One size doesn’t fit all: religious/spiritual identities moderate salutary effects of religion

ABSTRACT

Religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviours are frequently described as having salutary effects, but there are likely unexplored exceptions to this general finding. We combined data from the 2011/2012 Canadian Community Health Surveys (N > 7077) to investigate how religion/spirituality predicted five health outcomes (i.e., three subscales on the Mental Health Continuum – Short Form, self-rated health, and satisfaction with life), and whether these relationships were moderated by a person’s religious/spiritual identity. We found that while attendance, prayer/meditation, and religiosity had a statistical relationship with health outcomes, these relationships were frequently weak and often did not apply to people who were Nones, nonspiritual, or nonspiritual-Nones. Moreover, the results suggested that religious/spiritual identities moderated the relationship between religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviours, and health outcomes. Specifically, Nones, nonspiritual, and nonspiritual-Nones reported a nonpositive relationship between religion and health. Overall, the conclusion that “religion = better health” is an inadequate generalisation that fails to describe the nuance of the relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological wellness
• non-religion
• non-spiritual
• moderation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Cathryn Button and Dr. Darcy Hallett for their feedback on iterations of this project. Although the research and analysis are based on data from Statistics Canada, the opinions expressed do not represent the views of Statistics Canada. This analysis is based on the Statistics Canada 2011/2012 Canadian Community Health Survey public microfile. All computations, use and interpretation of these data are entirely that of Dr. David Speed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

We used the 2011/2012 Canadian Community Health Survey data. We cannot upload these datasets as we do not own them. However, these datasets are freely accessible through postsecondary data services at various universities. We also provide our Stata syntax file for analytical transparency.