Studies show that faith practices are good for people. But like any good medicine, getting the dose right matters. And a new study suggests that home-centered religious practices, combined with regularly attending religious services, yields the greatest benefit for families and individuals.
That’s according to “A Not-So-Good Faith Estimate,” a report published Tuesday by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University. The report says that studies that examine religion’s impact often underestimate the full benefits of faith and how it’s practiced.
The issue arises in how studies assess one’s degree of religious involvement, the researchers say.
The report acknowledges that attendance at religious services provides benefits. But those who also have faith-centered practices at home, like reading scriptures or family prayer, find life more meaningful and have both better relationships and better mental health. Religion offers them more.
Yet studies routinely lump into one group those who only attend church and those who additionally have at-home religious practices, then label them all “religious.” That obscures differences in the degree to which faith is practiced and benefits accrue, leading to the erroneous notion that the potential benefits of religion are smaller than they actually are, write study authors Spenser L. James and Jason S. Carroll, colleagues at BYU.
The report, based on an analysis of data from 16,000 people in 11 countries, suggests that using regular religious service attendance as the only metric for religious practice underestimates the benefits of religion by about 25% on average — and by up to 50% depending on the outcome being examined.
The benefits of faith practices and attendance together are more robust and varied.
The biggest impact is in having a sense of purpose and the belief that life has meaning, according to Carroll, associate director of the Wheatley Institute and a professor in BYU’s School of Family Life. “Finding connectedness to life was particularly significant,” Carroll said of the analysis he did with James, who is also an associate professor, as well as an institute fellow and director of the Global Families Research Initiative.
“And given that we live in a time where I think many are talking about a crisis of meaninglessness, I think religion provides a particularly powerful benefit personally in that aspect of life,” Carroll told the Deseret News.
The report notes a strong connection between home-centered religious worship and both mental and physical health. The international sample, they said, showed those who report the highest levels of religious practice are also more likely to report greater life meaning and personal happiness — levels “significantly higher” than those who attend religious services but don’t bring aspects of faith practice regularly into their homes.
They link the practice of faith both in and outside the home to having better marriages and family relationships, greater sexual satisfaction and more.
Per the report, “Women who worship at home are twice as likely to report a high level of relationship quality in their marriage compared to church-attending and less religious women. Highly religious men and women are also more likely to report high levels of emotional closeness and sexual satisfaction in their relationships compared to church-attending and less religious individuals.”
Carroll describes that as “spiritual intimacy.” When two people in a relationship have a common purpose and goal and share the vision of what makes a good life, he said, it enhances the partnership and their sense of being connected. Shared religious rituals in the family can be an important piece of that, the evidence “well-established” by studies.
He cites the work of Annette Mahoney at Bowling Green State University. What she calls sanctification, Carroll explains as “couples who feel a sense of the presence of God in their relationship. That is a form of sacredness, a form of deep vulnerability and intimacy.” He said when couples have that, along with a sense of belonging to a faith and a connection to others, there’s a greater likelihood of outcomes that are deeply satisfying and provide emotional closeness, stability and permanence in a relationship.
Measuring faith practices
The United States is an outlier among wealthy developed nations, which typically exhibit less religiosity compared to poorer and less developed countries, the report said. Like its peer countries, the U.S. has a large secular population, but it also has a comparatively higher share of people who engage in regular worship, including both at services and at home.
Consequently, the benefit of worship is likely greater in the U.S., according to Carroll and James. And when researchers lump the nuances of faith practice together as if they were the same, they probably underestimate the power of faith practice in the U.S. more, as well.
The report’s findings are based on data from the 2018 Global Faith and Families Survey, which included adults ages 18 to 50, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. More than 16,000 individuals were surveyed in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Ireland, Mexico, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States.
An earlier report by the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies using that data showed that among those who are married, women are most satisfied if they are half of a religious couple embracing traditional gender roles — or if they are half of a secular, progressive couple embracing egalitarianism. The least satisfied are those whose marriages lie somewhere in between.
In the new report, the authors noted that standard measurements of church attendance “may be adequate in identifying nonreligious and nominally religious folks, but don’t adequately portray the truly highly religious in most faith communities.”
Based on their self-reported degree of religious activity, those responding to the survey were categorized as being “secular” (the least religious), “nominal” (a category in which people claim a denomination or faith but rarely engage with services or religious practices), “attenders” (those who go to religious services of some type regularly but don’t otherwise engage much) and “home worshippers,” who not only attend church but bring religious practices into their at-home routines.
The researchers defined regular religious practice as going to church weekly or more often, daily or more frequent personal prayer, and at least twice-weekly family prayer, scripture reading and/or discussions of religion.
Seculars were 31% of the international and U.S. sample. Nominals were the largest group, at almost half of the international sample and 43% of those in the United States. Attenders were 13% of the international sample and 15% of the U.S. sample. Home worshippers made up 8% of the international sample and 11% of the U.S. group.
Those home worshippers were also the group that received the greatest benefit from their faith, the report found.
Women stood out in the study and the benefits they receive from attending services, reading scriptures and praying regularly were the most underestimated in studies that measured religiosity by only asking how often one attends services. Home-worshipper women scored an average of 40% higher on well-being measures than they would have if only the standard measure of “goes to church” (or doesn’t) had been applied.
Calculating the benefits
Presented as a graphic, the “probability of very frequently feeling that your life is meaningful or has a purpose” looks like a staircase going up. Seculars are on the bottom step, with nominals, attenders and home worshippers on succeeding steps.
According to Carroll and James, that the home worshippers are a step above the attenders using this data indicates that measuring religiosity and its impact solely based on church attendance is flawed in terms of understanding impact.
Home-worshipper men are nearly twice as apt to report a high level of happiness, compared to men with no religious involvement — and the likelihood is 40% higher than among the attenders, who worship regularly at church but don’t take faith practices home.
Home-worshipper women are about twice as likely to report high emotional closeness in their marriage compared to women in the other three groups. And it is only among those women that researchers can predict that most respondents report high emotional closeness to mates, the report says.
While half of home-worshipper women say they are highly satisfied with their sex lives, the same is true of just 34% of attender and nominal women and 25% of secular women.
The report noted that home worshipers also reported “significantly higher levels of shared decision-making between partners, fewer money problems and more frequent patterns of loving behaviors such as forgiveness, commitment and kindness” compared to less-religious peers.
Carroll hopes that people will recognize that the intentional effort that it takes to embrace religious practices in the home is worth it. “It’s a lesson for parents with young children, parents with teenagers, parents with busy lives, that while it takes real commitment and dedication to one’s faith to engage in home religious practices — gathering a family for prayer and for religious conversations, to read religious texts together as well as attend church — doing so matters.
“There definitely appears to be a higher dosage level of religion with higher on-average benefits for those who strive to do those things,” he said.
He likens it to exercise. While it takes more work than being sedentary, the benefits are greater, too.