Journal: Religion, well-being and anxiety

I’ve been thinking that I would like to use my doctoral degree in occupational therapy for something a little “out there” – there are nearly countless studies exploring the relationship between religion or religiosity and different aspects of health – but there are essentially no studies exploring the relationship between atheism and different aspects of health. Many of the religion studies use “non-believers” as a subgroup or control, but they don’t use people who identify specifically as atheist.

I’ve been perusing journal articles on religion, so I may as well document my findings publicly. My readers can get a sense of the kind of research being done or the kind of research I might do, I can get a sense of what kinds of things people (or at least my small group of commenters) find interesting.

The journal article[1] for today was a survey designed to examine if there were any differences between a group of Christians, Muslims, and non-believers with regard to five personality factors (dominance, liveliness, warmth, apprehension , and sensitivity), general well-being, and death anxiety.  As such, researchers used a demographic survey and several scales: a personality test designed to test the factors above, a well-being test, and a question about death anxiety rated using a Likert scale (a numerical scale ranging from 0-7, where 0 represents “low” and 7 represents “high”)

The study used 63 Christians, 18 Muslims, and 54 non-religious subjects.

The results indicated no statistical differences for the five personality factors and a significant difference between reported well-being of Christian verses non-religious participants. Regarding death anxiety, there was no significant difference between death anxiety of Christians and non-religious participants, but Muslims scores significantly higher on death anxiety. On the 0-7 scale, Christians scored 2.16, the non-religious group scored 2.94, and Muslims scored 4.5.

I am really interested in knowing about this non-religious group, as non-religious is (to me) a very vague term. The study does not say now they located the non-religious participants, but given that many fundamentalist Christians insist that they are “not religious” because they instead have a “personal relationship” with their god, “non-religious” could range all the way from hard atheist to hard fundamentalist. Even ignoring this, there seem to be some differences between people who self-identify as atheist, versus people who self-identify as agnostic, secular, apathist, etc.

These differences between different types of non-believer need to be studied much in the same way that much of the research on religion studies separate groups of Abrahamic theists. It would be very interesting, for example,  to repeat this study with a group of atheists, agnostics, and believers in “some kind of universal life force” and see if there are significant differences between those groups.

Non-believers, Muslims and Christians were compared, but given that Muslims and Christians are both monotheistic religions, they could in some ways belong to the same group. Using a group of atheists, a group of polytheists, and a group of monotheists would have been more effective at creating distinct groups.

This study and others suggest that strong religious faith is correlated with greater life-satisfaction, sense of well-being, and happiness, but I wonder if this has less to do with strong religious faith and more to do with relative certainty about how the universe works. I am relatively certain that the universe operates according to natural, material processes without supernatural guidance, and this have essentially zero religious belief. I think that this relative certainty contributes to my happiness, rather than uncertainty, apathy, or ambiguity. Non-believers who do not label themselves as atheist may have more uncertainty about how the universe operates which could correlate with a lower sense of well-being. There are no studies looking at well-being scores of atheists.

Regarding death anxiety, it is interesting that the scores were so similar for Christians and non-believers, but again, I want to know more about this non-believer group. Lots of people claim to be non-believers, but (in my experience) when you press them on the issue of life and death, many of them believe in some sort of afterlife or have some kind of non-conventional religious belief that simply isn’t important enough to them for them to label themselves. Many people will say that they aren’t religious, but they believe in a god. I can imagine that there could be significant differences on the scales used in this study between “non-religious but believes in a god” individuals and “atheist” individuals.

I also wonder if a non-believer might come to religion to cope with death anxiety, find their coping strategy in their religion, and then thus identify with their religion instead of as non-religious. In other words, if a non-believer is faced with increasing anxiety over death, that individual may cease to be a non-believer as a coping strategy for that anxiety.  Then, they are no longer part of the non-believer sample and their death anxiety is reduced by their newfound religion at the same time.

This study did show that Muslims had a higher death anxiety than non-believers or Christians, but other studies mentioned in the discussion of this study found otherwise, so It think the results in this case are rather ambiguous.

[1] Morris, G., McAdie, T. Are personality, well-being and death anxiety related to religious affiliation? Mental Health, Religion and Culture (2009) 12:2 115-120
Online Abstract