Donna fell in between the two—she didn’t particularly care about reading the Bible, but as a teenager she listed religious reading as one of her preferred genres. Her church attendance during childhood was not as regular as Linda’s, but her religious involvement increased over time, peaked in midlife, and then clearly tapered off after her sons left home.
We then asked ourselves: Was religious involvement at midlife predictive of long life during the ensuing decades? Before we get to those results, take a moment to reflect on your own religious experience.
Answer each of the questions below as accurately as you can—some of these are exactly the same questions Dr. Terman asked his participants decades ago.
Not at all 1 2 3 4 5 Very much
1. To what extent are you religiously inclined?
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2. How much do you enjoy reading religious texts?
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3. How regularly do you attend religious services?
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4. How much do you pray?
1 2 3 4 5
5. How often do you watch religious programs on television or listen to them on the radio?
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6. How involved are you with your religious community?
1 2 3 4 5
To calculate your score, simply add up your responses. Your result should fall between 6 and 30. Higher scores correspond with greater religiosity, but how should this be interpreted? It’s not what you might first think. Having a low score is no reason for health panic and a high score is no assurance of long life because, as we discovered, not all elements of religiosity are equally important. We need to separate out the elements of being “religious” in order to understand how religion is relevant to health.
When we looked at whether religious involvement at midlife was predictive of long life during the ensuing decades, we saw that religiosity did not matter much for the men, a finding that has also surfaced in shorter-term studies by other researchers. But for the women, the religiously inclined were clearly more likely to live long lives.
In childhood these women tended to be more prudent, generous, and unselfish than the typical child. When they were teenagers, their parents described them as especially full of tenderness and sympathy and as having affectionate relations with their families. They grew up happier but somewhat more likely to conform to the authority of others, and they were optimistic about the future. They were, of course, less likely to smoke, abuse alcohol, and take illegal drugs. Importantly, in addition to being religious, these women tended to be socially involved and outgoing.
Trajectories of the Religious Women Who Lived Long
For the individual, of course, religiosity and religious attendance are not static and unchanging. Some people are and stay devout, others drift away, and still others become more devoted and spiritual over time. To understand the story in a way that included the importance of changes in religiousness over time, we teamed up with Professor Michael McCullough.78 Mike has a well-deserved reputation for his research on revenge, forgiveness, and other such fascinating aspects of religion and health. Our measures of how religious each Terman subject was came from various questions they answered throughout many years. In addition to queries about the extent to which they were religiously inclined, they reported on their religious instruction, their Bible reading, their worship, and more. In our research, their answers were judged on religiosity, ranging from absolutely no religious interest to having a very strong religious inclination and involvement, at various points in time.
We again analyzed who lived the longest, now looking more fully at their life paths across the decades. Could it be that the long-lived women achieved an inner peace and self-healing through their long-term prayer and devotion? Which of their characteristics mattered most to long life?
The very religious women tended to be very friendly but were also inclined to be worriers. We found that we could explain their long lives by taking into account their outgoing yet concerned personalities, and their good, helpful social ties and behaviors, as they were measured in midlife. In other words, for these women, religion was a core and stable part of who they were and how they behaved—and it served them well in terms of long life.
It was the least religious women who were least likely to live a very long life. These women were not religious in young adulthood and stayed that way throughout their lives. They were generally bright and productive but they were less likely to be very extroverted and trusting, less likely to get and stay married, and less likely to have children or to be extensively involved in helping others.
What about the women like Donna whose religious inclinations declined with age? For them, we had to consider the various influences in their lives that occurred after 1940, as they aged. These women tended to be married, with children, and they, too, were careful about their health and often involved in volunteer service activities. As these women became less involved with religion, however, what emerged as important to their longevity were their social ties and health behaviors. Following her divorce, Donna was working hard to support her two boys, was disappointed in relationships, and had little time for or interest in friends and outside activities. In contrast to those who thrived, she had no strong social ties to replace the ones she lost as she gradually withdrew from church. Of course, the fact that she smoked with her associates at work also likely played a key role in her early death.
Herein lay the core of our striking finding: overall it was not religious involvement per se that was so important to long life, although it helped many women. Rather it was the other characteristics that tended to go along with being religious that explained why these women lived longer. It was not the meditative effect of prayer or the act of regular attendance at religious services that mattered. It was a much broader collection of associated acts and attributes. Those who gradually left their religious involvement were at high risk if they also let their community involvement falter and diminish.
If these findings about religious inclination and long life are not a fluke, then other well-designed studies should yield similar results. One seven-year health study examined the religious involvement of over ninety thousand American women aged fifty and older as part of the Women’s Health Initiative.79 This huge study did confirm that the women who were more religiously involved were less likely to die during the period of the study. This result remained even after taking into account influences such as age, ethnicity, income, education, and certain aspects of health status such as smoking and drinking. These confirming results, as well as those from other recent studies, increased our confidence that the detailed findings that have emerged from our studies of the Terman participants are pointing to some fundamental insights about the paths to good health.
What It Means for You: Guideposts to Health and Long Life
While we cannot provide empirical corroboration about whether being pious is important to gaining eternal life, we did uncover good evidence that at least some aspects of congregational participation are relevant to the length of one’s present life. The guideposts we identified, however, do not point directly to the church, the synagogue, or the mosque. Nor do they steer us directly to the meditation garden, with incense and candles. Instead, the most important characteristics, especially for women, are linked to social networks and community engagement.
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Our study with Dr. McCullough is M. E. McCullough, H. S. Friedman, C. K. Enders, and L. R. Martin, “Does Devoutness Delay Death? Psychological Investment in Religion and Its Association with Longevity in the Terman Sample,”
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For the large-scale, seven-year women’s health study, see E. Schnall, S. Wassertheil-Smoller, C. Swencionis, V. Zemon, L. Tinker, M. J. O’Sullivan, L. Van Horn, and M. Goodwin, “The Relationship between Religion and Cardiovascular Outcomes and All-Cause Mortality in the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study,”