Religious Involvement and Mortality Risk among Pre-Retirement Aged U.S. Adults*

A growing body of research demonstrates that higher levels of religious involvement are associated with lower adult mortality risks in the United States. While a handful of clinically- and community-based studies have considered the impacts of private religiosity and strength and comfort received from religious faith on survival status among the elderly (e.g., Helm et al. 2000; Oxman et al. 1995), the vast majority of sociological and epidemiological research in the area has focused on the most clearly social aspect of religious behavior: public religious attendance. The importance of public religious attendance for mortality risk was documented in a recent meta-analysis of the religion-mortality literature (McCullough et al. 2000), where non-attendance was found to be associated with about a 30 % heightened mortality risk in follow-up studies compared to people who attend on a regular basis. Additionally, other recent in-depth reviews of the religion-health literature have confirmed this relationship (Hummer et al