Letters: Does Going to Church Make You Healthier?

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

As a seminarian and an admirer of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann's work, I read "The Benefits of Church" (column, April 21) with interest.

While Ms. Luhrmann presents provocative findings about the benefits of worship on mental health, church leaders would be wise to temper their excitement over such positive press.

Faith and liturgy should not only build community but also challenge us to rethink the oppressive structures many of us perpetuate and benefit from. Worship that "improves" us is dangerous unless it also helps us turn outward to serve our neighbors.

JOSEPH PAILLÉ

Princeton, N.J., April 22, 2013

To the Editor:

Do healthy people go to church, or does church make you healthy? If the answer is that church makes you healthy, what is the mechanism? Leaving out divine intervention, what happens in church that produces health?

Economists and other social scientists have examined the relationship between health and social capital, which includes church, social clubs and having a support network of friends. Social capital provides information on health habits, better doctors or hospitals, and reduces stress, which can lead to heart disease and mental problems.

But we must confront the problem of causation. Those who attend church are on average healthier than those who do not: the selection effect. To deal with this, we would need to study the health of those who are randomly assigned to attend church and who do not attend.

Without this evidence, we can only hope that going to church makes us healthier, though it might be a good thing anyway.

RICHARD SCHEFFLER
Madrid, April 22, 2013

The writer is a professor of health economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

To the Editor:

T. M. Luhrmann's claims about the health benefits of attending church simply don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. The evidence that attendance boosts the immune system and lowers blood pressure comes from studies that are significantly flawed.

Moreover, the findings about the health benefits of religious devotion often vary between men and women, and younger and older people, and are overwhelmingly derived from studies of Christians to the exclusion of other religious groups.

Finally, evidence increasingly points to religiosity as a mere marker of underlying physiological and genetic factors that are the true influences of health and well-being. People should attend religious services because they choose to, not in futile pursuit of some specious health effects.

RICHARD P. SLOAN
New York, April 22, 2013

The writer, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, is the author of "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."