Spirituality and the “Faith Factor”

(C) Copyright by Timothy Conway, Ph.D. 1998, 2006

A major trend of recent years is the deepening spirituality and adherence to religious faith found among large sectors of the populace here in the U.S. and in several countries abroad. This trend is likely not just to continue but to grow much stronger—a rather amazing phenomenon, considering that, as sociologist Rodney Stark tells it: “At least since the Enlightenment, most Western intellectuals have anticipated the death of religion as eagerly as ancient Israel awaited the Messiah.… The most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology and psychology have unanimously expressed confidence that their children, or surely their grandchildren, would live to see the dawn of a new era in which, to paraphrase Freud, the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown.” [1]

However, contrary to the views of these anti-religious intellectuals—Antoine de Condorcet (1743-94), Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), Karl Marx (1818-83), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1938), B.F. Skinner (1904-90), Albert Ellis (1913- ) et al.—in the 1980s and 1990s numerous experts from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology went on record to express surprise over the durability of religion in a supposed “post-faith” era. Not only that, as Professors Huston Smith, Ninian Smart, Father Andrew Greeley, John Hick, Wade Clark Roof, Harvey Cox, Rodney Stark and others observe, religion has triumphantly survived oppression by the different forms of anti-religious modernity: secularization, scientism and atheistic communism. Clearly, homo sapiens tends to be homo religiosus.

Spirituality and religious faith have survived because they are valuable, enriching and salvational—not just for the soul, but also body, mind and society as well. Dr. Herbert Benson, founder of Harvard University’s Mind/Body Institute and a longtime advocate of holistic healing via the meditative “relaxation response,” in recent years, on the basis of the research evidence, advocates an explicit faith in God or transcendent spiritual reality to enhance the effects of meditative relaxation.

Dr. David Larson, a psychiatrist formerly with the prestigious National Institutes of Health, established his own National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR) to collect, analyze, summarize and report the scientific studies accumulating by the hundreds, showing that spirituality and religion are good for our physical, mental and social health. The positive effects are especially true of an authentic or “intrinsic” spirituality, a deep “connection with God or Higher Power that gives life meaning and guides life choices”—in contrast to “extrinsic” religiosity—like simply believing in God, having superficial membership in a church or synagogue, or watching evangelists on TV.[2]

Larson, his colleagues, and his predecessors have found that, after controlling for possible interfering variables, authentic spirituality or meditative prayerfulness or deeply religious faith positively correlate with greater longevity; greater life satisfaction; better overall health, happiness and psychological well-being; stronger immune systems; greater marital and sexual satisfaction; less stress (psychological and physiological); less fear of death; less hospitalization and shorter hospital stays; lower blood-pressure; and lower rates of the following: coronary-artery disease, mental disorder, suicide, depression, smoking, drug abuse (including alcoholism), divorce, premarital sex, and a wide range of crimes.[3]

This “faith factor,” as it has come to be called, seems good evidence that we are somehow programmed or structured for spirituality, “wired for God,” in Benson’s terms. In other words, whereas much religious motivation and expression is certainly human projection (Feuerbach) or an “illusion” based on collective, neurotic expression of as-if escapist make-believe (Freud), a core element of healthy spirituality seems to be part of our very nature.

Patrick Glynn, a former atheist turned Christian, notes the delicious irony:

The notion that belief in God [or Higher Power] arose as the mind’s defense mechanism in the face of primitive humanity’s early struggle against nature was, in a sense, the modern scientific and atheistic explanation for religious belief. It was precisely this notion that Freud invoked in dismissing religion as an “infantile” illusion. But … if this is an illusion, it is, first of all, not a harmful one, as Freud and the moderns taught. On the contrary, it is mentally beneficial. It is also, more puzzlingly, physically beneficial. And strangest of all, by deliberately interacting with this Illusion in a sincere spirit, through meditative prayer, one can create improvements in symptoms of disease that otherwise cannot be medically explained…. Are we really supposed to believe that this is some sort of massive coincidence, the accidental by-product of processes that were dictated by purely materialistic, mechanistic forces churning blindly over time—which human beings in their benighted primitivism have foolishly mistaken across the centuries for God? And why, then, should failure to believe this particular illusion have physiological and psychological penalties—in the form, for example, of a greater risk for high blood pressure and death from heart attack or a greater susceptibility to such behaviors as drug abuse and suicide? If this were an illusion, it would be natural to think, as Freud did, that it is a problem and that it should be curable. But the opposite is the case: “Curing” the mind of this illusion places the body and mind at increased risk of disease, for which the Illusion itself can be a cure! [4]

Endnotes:

1. Rodney Stark & William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation, Berkeley, CA: U. of Calif., 1985; quoted in Julie Bach & Thomas Modl (Eds.), Religion in America: Opposing Viewpoints, San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1989, p. 201. The renowned professor of religious studies Ninian Smart liked to tell the story of how, upon expressing his interest in studying religion at Oxford University decades ago, his professors thought he was making a career mistake, since religion would be “dying out.”

2. See Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response, Anchor Books, 1975, and the last few chapters of a subsequent work, H. Benson & Marg Stark, Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief, Scribner’s, 1996.

3. David & Susan Larson, The Forgotten Factor in Physical and Mental Health: What Does the Research Show? Rocklin, MD: National Institute for Healthcare Research, 1994. See summaries of more recent studies at NIHR’s website, www.nihr.org/.