Religion makes you depressed…if you’re Asian!!!

Well, today something popped into my RSS which is likely to make many neoatheists somewhat excited; Participating In Religion May Make Adolescents From Certain Races More Depressed:

But new research has found that this does not hold true for all adolescents, particularly for minorities and some females. The study found that white and African-American adolescents generally had fewer symptoms of depressive at high levels of religious participation. But for some Latino and Asian-American adolescents, attending church more often was actually affecting their mood in a negative way.
Asian-American adolescents who reported high levels of participation in their church had the highest number of depressive symptoms among teens of their race.

I managed to find an abstract:

This study explores the relationship between race, religiosity, and depression among American adolescents. Using data on 18,192 adolescents from Wave I of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we explore whether minority adolescents report higher levels of depression than white adolescents, and whether religious participation, religious affiliation, and the importance placed on religion have different effects on depression for minority adolescents. Results indicate that Black, Latino, and Asian adolescents have higher depression than white adolescents, but the relationship between religiosity and depression differs by race. While religious participation is negatively associated with depression for white and Black adolescents, it is positively associated with depression for Asian adolescents; Asian adolescents who frequently attend religious services report higher depression than Asian adolescents who attend religious services less frequently. In addition, the negative impact of religious participation on depression is more pronounced for Asian girls than Asian boys. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on race and depression among adolescents by suggesting that the relationships between religious affiliation, religious participation, and depression may vary among adolescents from different racial groups.

You can read the text (unfortunately Figures are stripped out) of the paper here.

Here is some old data from One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society:

A follow up study in 2000 shows that Asian Americans as a whole are much more likely to adhere to “Eastern Religions” than previously, but that the “No Religion” option was still prominent. This should not be so surprising, religion is a weak force in nations such as China, Taiwan and Japan in comparison to the United States, and even South Korea is 1/2 secular. I say even because most Americans might assume that the vast majority of South Koreans are Christian because of the enthusiastic Christianity of the Korean American community. The reality is that around 1/3 of South Koreans are Christian, a combination of selective migration of Christians along with proactive prosyletization of newcomers by Korean American churches has resulted in a Christianized population here in the United States.
The authors above have some complex social-psychological theories about assimilation and conformity in regards to why religious attendance is correlated with depression in Asian American women in particular. You don’t need to be a genius to intuit what their general idea is; particular cultural tensions between this subculture and the mainstream are at work, and religion might be an exacerbating as opposed to dampening influence. In contrast, the authors note the contrasting role of religion in the black community. I once knew a black atheist who told me that many of his co-racialists accused him of “being white” because of his lack of religion. Or, more precisely, the fact that he rejected the black church and religion as a whole as opposed to simply being lapsed or nominal. In short, some might perceive militant secularism as being antithetical to being black.
If one conceives of secularism to a large extent in a religious society of being a marker for nonconformity and deviance as a whole it would be expected that seculars would be prone to more psychopathology. Even if they initially did not exhibit traits which rendered them more susceptible from opting out of mainstream conventions, their deviation could result in a long term tension that might result in a psychological reaction. The authors note conservative Protestant youth report higher than average rates of depression than moderate or liberal Protestants. Their explanation is elegant and simple: mainline Protestantism exhibits the least deviation from the central tendency of society and so induces the least tension in an individual. In The Future of Religion data is reported that suggests that conservative Protestants in particular have a distinctive lifestyle which sets them off from the rest of society.
Asian Americans are religiously pluralistic and with a large dose of secularism. This is particularly true for the Chinese and Japanese American communities, which are divided among various Christian groups, as well as Buddhists and folk religionists, and a significant non-religious residual. The close identification of the black American experience with the Protestant church or the Korean American immigrant story with the rise of the Korean church does not have cognates in for example the Japanese American community. The Buddhist Church of America never has occupied the sample place in Japanese American life that, for example, the African Methodist Episcopal denomination has among elite black Americans going back to the 19th century.
But I don’t think that the specific results here are very important. Rather, it reinforces the point that generalizations about the affects of religion upon a society or individual must be handled with great caution. Religion in the white American community for example might be a predictor for reduced social pathology, all variables controlled, but certainly secular Japan is an example of a society where social pathology is even lower. And then you have the fact that religious attendance among American teenagers has opposite correlates in terms of psychological outcomes contingent upon their ethnic status! Since religion has its hand in so many social phenomena the confounds are legion and teasing them apart requires a great deal of caution, something which the boosters of religion and its enemies generally lack when making their cases to the court of public opinion.
Note: Many readers might be surprised at the secularity of Asian Americans because of the well known prominence of Asian Americans in evangelical groups on elite college campuses. But, just because most evangelicals within a particular subset of the population are Asian Americans does not mean that even within that subset most Asian Americans are evangelicals! Here’s some data:
Religious Beliefs and Practices, By Race
(Source: The Barna Group, Ventura, CA)