How Religion Enhances Longevity: Is It the Meaning?

Excerpted from
Emotional Longevity; What Really Determines How Long You Live
By Norman B. Anderson, Ph.D., P. Elizabeth Anderson

Andrew J. Young, a top aide of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, is himself an ordained minister. He also served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, was ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter, served two terms as mayor of Atlanta, and cochaired the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996. Not bad for a man who, after college, had no plan but left his fate in the hands of God. First of all, you have to understand that Young hailed from what he describes as a "very good, strong, and religious family." Still, it was his own epiphany that he says pulled everything else into line. Young explained to me that he had just graduated from Howard University but felt lost and that his life was meaningless. His father wanted him to become a dentist, a dream Young did not share, but he had no other viable goal. During a visit to North Carolina, he pushed himself to the brink of physical exhaustion running up a mountain trying to release his frustration at being what he described as "naive about life, despite a college degree." A revelation was waiting for him at the top of that mountain. He said, "It was almost in a moment like a flash of insight, looking out on those North Carolina fields and hills and the sky-everything seemed so orderly and purposeful. It suddenly hit me that there must be a purpose in life for me." Young said that a burden had been lifted, and in the next few months his life took shape as he believed God intended.

He accompanied his pastor to a religious youth conference in Texas with the intention of spending time with his college roommate, who lived in San Antonio, about 150 miles from the conference site. When they arrived, his pastor encouraged him to remain at the conference for moral support. They had not seen any other black people since they had entered the Texas panhandle from Dallas, and according to Young, his pastor told him, "You're not going to leave me here by myself, and I know you don't want to ride down these roads by yourself." Young ended up staying, and he began a journey that culminated in his going to seminary in Connecticut.

He participated in the conference and was impressed by the commitment he observed in many young white people who were having their first interracial interactions. He said, "It was the first time I had been around white people where their religious faith made a difference in their conduct, and that was impressive." He ended up as a volunteer for the National Council of Churches, which had sponsored the youth conference, and he was assigned to Connecticut. When he arrived, no housing arrangements had been made, so he was placed on the campus of the Hartford Theological Seminary. Since his volunteer work took up his afternoons and evenings, he requested permission to audit a couple of classes; school officials suggested that he might as well take three to qualify for a scholarship. He enrolled and did well while the school waited for his transcript from Howard, which took about two or three months to arrive. Good thing, because the school informed him that had they seen his grades, they would not have been able to admit him. Young reflects, "So through all of this, I felt God had a plan for my life, and it was working out, and all I had to do was go along."

Young believes that God, with just as firm a hand, continued to direct his life, sending him to pastor a church in Alabama and placing him in the home of his future wife. She wasn't even there, but he knew before they met that he would marry her. He tells the story better than I would: "When I got to Alabama, in the first house that I visited, I saw a Revised Standard Version of the Bible on the table. It had been underlined, and the name on it was Jean Childs. This was 1951, and this version didn't come out until 1950, and so what was a black woman in the country doing with a Bible that had just been published, and it was already underlined, and in a lot of my favorite chapters. Her mother had told me the book belonged to her daughter, who was away at Manchester College in Indiana. I had been to Manchester the summer before for a camp on my way to seminary. It's a college that advocates nonviolence, and it's where I started reading Gandhi. So to have some young black woman who reads the Bible and who probably understood nonviolence was more than I could have imagined. Then I looked on the wall in the living room, and there was a senior lifesaving certificate, and I had been on Howard's swimming team. I didn't know any women who could swim. So I just decided that the Lord must have sent me there for a wife. Sure enough, two years later we got married. There was never any doubt in my mind that she was the woman I was supposed to marry, even before I met her, and that's the way God has planned for me."

For Young and others religion is one of the chief frameworks to bring meaning and coherence to their lives and to help them understand events, both negative and positive. And, as summarized earlier, religion is strongly associated with better emotional and physical health and longevity. Religious-based coping in the presence of stress protects against depression, improves life satisfaction, and may be associated with longevity.

But have we really answered the question of whether religion has its salutary affects because it provides meaning? This is a tough question, since religious beliefs and practices do more than provide meaning. They can enhance other factors that improve health, such as social support and beneficial health behaviors. But some of the most rigorous studies in the field have taken such factors into account and yet still detect the link between religion and health.

One fascinating study takes us even closer to understanding the explicit role of meaning in the religion/health connection. Dr. Daniel Mcintosh and his colleagues wanted to determine the role of religion in helping people cope with one of life's most severe traumas: the death of a child. The participants in their study were parents of babies who had recently died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), a term used to describe the unexpected and, until recently, largely unexplained death of an apparently healthy infant. Mcintosh chose this population of parents because the loss is so shocking that no psychological preparation is possible. Parents of the deceased children were asked, among other things, about their level of religious participation and the importance of religion in their lives. The researchers asked questions to determine if such religious beliefs and practices helped the parents adjust to their loss. Significantly, they wanted to ascertain how religion helped, so they also explored whether religion enhanced adjustment by providing parents with more social support, by providing them with meaning, or by helping them cognitively process the loss. In this case researchers defined cognitive processing as having recurring thoughts and images about the child. People who had more thoughts, memories, and mental pictures about the child and who purposely engaged in thinking or talking about the baby were said to be high in cognitive processing of the death. Although difficult to endure, cognitive processing is ultimately beneficial. It helps a person assimilate, or make accommodations for, traumatic events.

The researchers thought that religion might speed up this cognitive processing because it could provide parents a schema for thinking about and understanding death (e.g., that their child lives on in heaven, that they will see their child again). The question then became, Does religion help a parent cope with the sudden loss of a child through social support, cognitive processing, or finding meaning?

To answer this question Mcintosh and his colleagues looked at two aspects of religion: religious participation (church attendance) and the importance of religion to the participants. The researchers believed that higher levels of religious participation might help parents cope with the death of their child by exposing them more frequently to a supportive church community. People who say that religion is very important to them may cope better because they develop a strong religion-based schema or worldview that would help them both to find meaning in their loss and to cognitively process it.