This is a follow up to the post yesterday, Religion is good for your health? Conservative Christianity bad?. I finished reading the paper. It’s not a bad one really, but its plausibility will be strongly conditioned by theoretical priors. It is a work in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, and attempts to resurrect a functionalist conception of religious denominations, David Sloan Wilson is smiling somewhere…. The authors posit that the other-worldly orientation of Fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations results in a host of social dynamics which increase mortality rates. In contrast, they contend that the this-worldly orientation of Mainline and Catholic denominations results in a more communitarian public spirit which generates positive externalities within a society. They don’t use the the term externality. In the paper they seem intent on carving out a non-economical space for their analysis, but that’s basically what they’re talking about. Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism focus on public social justice in a manner which injects capital into the community as a whole irrespective of sect. Fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches on the other hand are focused on their own narrow church-life and rather disengaged from collective public action which might produce communal capital (this shows up in the nature of mission-work, while Mainline and Catholic activities being more strongly geared toward education and health as opposed to just converting). An individual illustration of this might be James G. Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, and a Pentecostal, who reputedly had little interest in being a steward of the land due to his belief that the End Times were approaching and environmentalism was ultimately in vain.
At the end of this post I’ve placed the tables from the paper. The authors performed a regression analysis and found that Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism predicted higher mortality, while Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism and Evangelicalism predicted lower mortality, in that rank order. Additionally, they found elevated mortality from social pathology among Roman Catholics, and they adduced from this that this is likely due to the high rates of alcohol consumption among this group. Finally, they found that Evangelicals tended to have lower mortality rates than expected, and they inferred from this that this reflects the fact that this group is more engaged with society than are Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who are operationally much more sectarian. Jerry Falwell was a Fundamentalist, Pat Robertson is a Pentecostal and Billy Graham is an Evangelical.
First, let me hit the theoretical objection: cognitive psychology of religion strongly suggests that the relationship between believers and their theologies are very weak. This is documented in books such as In Gods We Trust and Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. The authors of the paper focus on “cultural content” in a manner which puts the spotlight on conscious, explicit and reflective cognition, but the consensus among psychologists today is that much of our inner lives are subconscious, implicit and reflexive. Macroscale inferences must be weighted in light of these microscale results. James G. Watt justified his hostility toward environmentalism through religious rationales, but it seems likely to me that he used religious language because it was the language he was familiar with. If he was a militant libertarian he would have used libertarian logic; if he was a Marxist he might have used Marxist logic. Methodologically I think we should consider the possibility that people use ideas, ideas do not shape people. On the margins I do think that ideas may shape people, but we really don’t know enough about it to generalize appropriately. Max Weber’s disastrous predictions about “Confucian” societies and their fundamental inability to ever become economically productive based on their ideological content is due warning.
Then there is the problem of definition and the neat & tidy theologies that the authors presume have a concrete reality. Fundamentalism is to a large extent a phenomenon which emerged around 1900, as is Pentecostalism. The suite of beliefs and dispositions of these religious movements predates either, but their current social configuration is a relatively recent phenomenon. But if you read Albion’s Seed you note that the social pathologies of the American South and the communitarianism of New England have roots as far back as the 17th century! Additionally, mortality rates were higher in the South in large part due to ecological factors. But during this period it would be fair to say that it was the North, especially New England, was the center of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism. The American South did not become the hotbed of religious activity it is today until the The Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century, when the dominance of the Episcopal Church gave way to the revivalism of the Baptists and Methodists. Churches that are today Mainline, such as the Congregationalists (United Church of Christ), Methodists and Presbyterians were once the Evangelical counterpoint to the Anglican establishment. And yet the social dynamics which are extant in the Upland South, which was Presbyterian Calvinist, and New England, Congregationalist Calvinists, have always been very different no matter the theological outlook ascendant.
There is one finding which the authors seem to have a hard time making sense of: Evangelicals outside the South tend to have lower mortality, but those within the South resemble Fundamentalists and Pentecostals. They explain this by asserting that there is little difference between Southern Evangelicals, Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, and more overlap in outlooks. I can accept this, but I do think it calls into question their ability to objectively generate a taxonomy which can’t be fudged post facto. Consider the idea that alcoholism and Catholicism are associated; in the United States most white Catholics are not of Southern European ancestry, they’re mostly German and Irish. There is a body of research which suggests that Northern Europeans are more susceptible to alcohol related social pathologies in due to a combination of genetic and cultural factors. If Catholics were Italian or Spanish then one would not see these pathologies to the same extent despite high rates of consumption. Alcoholism in Protestant Northern Europe is more of a problem than in Catholic Southern Europe, but the difference has little to do with religion and everything to do with the nature of broader cultural and genetic differences between these regions which happen to map onto the sectarian split.
In any case, there’s a lot to chew on. I appreciate that they ran some regressions, but I think there are some omitted variables lurking in there that they haven’t accounted for….
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