Abstract
This chapter introduces the book Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health: Evidence, Implications, and Resources. More than 3000 empirical studies 100 systematic reviews have been published on relations of religion and/or spirituality (R/S) with health, but R/S factors remain neglected in public health teaching and research. R.S reflects ultimate concern that taps deep motivations, and R/S typically encourages stewardship of health, so its health-relevance is unsurprising from a behavioral motivation perspective. R/S engagement also commonly fosters social support and access to distinctive methods of coping with stress, elements of a “generic model ” of how R/S influences health. Predominantly favorable relations suggest that R/S might be a fundamental cause of health, but R/S factors also sometimes correlate unfavorably with risk factors or poorer health. Part I of this volume contains 14 chapters that review evidence on R/S-health relations from the perspectives of major subfields of public health that include social factors, nutrition, infectious diseases, environmental health, maternal/child health, health policy and management, public health education and promotion, mental health, and clinical practice. Part II contains two chapters that address implications for public health practice, emphasizing community-based health promotion, health policy advocacy, and healthcare systems and management. The eight chapters in Part III offer resources for public health educators, including narratives of how R/S-health relations have been taught in schools of public health at universities that include Emory, Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, Boston University, University of Michigan, Drexel University, and University of Illinois at Chicago. A concluding chapter offers international perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
Estimates of the fraction of US adults who view themselves as spiritual but not religious have varied, perhaps in part due to different ways of asking the question. Up to 33% of respondents in national surveys have reported they were “spiritual but not religious,” when given the alternatives of “religious” (50%) and “neither” (11%) (Gallup Poll 2002, with 4% volunteering that they were both spiritual and religious). However, Hastings (2016) reports that in the US General Social Survey, percentages increased from 1.9% in 1998 to a maximum of 6.7% in 2014, when measured as respondents who rarely or never attended religious services and who considered themselves “very or moderately spiritual” (p. 68).
- 2.
Some readers may also find useful an influential set of definitions that have been offered by psychologist Kenneth Pargament (1997). He suggests defining spirituality as a “search for the sacred,” and defining religion (or religiousness) as a “search for significance in ways related to the sacred” (p. 32). More recently, he offered an alternative definition of religion as “the search for significance that occurs within the context of established institutions that are designed to facilitate spirituality” (Pargament et al. 2013, p. 15). According to this later definition, religion is broader than spirituality in its function, but narrower than spirituality in its institutional base. Pargament’s framework has been found relevant to both Western (Abrahamic) and Indian (Dharmic) traditions (Oman and Paranjpe 2017).
- 3.
“The first edition contained information on “over twelve hundred research studies conducted from the 1800s up to the year 2000,” and the second edition included “over twenty-one hundred quantitative studies exami9ning the religion-health relationship during the ten years between 2000 and 2010…. We estimate that this review covers about 75 percent of the existing research” (Koenig et al. 2012, pp. 5, 9, emphasis in original).
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Oman, D. (2018). Elephant in the Room: Why Spirituality and Religion Matter for Public Health. In: Oman, D. (eds) Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73966-3_1
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