Spiritual Struggles and Problem Drinking: Are Younger Adults at Greater Risk than Older Adults?

ABSTRACT

Background: Although a good deal of research has assessed the positive effects that involvement in religion has on alcohol use, there is relatively little research on the negative aspects of religious life and alcohol problems. Objectives: This study has two objectives. The first is to see if spiritual struggles are associated with problem drinking. The second is to see if the relationship between spiritual struggles and problem drinking is stronger for younger than for older adults. Methods: The data come from a recent nationwide survey of adults of all ages who reside in the United States (N = 2142).The study was conducted in 2014. Problem drinking is assessed with the CAGE questionnaire. Results: The findings indicate that people who encounter more spiritual struggles are more likely to experience problem drinking. The relationship between spiritual struggles and problem drinking was stronger than the relationship between three other frequently used measures of religion and problem drinking (i.e., attendance at worship services, private prayer, and affiliation with Evangelical denominations). The results further reveal that spiritual struggles are associated with a greater risk of drinking problems among younger than among older individuals. Conclusions/Importance: Although many studies show that various facets of religion are associated with a lower risk of experiencing problems with alcohol the findings from the current study show that there are negative aspects of religious life that may be associated with a greater risk of having problems with alcohol.

KEYWORDS:

• Problem drinking
• religion
• spiritual struggles

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by a grant from the John Tempelton Foundation (40077).

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 We re-ran the analyses to see if the nature of the relationship between spiritual struggles and CAGE scores changed if CAGE scores were assessed in a continuous format. Consistent with the results we have presented so far, the additional analyses suggest that more spiritual struggles are associated with larger continuous CAGE scores (β =.076; p <.001; these data are not shown in Table 2).

2 The relationship between phenomenon like spiritual struggles and problem drinking is likely to involve a number of factors that we have not examined up to this point. Consequently, we conducted two sets of additional supplementary analyses in order to explore some of these additional possibilities. The first set of analyses involves the relationships between religious affiliation and problem drinking. We examined whether the relationship between spiritual struggles and affiliation with an Evangelical denomination increases the odds of experiencing problem drinking. The data (not shown in Table 2) indicate that the interaction between Evangelical affiliation and spiritual struggles on problem drinking was not statistically significant (b = −.012; ns; odds ratio =.988). We also assessed whether the relationship between spiritual struggles and alcohol problems might be stronger among men than women. Once again, we failed to observe a statistically significant interaction between gender and spiritual struggles on the odds of having alcohol problems (b = −.021; ns; odds ratio =.979; not shown in Table 2).