A study by an ISU faculty member shows that people who attend church regularly live longer than people who do not.

Daniel Russell, professor of psychology and researcher for the Institute for Social and Behavior, uncovered evidence that church attendance emerged as an important predictor of mortality, both in terms of overall levels of mortality and mortality due to cancer or respiratory disease.

“Studies have linked mortality with attending religious services among the elderly,” he said. “It suggests that something about church attendance may affect your immune system, which, in turn, serves to protect you against certain illnesses that lead to mortality in the elderly.”

In 1981, Russell said he and three other professors began a study of 3,000 people 65 years old or older residing in Iowa and Washington counties. He said the original purpose of the investigation was to evaluate how measures of social contact and loneliness are related to mortality. “We followed them throughout a course of 13 years, taking samples from people in nursing homes and people at home,” he said.

After a number of tests addressing stress, loneliness, mental status and social contact, Russell said the group asked the participants about faith. Sixty-three percent indicated they attended religious services at least once a week, whereas 17 percent indicated they never attended such services, the study said.

The report, “Social Contact and Mortality Among Rural Older Adults: A Structural Equation Modeling Analysis,” was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Francisco, Calif., in August 1998.

Approximately 44 percent of the participants died over the 12 to 13 year follow-up period, Russell said. Thus, the report said, individuals who reported attending church more frequently were less likely to die.

Russell said this relationship was statistically significant after controlling for demographic characteristics, measures of health and well-being and other measures of interpersonal relationships and personal support.

“There is a 57 percent reduction in the mortality rate as you go from [people] never attending church to attending church more than once a week,” he said. “We called it ‘The God Effect.’ We knew people that went to church had more social support, but it didn’t fully explain the lower mortality effect.”

William Hoyt, assistant professor in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he did not participate in the study with Russell but collaborated on a “meta-analysis of studies examining religion and mortality.”

“The studies included diverse age groups, and the amount of time until investigators assessed who was still alive from the original sample varied,” he said.

He said a meta-analysis provides a good opportunity to summarize what is known about a topic. “The role of religion in physical and physiological well-being is controversial,” he said. “This was an opportunity for us to summarize the findings of existing studies.”

While Dave Russell, pastor at First Baptist Church, said real life examples of Hoyt’s study can be found, he said there are cases where it did not insulate a person from the harsh realities of life.

“In some cases, the opposite of what the study found is true,” he said. “Taking one’s faith seriously can get a person in trouble — it can even get a person killed. Martin Luther King Jr. and Archbishop Oscar Romero come to mind as individuals who had their lives cut short because of their faith. And you have to admit that a strong faith did not help Jesus live a long life.”

Hoyt said the findings suggest directions for future research into the source of the protective effects of religion.