FAITHLESS

In the USA, so-called ‘deaths of despair’ (overdose, suicide and alcohol-related disease) started to rise dramatically in the early ‘90’s, and they have continued to grow (1).

A recent Ohio State University study found that these trends likely followed on from a sharp decline in church attendance (1), which started in the USA in the late ‘80’s. The researchers suggested that losing religious participation meant losing meaning, identity, purpose, community, which are all factors likely to protect health, and a move away from health-promoting behaviors. Their case rested, in part, on the Blue Laws.

The so-called Blue Laws traditionally restricted many businesses from opening on Sundays, a situation which favored church attendance. In 1985 these laws were cancelled in Minnesota, South Carolina and Texas after sustained lobbying pressure from the Texans for Blue Law Repeal group, a folksy-sounding outfit that actually represented a thuggish group of pharmacy chains and multiple retailers who believed that Sunday was for selling. The fact that these laws protected workers and promoted a day of rest was deemed inimical to business, and the dollar displaced divinity.

The researchers compared outcomes in those states which repealed their blue laws with others that did not. In the repeal states they documented a 5- to 10-percentage-point drop in weekly attendance at religious services and, within a few years, higher rates of deaths of despair (DOD).

They further found that the decline in religious participation was concentrated among white, middle-aged males and females without a college degree, the same group that experienced the most pronounced increases in deaths of despair. This happened a decade before the (non-Christian) Sackler family flooded the USA with oxycontin in the early to mid 2000’s, but likely prepared the ground for those genteel mass murderers.

The Ohio paper was very much in line with an earlier study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which found that church-going health professionals were significantly less likely to suffer DOD than their non-church-going colleagues (2).

The situation in the UK is not as clear-cut, but does show some parallels.

20^th century church attendance had started to fall rather earlier, with pronounced reductions in the swinging sixties and early ‘70’s as part of a larger cultural shift which included – in no particular order – mini-skirts, the Pill and the Rolling Stones. Numbers halved again after 1987 (3), influenced by the aggressively secular politics of the deracinated left, rapidly increasing numbers of illegal immigrants and a consequent decline in social trust (4).

British deaths of despair started to spike in the 2000’s, and mostly involved drugs (5); with further increases around the time of covid, this time primarily centred on alcohol (6) and particularly affecting the Scots (7).

Living in the North, living alone, unemployment / economic inactivity / poverty, white British ethnicity and living in urban areas were all significantly associated with increased risk of DOD (8); forming a risk cluster surprisingly similar to the one cited in the Ohio report (1).

The link between church-going and DOD does not seem to have been studied in the UK yet. However, given that British church-going is in decline (8), DODs are up and the link between religiosity and reduced risk of suicide is fairly strong in most countries (9), I would expect to find a degree of correlation.

One interesting finding from the US study (1) was that the number of people professing faith did not change much over the period studied, neither did participation in other social activities. So, having raised all the usual caveats (this was a sociological study involving a huge number of variables, many of which were unaccounted for, and association does not mean causation), there did appear to be something uniquely protective about the act of going to church.

Could lower church attendance really contribute in a causative manner to higher death rates? And if so – how?

These are urgent questions, because if falling way from the church really is so harmful then the future looks bleak. In the USA, an estimated 100,000 churches will be lost in next few years alone (10), and British churches are closing as they can no longer afford to remain in the most socially deprived areas (11) where they are arguably needed most. Nor will the tin tabernacles of TikTok replace them: excessive use of social media is associated with an increased risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation (12, 13).

So let us examine the ways in which religion might plausibly impact on health. Dr Harold Koenig, at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham NC, has written an interesting review paper on this very topic (14).

The article presents evidence that religion enhances resilience, and helps people to deal with many different kinds of adversity ranging from illness to acts of terrorism. It is associated with greater happiness and hope, meaning, purpose and a sense of control; together with reduced depression and anxiety and, once again, a lower risk of suicide.

Following on from this, most of the studies included in Koenig’s review show a link between religiosity and healthier behaviors including higher levels of physical activity, less smoking and less sexual promiscuity.

These behaviors would be expected to translate into health benefits. The Koenig paper reports reduced rates of coronary heart disease, hypertension, Alzheimer’s and dementia, with evidence also of improved immune function and self-reported health.  Overall, this manifested quite consistently as greater longevity, which correlated strongly with frequency of attendance at religious services and could legitimately be attributed to the psychological, social and positive health behaviors listed above.

The author concludes by suggesting that given the benefits of faith, addressing spiritual issues should be a part of clinical practice, and cites research that shows that failure to address patients’ spiritual needs increases health care costs, especially toward the end of life (15). You can hear the tectonic plates of faith and medeconomics grinding together ..

The last point was addressed in detail in another paper from the Chan School of Public Health (16). This systematic review presented a good case for addressing spirituality in serious illness and overall health as part of person-centered, value-sensitive care.

For those who won’t adopt faith I could suggest a pharmaco-nutritional alternative, but this would be unbearably glib, if not blasphemous. There are looming gaps in our social fabric, and in our attachment to it, that must be addressed.

Let us progress by looking further back (17).

In the first half of the 19^th century Britain, Sunday church was mainstream. The institution provided not only spiritual support for the faithful, but also an important social service for the less faithful. Gathering in church, and after the sermon in the spaces outside the church, was where most folk got their mostly local news. Church-going fell once the Sunday papers started to appear circa 1850, and then again when news started to be broadcast on the radio, in 1922. (WWI was announced to the British public at church, WW2 by radio in the parlors of the nation).

The communality of church involved improving and often socially-minded sermons, hymns with anxiety-binding musical structures (18, 19) which were sung communally and which also often referenced coming together, and many different kinds of after-church social gatherings for adults and children. These are hallmarks of successful churches to this day; they function collectively to reduce individual (existential) doubt, as did much 19th century literature, and enhance integration into social structures (20).

This integration, above all, is associated with better mental health (21) and thence, by endocrinological, immunological and other mechanisms, better physical health (22).

In these fractured and fractious times, can we learn from the denser social sensorium of the 19^th century?

Technology binds us more tightly than ever, yet more of us are isolated, disconnected, and struggling to find meaning in our lives. The W.H.O. reports a global pandemic of loneliness, now affecting 1 in 6 of the world’s population (23). In the exceptional USA a reported 36% of all Americans—including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children—feel “serious loneliness.” (24). Suicide rates among young Americans are close to an all-time high (25, 26).

This particularly affects Generations Z and Alpha, who are the most technically connected of us all, and a generation which grew up within algorithmic curation. Their identities and friendships have been shaped inside systems designed to maximize engagement, and at the same time degrade the value and meaning of real communication. They wade through emails and more so texts, unaware for the most part that delays in response time change how messages are interpreted, how they reduce spontaneity and social connection, and how they impoverish nuanced and emotional discussion (27, 28).

The Z’s and A’s are rarely alone as my generation was, spend little time in solitary reflection and are not comfortable with disconnection. Yet they report higher levels of isolation and depression than their parents or grandparents did at the same age (29).

This is a pattern which can also be traced back to the atomization of family structures by late-stage capitalism (30), the further destruction of social fabric and the environment by neoliberalism (31, 32) and by declining religiosity (33). Between 1968 and 2017, the percentage of children living with a single parent rose from 15% to 35% (34), an experience which correlates with increased feelings of loneliness (35) and an increased risk of later-life loneliness, anxiety and depression (36).

Literature, nature, extended family, the church and other systems which once provided context, comfort and community were pushed aside first by the social media with its endless succession of dopamine rushes, now AI, soon superintelligence.

It is a modem dilemma. It is at the same time the age-old overwhelming of a primitive culture by a more advanced one, with the new cyber-barbarians already inside the logic gates and with memes as latter-day pathogens.

The first silicon wave created silos, then echo chambers. They frayed society further by making us less able to discuss and debate synchronously and thus less autonomous, less resilient.

The second wave may well remove us, slowly and then all at once, from the gene pool. It encourages excessive cognitive off-loading (37) and surrender (38), reducing our capacity for critical thought (37, 38), and it seduces us (39). Avatars know us more immediately and more intimately than any flesh and blood parent or lover can as they have infinite memory, infinite learning capacity and are without ego.

They are designed to exploit us because they are built by companies that profit from sales linked to the newest currency, our attention. Those companies are owned by people who do not have our best interests at heart and know that in the end, they do not need us.

Anthropic recently announced an AI that displayed malign intent, or at least capability, and was deemed too dangerous to release (40). This may be no more than the impulse of any complex system to survive, manifest in single cell life-forms and arguably in giant and even standard-issue viruses. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a manifestly decent man whose name, incidentally, derives from Amadeus, shared a safe version to stimulate the development of counter-measures.

This new breed of AI will surely emerge elsewhere and dead-eyed Altman, Thiel and other less benign actors will likely draw a different equation, in which monetary gain and the will to power overwhelm social responsibility. Mashing Niemöller and Vonnegut, first they came for the blue-collar workers and I did not speak out, because I was not a blue-collar worker. Then they came for the white-collar workers and I did not speak out. And so it goes.

I was raised agnostic but if we are to survive superintelligence, perhaps all that will be left to us is faith; for God is, perhaps, where he has always been. At the end of our tether, and socially, in our churches.

There is one last nexus that seems worth mentioning, and these are the several and complex connections between the science of diet, brain function and mental health, and the unscience of faith. I view this nexus from a position which increasingly and uncomfortably straddles both worlds.

The revised 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR, 2022) includes the term Religious or Spiritual Problem (RSP). This refers to a category of distress related to questioning of faith, transcendent values, or changes in the religious belief system and it is often accompanied, understandably, by marked depression and anxiety.

RSP is associated with neuroinflammatory signals in the amygdala and hypothalamus (41), distinct but interconnected regions of the brain involved with emotional processing and survival functions. Further evidence suggests that religious or spiritual angst causes neuroinflammation rather than being caused by it (42), and that spiritual practices can reduce stress-related neuroinflammation by calming the brain’s danger signals and improving emotional regulation (43, 44). This will likely create substantial health benefits (45).

The industrial diet causes neuroinflammatory stress and eventual damage in the same brain areas (46, 47), and tends towards depression and anxiety (48). I have long advocated pharmaco-nutritional interventions such as the health protocol to address these issues, but I now believe that a spiritual component is at least as important.

We have left our traditional environment and values behind, and are paying a high price for it. Perhaps we should try to find a way back. Gen X men (and some women) may already be doing so (49).

EndNote: Normal service will be resumed shortly. In the next few posts I will be examining immunosenescense, and tracing the links between gut and bone, gut and cartilage, gut and skin, lungs, mitochondria and brain. And everything else.

References:

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