What the Wizard said to the Scarecrow, “Anybody can have a brain,” could just as easily have been something Dr. Terman said to his subjects. They were all quite smart, but this was not enough to take them very far. Being intelligent was not a ticket to long life, but channeling knowledge and smarts toward productive achievement was.
CHAPTER 11
Long Life Meets the Afterlife
Religion played a different role in Linda’s, John’s, and Donna’s lives. Linda was raised Catholic and attended Sunday school most weeks. At age twenty, she married a Catholic man and they remained active together in their church throughout their lives. John, in contrast, lived pretty much without religious involvement. As a young adult, he focused on his career and never developed an interest in congregational religion. Donna was more representative of most of the Terman participants: in her twenties she was somewhat interested in her Lutheran church, and during the decade that followed she became further involved, bringing her children to Sunday school. She was never as devoted as Linda, however, and her religious involvement gradually waned as her children grew up and left home.
Was religious involvement relevant to the health and long life of the Terman participants? Overall in the United States, we know that religious people tend to be healthier and live somewhat longer than the nonreligious, but there is a lot of individual variation.76 Similar results have emerged from other studies in Europe and Asia. Why do religious folks stay healthier and live longer? Does praying make a difference?
Ancient advice about long life comes from the biblical book of Exodus, where one of the Ten Commandments instructs, “Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land which the Lord God is giving you.” Among the many commentaries on this stark verse, three are highly relevant to the issue of religion and health. The first interpretation is that those who live a righteous life will be blessed with long life. A second, alternative interpretation asserts that the honoring of parents is necessary for the nation (or people) to remain in the Holy Land. A third interpretation is that a harmonious, respectful family life and social structure will lead to a stable civilization and long healthy lives. These age-old thoughts turned out to provide an excellent framework for our modern thinking about families, religion, social relations, and health.
Sometimes religion can be dangerous to health. People who shun modern medical treatment in favor of faith healing can cause great harm to themselves or their ill family members. A few religious groups have become cults that advocate violence or antiscientific practices. But such groups are a minority, and we are focusing our research attention on mainstream religious organizations that are compatible with modern life and scientific knowledge.
Does Prayer Work?
People often ask us if praying leads to better health and longer life. The questioner may be asking either if religious devotion and the associated psychosocial characteristics affect health or if intercessory prayer does. There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer—examining whether praying for a sick person can lead to recovery via divine intervention. Some of them try to be very scientific. That is, they may have a control group (a comparison group) of ill people who are not prayed for. But it would be disappointing for many ill folks to know that no one is praying for them. So a study may go even further and be a double-blind study, in which neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is being systematically prayed for and who is not. Intellectual interest in such matters traces back several hundred years to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote about the reasoning and evidence needed to establish the existence of miracles.77
From a psychological point of view, these arguments are fascinating. Most proponents of intercessory prayer present it as an article of faith. For most scientists, however, faith in supernatural forces is outside their realm. This does not mean that scientists cannot have faith in the supernatural, just that such ideas depend wholly upon, well, faith. By definition, supernatural means “beyond the natural,” and unexplainable by scientific law.
So why would someone design a scientific experiment to try to test an article of faith? We think that such attempts arise repeatedly in a society that is too willing to underestimate the psychological, social, and behavioral influences on health and well-being. Because the “science” of modern medicine is often too quick to reduce health to simple mechanical cause-and-effect relations, many patients feel a dissatisfaction and frustration with medical care. They “know” that a good family life (honoring father and mother) and devotion to others can lead to good health. Our studies of the Terman participants, as well as studies by others, convinced us that good health is indeed a much more complicated phenomenon and that religion provides a good insight into pathways to long life.
Religious Involvement Throughout Life
In 1950 Donna and the other Terman participants (who were then around forty years old) were asked, “As an adult, to what extent are you religiously inclined?” Some were not at all religiously inclined, others were a little, and still others were moderately or strongly religious. Donna, for example, indicated that she was moderately religious. The question did not ask respondents if they were affiliated with a particular religion or regularly attended religious services. Instead this was a more global question, accounting for private practice of religion, too.
Unfortunately, a particular type of bias often crops up in studies of religion and health: people who report that they attend religious services on a regular basis may be healthier to start with—they have the ability to get out and about, they are not severely depressed, and they have enough social skills to be able to function in a community. We designed our studies to look at health effects that go beyond these obvious ones.
The cases of Linda and John and Donna showed us that religious involvement has many aspects that could be relevant to good health, but they also illustrated the differences among individuals in their religious devotion and their daily health habits. Linda was both the most traditional and the most religious of the three. She had a compassionate nature, being described in childhood as “kind on principle” and unable to tolerate cruelty. She was also prudent and truthful—“never misleads or misrepresents, however great the temptation.” She attended her Catholic church regularly throughout life, which reinforced these inclinations.
Linda’s early religious leanings were evident from her response to Dr. Terman’s early questions about reading. In 1922 he presented a list of twenty-eight different types of readings. The children were requested to place an X in front of those they liked and two Xs in front of those they liked “very much.” Although Linda placed Xs on twelve different lines, only three received double Xs: love stories, garden books, and the Bible. Religious reading found its place in her top three again in 1927. In adulthood many of Linda’s health behaviors were consistent with what we know to be true of religious folks in generaclass="underline" she never smoked and she never drank alcohol. She remained an active member of her congregation, and so did her husband.
Although John and Linda shared some of the same childhood characteristics (he was described as “truthful, honest, and frank” as well as being more tender and sympathetic than the typical child), his lack of religious inclination was as clear as Linda’s predisposition toward it. As a child and young adult, he rarely attended religious services and while in 1922 he marked twenty-five of the twenty-eight types of reading as enjoyable, he did not put an X on the line next to the Bible.
76
For a review of religion and health see M. E. McCullough, W. T. Hoyt, D. B. Larson, H. G. Koenig, and C. E. Thoresen, “Religious Involvement and Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review,”
77
For philosopher David Hume’s essay, see