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Does Childhood Religiosity Delay Death?

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Abstract

This study explores the potential long-term health effects of religiosity in the childhood home. Analyses use retrospective childhood data from the MIDUS survey linked to National Death Index records from 1995 to 2014. Findings from Cox proportional hazard models suggest that children brought up in highly religious households have a higher risk of mortality than those socialized in more moderately religious households, this despite such individuals having better overall health profiles. The surprising link between high childhood religiosity and mortality was confined to those who downgraded their religiosity. Those who intensified from moderate to high religiosity, in fact, seemed to be most protected. We call for future research to more clearly specify the intervening mechanisms linking childhood religion with adult health and mortality over the life course.

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Notes

  1. An aspect of adulthood religiosity found to significantly predict childhood reports of religious importance in fixed-effects twin models and included in our main statistical analysis was religious importance (ranging from “not at all” to “very important”). The pattern of twin differences suggests that relatively less religious adults tend to report childhood religion as more central to their family than do the most highly religious adults. Several other correlated variables were also significant in fixed-effects twin models when religious importance was excluded; these include how important spirituality is for the respondent and how spiritual they believe they are (both ranging from “not at all” to “very important), and the frequency of relying on religion for comfort or in their daily activities (both coded from “never” to “often”). For the sake of parsimony, we do not retain these final three variables in our analysis, because results were unchanged with their inclusion.

  2. Additional analyses also incorporated a measure of respondent’s current region of residence (Midwest, South, Northeast, and West), as childhood census region was unfortunately not available in the MIDUS data. Results were unchanged with the inclusion of this variable, so we excluded it from final analyses.

  3. Results were substantively similar using listwise deletion to handle missing data.

  4. At a reviewer’s request, we conducted analyses that considered only White, non-Hispanic respondents (n = 2637). The results were substantively similar, likely because 87% of the full sample comprised this category. We retain the full sample in our analysis, however, so as to maximize the number of cases we have available, and because race was not a focal point of our analysis.

  5. Since the MIDUS data did not contain information about a respondent’s childhood religious denomination, additional analyses included a dichotomous measure of belonging to a conservative religious denomination in adulthood (coded using the RELTRAD coding scheme; see Steensland et al. 2000) to test whether those belonging to stricter religious groups at some point in the life course had a different mortality risk. Those reporting belonging to conservative religious traditions in adulthood were not at an elevated mortality risk compared to those belonging to non-conservative religious traditions. Main results were also unchanged with the inclusion of this variable, so it was ultimately excluded from final analyses.

  6. Subsequent analyses considered a progressive modeling strategy, starting with the covariates from Model 3 of Table 2 and then adding in covariates in the same fashion as we did for Model 4 (health) and Model 5 (health behaviors). Results were substantively similar, so we present only the results from the fully adjusted model in Table 3.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the 2017 Association for the Sociology of Religion Annual Meeting, in Montreal, Canada. We thank William Magee, Andrew Miles, Scott Schieman, Jeremy Uecker, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Funding

This work is supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Insight Development Grant #231615) and from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (Early Researcher Award).

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX, 78249, USA

    Laura Upenieks

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Markus H. Schafer & Andreea Mogosanu

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Correspondence to Laura Upenieks.

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Ethical approval was not required for this paper. The data we used are publically available through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR Web site, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/series/203).

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Summary of missing data
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Upenieks, L., Schafer, M.H. & Mogosanu, A. Does Childhood Religiosity Delay Death?. J Relig Health 60, 420–443 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-019-00936-1

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