CONNECTING
FAITH AND HEALTH

Topics: Church Attendance; Health; Worship

References: Exodus 20:24; Hebrews 10:24–25

Recent studies indicate that men and women of faith live longer than people of no faith. They have fewer strokes, less heart disease, less clinical depression, better immune system function, lower blood pressure, and fewer anxiety attacks. They are also less likely to commit suicide.

These findings come from secular medical schools and schools of public health. What’s more, Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University Medical Center has calculated that the lack of religious involvement has an effect on mortality that is equivalent to forty years of smoking one pack of cigarettes per day.

And another study by researchers at the University of Texas found that those who regularly attended worship services lived an average of seven years longer than those who never attended.

—Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic (July 1999)