Religious attendance as factors in wellbeing and social engagement

Religiosity and religious attendance as factors in wellbeing and social engagement. R.I.M. Dunbar. Religion, Brain & Behavior, Jan 22 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2020.1712618

ABSTRACT: There is accumulating evidence that being an active member of a social community predicts health, wellbeing and even survival. I use data from an online survey to determine whether religious behavior has the same effect. The results suggest that religiosity and attendance at religious services most strongly affect engagement with the local community and through that the numbers of friends someone has, as well as the level of trust in the local community and bondedness with friends and family. However, they seem to have little direct impact on happiness or life satisfaction. Frequency of attendance at religious services (but not private prayer) is associated with a larger sympathy group and a greater sense of bonding to congregation members. I suggest that regular attendees may feel they can count on the emotional support of congregation members more readily than they can conventional friends and family because they interact with them more often.

KEYWORDS: Wellbeing, happiness, trust, support clique, religiosity, emotional support

Discussion

This study yields two main findings. First, in contrast to the context of feasting, religiosity and religious attendance form a close knit functional unit that is somewhat separated off from other aspects of people’s psychological and sociological domains, with few direct effects on these two aspects of their behavior. Second, attendance at religious functions (but not religiosity indices or private prayer to quite the same extent) positively influences both the size of the sympathy group and the sense of engagement in the local community (by which is meant the wider community, not just the congregation), as well as bondedness to other members of the congregation.
Note that engagement with the wider community increases roughly linearly with frequency of attendance, but sympathy group size seems to involve more of a phase transition that suddenly rises to a new level once attendance reaches a certain level (at least once a week). Conventionally, people list only 3–7 individuals in their support clique—a finding that has been reported consistently across studies (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). We see much the same pattern among those who attend religious functions only intermittently (once a month or less): in Figure 2(a), these average a very consistent 7. Those who attend religious services at least once a week, however, list around 20 individuals, or three times as many as the societal norm. It could be that those who attend services frequently are over-enthusiastic in rating their relationships with other people. However, an alternative explanation may be that seeing and interacting with a large number of people at a daily or weekly service creates the sense of bonding intensity normally associated with support cliques. Weekly interaction is the frequency required for creating and maintaining the intense bonds found among best friends (the inner core of ∼5 most intimate friends and family that form the support clique) (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). It may be no accident that the Abrahamic religions, at least, enjoin their members to attend a weekly service.
This sense of belonging or bondedness may well be compounded by the belief that shared interests and beliefs (Dunbar, 2018) and the charitable demands of most religions will make fellow congregation members (but not strangers, and perhaps not even less religious friends) more willing to provide the kinds of intense, time-costly emotional support that one would normally expect only from a member of one’s support clique. In effect, being a member of a congregation that meets regularly may create a large support clique that one can rely on. People who were more assiduous in their attendance at religious services also felt more engaged with the wider community within which they lived (many of whom they will not know personally). This second finding suggests that actively religious people may indeed be genuinely more willing to invest time and effort into the welfare of other people (i.e., behave altruistically for the greater good of the community).
In retrospect, it would have been desirable to have included questions on both the size of the subject’s congregation and how long subjects had been a member. It may be that the size of the congregation directly affected how many people were listed in the support clique and sympathy group for the reasons suggested above. A more important complication is that there is a potential confound between frequency of attendance at services and how long someone has been attending a particular place of worship: it may be that the effects attributed to attendance in these analyses are in fact due to length of association with a particular congregation (and hence familiarity with its members). Future studies should consider these variables.
Contrary to some previous studies (Francis, Ziebertz, & Lewis, 2003; Mookerjee & Beron, 2005), the survey found less evidence that religious people, or those who attended religious functions more often, were consistently happier, or more satisfied with their lives. This suggests that any beneficial effects of an actively religious life come not through elevated feelings of happiness and contentment, but through the communal moral, social, and perhaps financial support provided by the congregation and the sense of belonging that a close-knit congregation creates. Historically, congregations have usually been the main source of financial support for parishioners who have fallen on hard times. Examples include both the Poor Roll in English and Scottish parishes that, for over two centuries until the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, provided poor relief for the destitute with funds raised by charitable donations from the congregation, as well as the Islamic tradition that charity to beggars may be not refused on a Friday.
The results strongly suggest that it is active participation in the religious services that is important, rather than merely a sense of being religious. Religiosity certainly plays a role, as does engaging in private religious activities like prayer, but Figure 1 rather strongly suggests that there is a causal sequence running from private prayer to religiosity to regular attendance, which in turn creates a greater commitment to being engaged with the wider community. From this, there is a small residual effect the leads to larger sympathy and support groups. This suggests that it is the active participation in communal rituals, not the belief state or predisposition to believe, that is instrumental in creating these psycho-social effects and benefits. It may be that the particular beliefs of a religion serve a different function—such as persuading people to keep turning up to the regular religious services (Dunbar, 2013) or to maintain an appropriate degree of moral rectitude (the supernatural punishment hypothesis: Johnson, 2005).