Religion, Families and Health: Population-based Research in the United States

Abstract

The subtitle of this volume delineates its scope: population-based research in the United States. This stream of research captures the leading position of the University of Texas research team and their colleagues in empirical investigations of religious involvement in the contemporary United States. Taken together, these articles all address two overarching questions: first, whether religious belief and/or involvement in religious activity correlates with variations in family circumstances, attitudes, and experiences and with mental and physical health outcomes; and second, whether any such correlations suggest that religious belief or activity actually have some independent causal effects on health and family life. The first of these questions is convincingly answered in the affirmative, as the more than two dozen authors demonstrate linkages between religion and family life outcomes (in Part 1 of the book) and between religion and health outcomes (in Part 2 of the book). The causal impacts implied by the use of phrases like “family life outcomes” and “health outcomes” in the section headings of the book are perhaps less convincing in some cases. The perennial issue always centers on whether correlations between religion and other dimensions of social life reflect selection of certain people into religious involvement, or an actual causal effect of religious involvement on those other dimensions of life.