Perceived religious discrimination and mental health

ABSTRACT

Objectives

Most knowledge on the health consequences of discrimination comes from studies on racial/ethnic minorities, and research on religious discrimination is rare. To address this gap in knowledge, we examine the relationship between religious discrimination and self-rated mental health (SRMH), focusing on the role of religious affiliation as well as religious participation and the importance of religion/spirituality.

Methods

The empirical analysis uses cross-sectional data from Statistics Canada's 2013 General Social Survey (GSS-27) and the target population includes Canadians aged 15 and older (N = 27,104) from all 10 provinces. The outcome variable is SRMH. Using OLS regressions, we compare the consequences of religious discrimination across five major religious groups (Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim), controlling for racial status and other confounding variables, and examining moderating factors.

Results

Religious discrimination is harmful for the SRMH of all religious groups. Despite experiencing higher levels of religious discrimination, religious minorities have no worse SRMH than the Christian majority, with the exception of Buddhists, who fare worse. The magnitude of the relationship between religious discrimination and SRMH differs across religious groups.

Conclusion:

Religious discrimination is a threat to mental health, irrespective of religious affiliation. There is a need to disaggregate non-Christian groups into distinct groups in studies of religious discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• religious discrimination
• mental health
• self-rated mental health

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge research assistance provided by Grace Li and financial support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2017-0057) awarded to the first author. Both authors have no conflict of interest.

Compliance with ethical standards

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Differences in religious discrimination between Catholics and mainstream Protestants are small. However, the members some Christian denominations experience comparatively more religious discrimination (Wilkins-Laflamme 2018). In 2014, about 19% of Jehovah's Witnesses and 5% of Pentecostals reported being targets of religious discrimination, compared to under 1% of Catholics and about 1% of mainstream Protestants.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2017-0057).