Yes, religion does affect your mental health, and as the stats show, it affects positively. Individuals who practice a religious belief system have been noted to experience a wealth of psychological benefits from their belief. However, those benefits tend to diminish depending on whether or not their faith is extrinsic or intrinsic. Those who express their faith in an intrinsic way experience the most mental health benefits.
What Do We Mean By ReligionÂ
People typically think of religion as a set of rules or mandates from a god or gods. These mandates if followed will result in some paradise after death. This idea does account for quite a few of the religions that we know of today. However, it does not account for all of them. There are some sects found in the big three, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity would all fall out of this categorization. So what makes a religion?
From my understanding, the one thing that all religions share is their establishing utmost importance in something. That something of ultimate reverence could be anything or everything, and in rare cases it is nothing.Â
Now to hold anything with utmost importance, a religion needs a system of value. The only way to say x is more important than y is by a network of values. It need not be an external system, but it does need to be hierarchical. That is, it must be able to say x is better than y. To be able to make the judgment that x is better than y, it must be able to reference neither x or y in showing that either one is better than the other. That thing outside of x and y that you use to judge x and y is the hierarchical value system.
So given those two factors, the reverence of one thing above all others, and a system by which you can define it to be more important than all others. We have our definition. Religion is a belief that one thing is more important than everything else and has a system by which it can assign importance. I think this is a better way to define religion and will be the way that I will be using religion throughout this article.
What is Mental Health
Contrary to what most think and to what has been the prevailing opinion since the dawn of psychology. A mentally healthy individual is not an individual who does not have any mental illness. If you remove all of the mental illness from a person, you do not get a mentally healthy person. You have a person free of mental illness. In other words, a patient with no mental illness is not mentally well but merely empty.
Mental Illness
Most of us know a mental illness when we see it. In fact, with the increase in the popularity of psychology, most of us even think we can diagnose mental illness. Disorders such as A.D.H.D., Anxiety, and depression are often thrown around by any sixteen years old who have heard of the name Freud. However, diagnosing a mental illness has far more nuance and rigor involved than merely saying it is so.
Mental illness’ as defined in the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is short for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We are currently on the D.S.M.–5, which means we are on the 5th revision of the manual.Â
According to the DSM-5, mental disorders are classified by these five traits:
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A behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual
Reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction
The consequences of which are clinically significant distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning)
Must not be merely an expected response to common stressors and losses (ex. the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (ex. trance states in religious rituals)
Primarily a result of social deviance or conflicts with society
Mental Well-being
Mental health has often been called mental well-being. To cut the idea out that a positive mental state is the absence of all negative mental states. After all, zero is not a negative number, but I am sure none of us would say we’re living a good life if we rated ourselves at a zero.Â
Mental well-being, as defined by the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. Means to report highly in five specific areas of the human experience. Â
PERMA:
- Positive Emotion
- Engagement
- Relationship
- Meaning
- Accomplishments
Subtypes Of Religious Adherence
A study conducted at Harvard University in 1967 by American psychologists Gordon Allport and J. Michael Ross found that those who went to church more frequently were less prejudice than those who attended infrequently and even those who did not attend at all. See table 1 below.
They found that the motivation for the churchgoers played a significant factor in their attendance rate as well as their prejudice. As a result, they developed two separate ways to categorize religious motivation. They called these two different motivations Intrinsic Religiosity and Extrinsic Religiosity. Allport and Ross briefly describe the differences of motives by saying:
“Perhaps the briefest way to characterize the two poles of subjective religion is to say that the extrinsically motivated person uses his religion, whereas the intrinsically motivated lives his religion.” (Allport and Ross 434)
They found that those who live their religion were less likely to be prejudice as opposed to those who use their religion. Meaning the most significant factor in a believer’s prejudice was not, that they were religious, but what their motive for being religious was.
Further on in their paper, Allport and Ross define each religious motive more thoroughly. To maintain the integrity of their definitions, I have included the direct quotes below.
Intrinsic Religiosity
“Persons with this orientation find their master motive in religion. Other needs, strong as they may be, are regarded as of less ultimate significance, and they are, so far as possible, brought into harmony with the religious beliefs and prescriptions. Having embraced a creed the individual endeavors to internalize it and follow it fully. It is in this sense that he lives his religion, A clergyman was making the same distinction when he said,
Some people come to church to thank God, to
acknowledge His glory, and to ask His guidance.
. . . Others come for what they can get.Â
Their interest in the church is to run it or exploit it rather than to serve it.”Â
(Allport and Ross 434)
Extrinsic Religiosity
“Persons with this orientation are disposed to use religion for their own ends. The term is borrowed from axiology, to designate an interest that is held because it serves other, more ultimate interests. Extrinsic values are always instrumental and utilitarian. Persons with this orientation may find religion useful in a variety of ways—-to provide security and solace, sociability and distraction, status and self-justification. The embraced creed is lightly held or else selectively shaped to fit more primary needs. In theological terms the extrinsic type turns to God, but without turning away from self.” (Allport and Ross 434)
A Meta-Analysis Of Religion And Mental Health
In a meta-analysis of 97 studies, Peter H. Van Ness, Ph.D., M.P.H. and David B. Larson, M.D., M.S.P.H. conducted for the Handbook On Religion and Health. Van Ness and Larson looked at the relationship between religion the following aspects of mental health: well-being, religious coping, cognitive dysfunction, anxiety, depression, and suicide. They also accounted for the extent of which hope is a mediator of the reported advantageous effects of religious expression. Their review of the data gathered over 97 studies found that religious expression produced many benefits in each of the specific areas of interest. Â
I have included the chart describing their methods of religious classification below.
Positive Associations With Intrinsic Religiosity
The study conducted by Van Ness & Larson found many mental health benefits correlated with religious belief. I have listed some of the specific areas mentioned in their paper along with a table showing the number of studies reflect the correlations.
Along with the findings listed in the table above they also found positive associations with the following:
- Life Satisfaction
- Happiness
- Optimism
- Coping With Disease and Disability
- Coping With Cognitive Dysfunction
- Postponement of Death
- Better Management of Pain and Improvement of Life Satisfaction During Illness
Conclusion
What I have written has nothing to do with the validity of any specific religion, but what I have written does support the idea that religion expressed intrinsically is beneficial for your mental health. This view is quite to the contrary of many modern people today both inside and outside the church. Author and former Professor of Psychiatry and President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Andrew Sims writes in his book Is Faith Delusion?: Why religion is good for your health
“The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally. If the findings of the huge volume of research on this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health, it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land.
In the majority of studies, religious involvement is correlated with well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism;purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better adaptation to bereavement; greater social support and less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide; less anxiety; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug use and abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; greater marital stability and satisfaction… We concluded that for the vast majority of people the apparent benefits of devout belief and practice probably outweigh the risks.”
The data is in, and there are years of research supporting it. We can no longer deny the fact that intrinsic religious behavior is beneficial to our mental well-being. Contrary to the famous voices of today, religion does not poison everything. Is seems to do quite the opposite.Â
While religious belief is beneficial for our mental health, it is only helpful when it is practiced intrinsically. Which means you cannot attain the benefits described in this article by merely becoming religious for the gain of mental health. That would mean you were extrinsically motivated. The benefits of religion come as a by-product of your devotion to the creed you follow. Intrinsic religiosity undoubtedly has a positive effect on mental health.
Sources
https://www.saybrook.edu/unbound/defining-mental-disorders-dsm-5-style/
Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of personality and social psychology, 5(4), 432.
Van Ness, P. H., & Larson, D. B. (2002). Religion, senescence, and mental health: the end of life is not the end of hope. The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, 10(4), 386–397.
Knowing my Creator has completely transformed my life. (John 17:3)