidence relating R/S to physical and mental health; with the next chapter (“Social Identity and Discrimination in Religious/Spiritual Influences on Health”), this is one of two reviews emphasizing factors of interest to social epidemiology.
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Notes
- 1.
Idler (2014a) is quoting the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, but she notes that religion was “notably… not mentioned among the ‘wider set of forces’…. A blind spot in nearly all of the current work on social determinants” (pp. 8–9) (see also chapter “Elephant in the Room: Why Spirituality and Religion Matter for Public Health” this volume).
- 2.
For example, the recent Roman Catholic papal encyclical on the environment states that “we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (Francis 2015, p. 30, paragraph 49, emphasis in original).
- 3.
For example, consistent with such widely accepted perspectives, one cross-national European study found that religiousness was independently predicted by both economic and existential insecurity, measured at both individual levels (e.g., unemployment, loss of partner) and collective levels (unemployment rate, experience of war) (Immerzeel and van Tubergen 2013, European Values Study, 26 countries, n = 65,266).
- 4.
Counts of religious congregations have been used to measure community-level religion, but no analogous strategy seems possible for measuring community-level spirituality, which possesses non-organizational connotations. More feasible is to measure community-level spirituality as the mean of individual-level spirituality assessments of community members, although it is unclear if any studies have done so (see also chapter in this volume entitled “Social Identity and Discrimination in Religious/Spiritual Influences on Health”).
- 5.
Reviewing multiple academic definitions, Baker and Miles-Watson (2010, p. 63) note that “religious and spiritual capital are contested terms [while] the public space into which they are placed is increasingly complex and fluid.”
- 6.
Even leaving aside its emerging derivatives, the “umbrella” notion of social capital encompasses a wide array of other constructs ranging from social trust to network ties, most of which were the focus of pre-existing empirical literatures. Such conceptual breadth and terminological diversity pose obstacles to comprehensive reviews. Hence the present subsection will emphasize primarily literature that explicitly self-identifies as about social capital.
- 7.
It has been proposed that religion/spirituality may also be a fundamental cause of health in the sense that it will “maintain an [inverse] association with disease even when intervening mechanisms change” (Link and Phelan 1995, p. 80) (see Hummer et al. 1999). If such a relationship holds, it is unclear whether the fundamentally causative agent should best be viewed as R/S as a whole, or one or more specific R/S dimensions, especially more cross-culturally generalizable dimensions (Oman 2009). Additional discussion of R/S as a fundamental cause occurs in the chapter entitled “Weighing the Evidence: What is Revealed by 100+ Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews of Religion/Spirituality and Health?” (this volume).
- 8.
Voters who hold heterogeneous moral and economic preferences (i.e., partly liberal, partly conservative, depending on the issue) frequently face dilemmas, especially in countries with “majoritarian” electoral systems that are dominated by two major parties, because party issue positions on these diverging dimensions are by necessity “bundled together” (De La and Rodden 2008, pp. 441, 469). Such dilemmas are not uncommon, because “in every single one of our countries, the [moral versus economic] issue scales had opposite correlations with income, and they never exhibited a positive correlation with one another” (p. 469). Conflicts may be fewer in proportional representation electoral systems, however: “faced with the menu of choices available in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries… voters need not choose one preference dimension on which to base their vote” (p. 470).
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Oman, D., Syme, S.L. (2018). Social and Community-Level Factors in Health Effects from Religion/Spirituality. In: Oman, D. (eds) Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73966-3_5
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