RSS Feed
Can Religion Effect or Affect Health?
The editors asked whether religion can effect health--your health, my health, health of anyone.
My answer: generally no.
If the editors had asked whether religion can affect health? My answer: sometimes yes.
Let's assume that there was a typographical error in the question, and then redeem it.
Get out the dictionary:
To effect is to "cause to come into being."
To affect is to '"to produce an effect upon."
Playing the game with the two words permits me to make, or attempt to make, my main point.
If I have ill health---a malignant tumor, Alzheimer's disease, disease-caused blindness, I would say "generally no" the question whether my religion can "cause to come into being" the disappearance of the cancer, the deterioration of brain cells, or blindness.
To observe that is not to deny the appearance of "cures" among people who pray, meditate, an follow disciplines. Further, to observe that is not to rule out the possibility, a priori, of "miracles" occurring. A 19th century German theologian wisely said that it is not wise to tell people in advance what they are permitted to believe. The long record of medical and "pastoral" care is too rich and too complex to warrant anyone's running around with a sticker to paste on hospital beds or wheel chairs: "Not possible."
To claim to "effect" good health," to bring into being such cures, however, is an invitation to false advertising, to license false hopes (acknowledging that there can be "true" hopes), and even guilt or worse health among the hyper-religious for whom their prayer disciplines were ineffective. Am I a reject of the divine? Did I not pray intensely enough? Did I not read enough best-sellers whose authors promise perfect health? Might I so depend on "miracle cures" that I shun good medical care, which is its own miracle cure? So, again, cancel "effect."
Yes, to the suggestion that religion--too broad a term here, but we know what we mean when we use it in this context, Religion can affect health and in some ways produce healthful effects. One can assert this without moving into magic, superstition, or charlatanry.
I like to begin empirically. I've heard of a man who was asked if he believed in infant baptism. "Believe in it, hell, I've SEEN it!" So many of us who have worked on frontiers where religion and health meet have "seen" good effects. For a score of years I was affiliated with and a leader at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, we brought together first-class physicians, clinicians, other scientists, chaplains, pastors, ethicists, and more to measure and interpret findings about how religion affected better health.
Standards were high. A nationally known physician who worked with us counseled that we should push as far as we could, "but don't do any nutty stuff that I can't bring into med school." Of course, what is "nutty stuff" to some people in one generation becomes mainstream in the next. But I think readers will know what I mean in this context. We get some empirical clues: Seventh-Day Adventists and Latter-day Saints live longer than those who smoke, drink alcohol, ingest caffeine. (One who left Adentism smiled over a glass of wine: "but, then, maybe it only SEEMED we lived longer!) Those longer lives were "effects" of the way the disciplines of those faiths led to health-giving ways.
By now the mind-body connections are so much studied and the health-giving role of certain mental ("spiritual") processes have helped with health. Some studies show that regular church-goers have better health and longer lives than those who sleep-in on Sundays. Whether the "religion" did it or whether those who take care of their health tend to be more religious is unsettled in this.
Beyond it all, the care given through religious agencies, congregations, and the like, affect health. And finding meaning in the midst of suffering, while it does not remove pain, can help promote health as someone who is ill reorients life.
So, once again: religion in some of its many faces can affect health--and produce good effects. Still: handle with care!
By
Martin Marty
|
June 13, 2008; 9:54 AM ET
Share This: 
Technorati
| Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook
Previous: Faith is not a New Age Belief |
Next: You Want Facts or Feelings?
Posted by: BGone | June 15, 2008 11:36 AM
Report Offensive Comment
I like Martin Marty's distinction between "effecting" and "affecting" health.
To put it another way, physical disease is not the only component of health. Healing is not simply a matter of the physical disease processes. How we live in our bodies, and how those around us respond to us, can lead us to live well or ill, to experience wellness or illness. Our faith, our personal belief systems and our communities of faith, have a lot to do with the transmutation of disease into illness, or our ability to live well with disease. The healing power of faith often succeeds in healing illness, whether or not it achieves a medical cure for disease.
In addition, societal sickness produces a lot of disease. Our social system is sick, and that sickens us. On one side, our economic and social system means that most of us are living with stress, overwork, isolation, and anxiety; on another side, many lack medical care, appropriate information, good food, or even a place to sleep at night. This sickness is a social illness, and when the deepest values of our faith call for fair distribution of society's basic goods, human rights, and justice for all, faith can contribute to the healing of the social ills as well.
Posted by: Rachel | June 14, 2008 6:07 PM
Report Offensive Comment
I always like Martin Marty; he reminds me of my grandfather, a life-long baptist minister. I'm not a religious believer, myself, but I find them both to be eminently reasonable in their approach to faith.
Posted by: jyhume | June 14, 2008 10:31 AM
Report Offensive Comment
"(...)save the Lord of the Worlds . Who created me , and He doth guide me , And Who feedeth me and watereth me . And when I sicken , then He healeth me ," (Koran, Ash-Shu'araa : 77-80)
Posted by: Visitor | June 13, 2008 1:38 PM
Report Offensive Comment
The comments to this entry are closed.
Picky, picky, picky. To effect or affect? That is the question?
Faith did something rather "affective" to the health of a few million folks between 1933 and 1945. And and particular faith was ignored with some being greater beneficiaries of faith "affecting" their health than others There's a right smart of that still going on too. Faith has caused folks to literally lose their heads recently, within the past 7 years. And the faithful were so proud of themselves for "affecting" the health of infidels they put it on television, whacked that poor boy's head clean off severing it and his health in one easy step.
The history books are so filled with the affect of faith on health it's not that far off to say history is the story of the affect of faith on health. Faith has been an affective source of sudden changes in the health of not only individuals but whole synagogues full of them with an occasional church thrown in just for the flavoring. And then there's the affect faith had on the health of Montezuma as a stellar example of how faith in gold affects the health of the suspicious and the non suspecting alike.
The illnesses cured by faith are many. How many is impossible to know without knowing what else besides being alive and in possession of something others of great faith wanted suffered from that needed to be cured. One little whack and all diseases are cured, or at least rendered harmless by comparison.
Faith is the source and not the solution to what the editors have in mind.