Faith and physical health — what research shows

Decades of epidemiological research have produced a surprisingly consistent finding: people who attend religious services regularly tend to live longer, have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, recover more quickly from illness, and report higher levels of overall wellbeing. The mechanisms are debated — social support, meaning-making, health behaviors encouraged by religious communities, the physiological effects of contemplative practice — and the relationship is not uniform across all religious contexts. But the evidence is strong enough that to ignore the connection between spiritual life and physical health is to miss something real about the full ecology of human flourishing.