Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1998, pp. 177-187
Religion and Mental Health: an exploration of
the relationship between the ineffable and the
indefinable
PETER CONNOLLY
ABSTRACT This article suggests that the relationship between religion and mental health is both
important and complex. It reviews some studies of the relationship and suggests that religion can be
good or bad for one's mental health, depending on the content of the religious message. It also
presents a model of mental health and suggests that this or some similar scheme can be employed to
assess the extent to which one's religious or value system promotes mental health.
The terms `religion' and `mental health'; both conjure up a variety of images, associations
and emotions in people who think about them. The same is true among the scholars who
write about them. People in general, and students of religion in particular, differ about the
nature of and characteristics associated with the phenomenon of religion. That is, they
disagree about the meaning of the word. They also disagree about the benefits and
detriments which accrue from the adoption of religious beliefs and engagement in religious
behaviours. A similar situation pertains in the field of mental health. Mental health is
measured in many different ways, and each measurement strategy is based on an implicit
definition. One recent study identified 21 different measures, and this figure is by no means
comprehensive (Schumaker, 1992). In short, the referents of the terms and the
relationships between them are matters of contention, and thus a simple demonstrable
answer to the question `Is being religious good for one's mental health?' cannot be provided
at the present time. What is more, to date the increase in the number of studies addressing
this issue is doing little to improve the situation.
In 1982 Daniel Batson and Larry Ventis reviewed 57 different studies of religion and
mental health and found positive or negative correlations between them for four of their
seven definitions of mental health. In 1993 they repeated their review, this time drawing
upon 91 different studies, and found more or less the same pattern as that which emerged
from their 1982 survey. Did this result imbue them with increased confidence in their
findings? It did not. They write:
... we must once again emphasise the methodological limitations of this
research. The quantity of research is certainly great, and is increasing all the
time; unfortunately, the quality is neither great nor increasing ...
Although we have suggested the need for more data in several areas,
quality is a far more important research virtue than is quantity.
Therefore, we do not wish to call for more research on the religion–mental
health relation-ship without calling even more loudly for better research.
(Batson et al., 1993, pp. 288–289)
Batson and Ventis bemoan the facts that virtually all the research they reviewed
was correlational, assessments of mental health were almost always based on
self-reports and some of the sample populations were far from being
representative. To some extent they could have addressed these issues
themselves. Studies based on unusual populations could have been excluded
from their review. Studies based on self-report could have been categorised into
those which employed lie scales or other similar devices for identifying biases in
the responses and those which did not. Studies which reported high correlations,
say r = 0.05 or above, could have been distinguished from those reporting low
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ones. The studies based on relatively average or representative populations,
which employed lie scales or similar devices and reported high correlations could
then have been offered as examples of what `better' research might look like.
One factor not commented on by Batson and Ventis, though one which is
certainly significant in this field, is that of investigator bias. As a group,
psychologists of religion differ markedly from other psychologists. Many
psychologists of religion are both trained psychologists and members of religious
organisations yet, ever since James Leuba published the results of his
investigation into the religious beliefs of American scientists in 1916,
psychologists have consistently shown themselves to be the least religious of all
types of scientist (Wulff, 1991, pp. 34–36). It is reasonable to expect, therefore,
that many psychologists of religion will be predisposed towards information
which supports rather than undermines their religious commitments. Non religious psychologists, particularly in America—which is where most of the
research on the psychology of religion takes place—can hardly ignore religion
and the issue of its effects on human welfare. The fact that they are non religious suggests either that they do not regard it as offering sufficient personal
benefits for them to take it seriously or that they regard it as detrimental to
human well-being. The likelihood is then, that at least some members of this
group, when they write on religion, will exhibit a negative bias towards it. The
current state of affairs amongst psychologists on the issue of religion and mental
health can thus be described as one of fundamental disagreement.
For some psychologists religion promotes negative self-evaluations, emotional
repression, anxiety, dependency, conformity and a whole host of other debilitations.
For others, it provides people with a sense of power and focused identity, anxiety
reduction, emotional well-being, social cohesion and a range of other benefits
(Schumaker, 1992, pp. 3–4). Yet others, such as Batson and Ventis, John Schumaker and myself, try to take up some kind of middle ground, where religion can be
seen to promote either mental health or mental ill-health depending on the content
of what is being propagated. The moral here then, as in many other areas of social
enquiry, is that the identification of the researcher can often be as important as the
research.
Another confounding factor, which pervades much of the American research in this
area, is the idea that there are different ways of being religious or that there are
different religious `orientations', some of which are more `healthy' than others. The
most well known and well used of these distinctions is Gordon Allport's separation
of religious people into the intrinsically religious and the extrinsically religious. The
former are the truly religious—those who sincerely try to live according to the tenets
of their faith (the sheep), whereas the latter are merely conventionally religious—
those for whom involvement in the faith is superficial and often undertaken for
purely social reasons (the goats). Other psychologists of religion have produced
similar distinctions such as individualised–institutionalised and committed–
consensual, though none of these have come close to exerting the same influence
none of these have come close to exerting the same influence on research as
Allport’s scheme (Brown, 19; Allen & Spilka, 1967).
Despite its influence and popularity, researchers who have approached the evaluation of the intrinsic–extrinsic distinction with a reasonable amount of rigour have
consistently concluded that it is fundamentally flawed. L.B. Brown and J.E. Dittes
have both argued that the I and E orientations are more like pervasive personality
characteristics than religious orientations, and this would certainly fit with the
obvious conclusions to be drawn from Allport's original essay (Allport, 1959/60,
Brown, 1964; Dittes, 1971). In 1971 Richard Hunt and Morton King reviewed all
the major works in the I–E concept and concluded, amongst other things, that
although the results preclude employing I and E as poles of a single axis, separating
them and forming two independent scales (the orthogonal variation) did not produce
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two clearly independent factors. Like Brown and Dittes they reckoned that the I–E
material points to pervasive personality variables rather than some kind of
irreducible religious dimensions of life. Their recommendation was that psychologists of religion should abandon the attempt to identify irreducible religious factors
and focus their attention on the common centre of socio-psychological study,
namely the effects people have on each other's beliefs and behaviour. Their call has,
however, tended to go unheeded (Hunt & King, 1971).
In 1990, L.A. Kirkpatrick and R.W. Hood Jr published an article on essentially the
same lines as that of Hunt and King (Kirkpatrick & Hood, 1990). They pointed out
the invalidity of the I and E scales and the conceptual confusion surrounding •
them, and encouraged psychologists of religion `to move beyond a simplistic I–E
framework to more theoretically and psychometrically sophisticated approaches'
(Kirkpatrick & Hood, 1990, p. 442). This further call to abandon I–E research is
likely to fall on the same deaf ears as Hunt and King’s recommendation some 20
years earlier.
In the light of these observations it is clear that one of the primary weaknesses in
Batson and Ventis's analysis is that they too accept the general principle of the
distinction between sheep and goat orientations and then add another of their own
devising: the quest orientation. This merely exacerbates the situation, however.
These orientations are all about ways of being religious rather than religion, about
ways of approaching religion rather than religion as a distinctive dimension of
human life. This dimension can be delineated and such delineation can reveal what it is
that these so-called orientations have in common, that is, what makes them religious
orientations. For this, a robust definition of religion is required, a definition that will
distinguish the religious from other aspects of human life and which, at the same time, can
encompass the various phenomena that are generally recognised as falling within the
category of religion by informed investigators. Such a definition can then be employed in the
construction of questionnaires designed to determine whether people are religious or not,
and these, in turn, can be combined with various measures of mental health in order to
ascertain whether religious people exhibit higher or lower levels of mental health than nonreligious people.
This, of course, is an outline for a major piece of research that has not yet been conducted.
The comments which follow are offered as a kind of preamble to such a project. First, I shall
offer what I believe to be a fairly robust definition of religion. Second, I shall summarise the
findings of Batson and Ventis's review—but without differentiating the so-called religious
orientations—in order to provide a rough sketch of the current state of play; then I shall
offer a kind of multi-category definition of optimum mental health and suggest that if
religious people want to argue that living a religious life really does offer a route to human
fulfilment then the criteria for mental health by which such claims must be judged need to
be closer to this kind of optimum characterisation than the kind of minimalist `absence of
mental illness' definitions employed by many researchers (Batson & Ventis, 1982, pp. 222–
223; Batson et al., 1993, pp. 262–263). Finally, I shall comment on what seems to me to
be an important characteristic of the mentally healthy, a characteristic which provides
insights into the reasons why religion can have either a beneficial or a detrimental effect on
people's mental health and why, in the final analysis, even the most beneficial religious
approaches to life fall short of being optimal strategies for mental health promotion.
First, then, a definition of religion. At the present time the student of religion is spoiled for
choice on the issue of definitions. Virtually every scholar who writes on the subject
formulates their own. As with the research on religion and mental health mentioned earlier,
not all of them are of equal quality. In the early years of the present century scholars tried
to encapsulate what they regarded as the essence of religion in pithy, one-line definitions.
Examples would be Alfred North White-head's `what the individual does with his own
solitariness' or E.B. Tylor's `belief in spiritual beings' (Sharpe, 1983, pp. 34, 38). A more
recent offering from Ronald Cavanagh is:
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Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1998, pp. 177-187
... `the varied, symbolic expression of, and appropriate response to, that which
people deliberately affirm as being of unrestricted value for them. (Cavanagh,
1978, p. 20)
The best of these is, I would suggest, Tylor's `belief in spiritual beings'. Despite its
many limitations (it lacks reference to the realm of activity or behaviour and leaves
little room for non-personalistic conceptions of `the spiritual', for example) it does
contain reference to the element which, it seems to me, offers the only rigorous way
of distinguishing religion from other areas of human experience and behaviour,
namely a reference to `the spiritual' [ 1 ] . Other commonly used terms for this
dimension are divine, holy, numinous, sacred and supernatural. They all refer to a
trans-empirical realm which is believed to be accessible to human beings and
deemed to be the primary source of fulfilment for them. The other definitions lack
this element and thus cannot meaningfully separate the religious from other aspects
of life. Whitehead's cannot exclude reading pulp novels from the realm of religious
activity, and Cavanagh, perhaps anticipating former England team manager Terry
Venables, would have to allow Association Football to be classified as a religion.
In recent years, partly to avoid the kind of over-emphasis on one aspect—as found, for
example, in Whitehead's definition which, we may note, contrasts sharply with Durkheim's
claim that religion `is an eminently collective thing' (Sharpe, 1983, p. 37), scholars have
come to favour multi-category definitions of religion. Thus, Frederick Streng describes
religion in terms of its three primary dimensions: the personal, the cultural and the
ultimate (Streng, 1976, pp. 1–9). Eric Sharpe prefers the language of modes to that of
dimensions and distinguishes four: the existential, the intellectual, the institutional and the
ethical (Sharpe, 1983, Ch. 7). Sociologists Charles Glock and Rodney Stark identify five
distinct dimensions: the experiential, the ideological, the ritualistic, the intellectual and the
consequential, (Holm, 1977, p. 18) whilst philosopher and phenomenologist of religion
Ninian Smart has distinguished six, and later seven, dimensions: mythical or narrative,
ritual, social, ethical, doctrinal, experiential and, most recently, material (Smart, 1968, pp.
15–19; 1969, pp. 15–25; 1989, pp. 10–21). Such attempts to map out the primary
ways in which religion manifests in human life certainly offer fuller notions of what might
be encompassed under the heading of `religion' but, equally, they can distract attention
away from what it is that makes them dimensions or modes of religion.
In his second formulation of his six-dimensional model Smart goes some way towards
correcting this omission by pointing out that what prevents Marxism or Humanism from
being religious is not that they lack the dimensions but that they deny the existence of the
supernatural, of the invisible world. This, to me, is crucial for dimensionalisation alone
cannot distinguish the religious from the non-religious—a point pertinently exemplified by
the fact that elsewhere Smart employs his scheme to analyse secular ideologies (Smart,
1983, 1989). Indeed, I would suggest that any definition of religion which places more
emphasis on its dimensions or modes or whatever than its rootedness in the sacred is not
only inadequate but misleading.
A robust definition of the term `religion' would thus be `any beliefs which involve the
acceptance of a sacred, trans-empirical realm and any behaviours designed to affect a
person's relationship with that realm'. The most convenient term to refer to such
behaviours is, perhaps, `spirituality'. Religions can thus be communal or individual (see
Corbett, 1996). They will usually exhibit some of the dimensions or manifestations already
mentioned. Sometimes they will exhibit all of them. The only really crucial element,
however, is the belief in the sacred, the transcendent or trans-empirical realm. When this is
present we have religion; when it is absent we do not.
As with religion, there are many definitions of mental health that a researcher can
employ and, again, not all are equally valuable. Despite its limitations, some of
which are acknowledged by the authors themselves, the review of research into the
relationship between religion and mental health conducted by Batson and Ventis (Batson
et al., 1993, p. 386) is one of the most useful available to date, not least because these
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authors recognise the dangers of bias creeping into this kind of work and take some steps
to minimise its effects.
Their organisation of the reports under review in terms of the seven most frequently
employed definitions of mental health also provides a useful springboard for further
enquiry. The seven are: (1) absence of mental illness; (2) appropriate social behaviour; (3)
freedom from worry and guilt; (4) personal competence and control; (5) self-acceptance/selfactualisation; (6) personality unification and organisation, and (7) open-mindedness and
flexibility. These conceptions of mental health are those that Batson and Ventis found
employed in the literature they reviewed and thus, despite Schumaker's warning about the
dangers of collapsing `a large number of mental health variables into a limited number of
definitional categories' (Schumaker, 1992, p. 16), they do offer a reasonable first attempt at
rendering the results of diverse studies on religion and mental health intelligible.
Batson and Ventis' categorisation, suggests that when mental health is defined in the first
way, i.e. absence of mental illness, it is positively correlated with being religious except for
clergy and nuns (especially the cloistered), who display a negative correlation.
Commentators on these latter findings tend to suggest that they derive from the tendency of
people with a propensity towards mental disorder to seek a religious vocation. If this is true
it points to serious deficiencies in the screening procedures for such occupations. When
mental health is defined in terms of (4), personal competence and control, (5), selfacceptance/self-actualisation, and (7), open-mindedness and flexibility, the correlation with
religion is negative, religious people do not display high mental health. Definitions (2), (3)
and (6), appropriate social behaviour, freedom from worry and guilt, personality unification
and organisation, yield only ambiguous relationships between religion and mental health.
Thus, being religious can shield people from the most obvious forms of mental disturbance,
perhaps because involvement with a religious organisation or group often provides a strong
sense of community and identity as well as offering a framework of explicit behavioural
boundaries. On the other hand, indicators of what our culture tends to regard as high
mental health: personal competence and control; self-acceptance; open-mindedness and
flexibility, do not appear to be common among the religious. The implications of this are
clear. Whilst it might be useful to employ a range of mental health measures when seeking
to determine the relation-ship between religion and mental health—so as to specify the subcategory dynamics between them—on the ultimate issue of whether religion has a role to
play in the creation of optimum mental health the evidence suggests a negative answer.
There is, however, some evidence that it does have a role. The Timberlawn research on
healthy families, as reported by Robin Skynner, found that:
... the most healthy families of all gain great emotional support from some
kind of transcendent value system .... Many of these families were committed
members of a church or held to one of the traditional religious beliefs. But it
didn't have to be that. Sometimes the `transcendent' values were not so much
religious as connected with some broader humanitarian cause. What seemed
to matter was that their greatest source of value came from something much
bigger than themselves, beyond even their family, something which provided a
feeling of meaning and purpose which could survive loss and change of all kind.
(Skynner & Cleese, 1993, p. 33. emphasis added).
If this is the case then religion would seem to offer a way, though only one way, of
generating a mental-health-promoting family or group-transcending value system. The fact
that non-religious value systems can have similar beneficial results raises some new issues,
however. It suggests that research should focus not so much on religion and mental health
as value systems and mental health. The crucial issue would then be one of identifying the
characteristics of those value systems which exhibited the strongest correlations with
optimum mental health rather than whether a commitment to a value system based upon
the postulation of a supernatural realm is beneficial or detrimental. The task of identifying
and characterising optimum mental health thus moves onto centre stage. In her influential
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Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1998, pp. 177-187
study of this issue Marie Jahoda argued that it involves more than an absence of mental
illness, more than normality and more than a sense of well-being (Jahoda, 1958, pp. 14, 18,
21). She also provided an account of the constituents of this ‘more’, an account which has
received substantial support from subsequent researchers. A mentally healthy person
exhibits:
... a positive view of the self, the ability to be happy or contented, the ability to care
for and about others, the capacity for productive and creative work, and the ability
to grow and achieve within the context of a challenging and sometimes threatening
environment. (Taylor, 1989, p. 48)
At the present time, however, it is estimated that only about 20% of the population in
`developed' countries are mentally healthy in the `above normal' sense and, of these, only
25% exhibit optimum mental health (Skynner & Cleese, 1993, p. 39). That is, the number of
optimally mentally healthy people in the developed world is around 5% of the total
population. There is thus plenty of scope for improvement. For those involved in mental
health promotion the operationalisation of these components has been a significant
challenge. L.H. Connolly, a counsellor and teacher of personal development strategies, has
responded to this with a formulation of the optimum mental health characteristics which
enables her to teach her clients and students how to develop them (Connolly & Connolly,
forthcoming). This formulation, I would suggest, offers a useful framework for checking
whether a person's value system (including their religious beliefs, if any) is conducive to the
cultivation of improvements to their mental health.
Her formulation of optimal mental health has six components: (1) high self-esteem;
(2) effective communication; (3) adaptability; (4) a sense of meaning and purpose in
life; (5) enabling beliefs and thoughts; (6) bodymind awareness. The kernel of selfesteem is the acceptance of oneself as one is, recognising that one is a person of
value who shares a common humanity with all other human beings. Being an
effective communicator involves having the ability to communicate congruently with
people, that is, being able to convey the same message through all channels: body
language, voice quality and words, when it is appropriate to do so. It also involves
being receptive to feedback from those with whom one is communicating and having
the ability to adapt one's behaviour accordingly. Adaptability is coping effectively
with expected and unexpected changes in life. In particular, it has to do with how
well one copes when things run counter to one's expectations. Sometimes this
involves being able to accept things; sometimes it involves `reframing'—attaching
meaning to situations that are different from those originally employed to make
sense of events. There are two primary facets to having purpose and meaning in life.
The first is having goals to aim for, things that motivate one to act; being ‘future
orientated’. The second is having a feeling of being part of something bigger than
oneself, a community, a noble cause or a religion for example.
Enabling thoughts and beliefs are ones which empower oneself and others, thoughts and
beliefs which facilitate success—both in terms of creating positive mental and emotional
states within oneself and in terms of being effective in the world. Bodymind awareness
involves being responsive to messages from your body and recognising that you are your
body and your body is you. It also involves knowing how to use your body to change your
mental and emotional states. It is worth noting that there is no mention of an accurate
perception or conception of reality in this model, nor in the summary of Jahoda's account
mentioned earlier. Many psychotherapists, particularly those of psychoanalytic persuasion,
have argued that this should be a primary aim of therapy and is a significant indicator of
mental health. We may also note that seeing the world as it really is (yathabhutam) lies at
the heart of the Buddha's enlightenment experience. Indeed, Jahoda did emphasise this
component in her survey and, more recently, so too has Robin Skynner. This probably
reflects the influence of his early training in psychodynamic psychotherapy, not least
because in the same work where he states that the central idea he cannot repeat too often
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is that `if we can stay in touch with reality, the truth will heal us' (Skynner & Cleese, 1993,
p. 334), he offers Japanese social organisation as an example of one way of promoting
mental health. Yet, by his own admission, `For the Japanese, reality is negotiable ...
because they value cohesion above any other quality, the Japanese are not interested in
finding an accurate view of reality; they want a formula that everyone can agree on'
(Skynner & Cleese, 1993, p. 208). Reality distortion may, then, have beneficial effects.
Recent research confirms this conclusion and points to the need to reject accurate
reality testing as a central criterion for mental health. Indeed, the people who seem
to have the most accurate understandings of themselves and their situation in the
world are depressives (Taylor, 1989, p. 213). The most mentally healthy actually
display a positive talent for self-deception, particularly in terms of flattering perceptions of the self, illusions about the extent of their control over their lives and an
unrealistic optimism about the future. This is not to say that the healthy fail to
perceive things accurately, for they are quite good at perceiving the nature of both
physical and social situations. Rather, it is to note that such perceptions are far less
salient for them than for depressives. In other words, the healthiest people seem to
be able to operate accurate and illusory conceptions of the world in parallel.
The reason why this ability helps to promote mental health is, according to John
Schumaker, that the generally accurate perception of reality made available to us by our
developed cognitive abilities (for example, the recognition of the inevitability of death) can be
debilitating. Human beings require, therefore, something to counter-balance the sense of
powerlessness, meaninglessness and futility that an accurate understanding of our
existence can generate. This something, suggests Schumaker, is our capacity for reality
distortion. Religion, in his view, is the traditional method employed by cultures to distort
reality in a way that is deemed to be beneficial—by the promotion of meanings and values
for example. It succeeds in this because of the brain's capacity for dissociation, the capacity
to run different programmes at different times and even in parallel (Schumaker, 1990;
1995).
Reality distortion is not, however, always beneficial. Individuals and cultures can create
negative illusions almost as easily as they can create positive ones [2]. What is more,
illusions seem to be more potent when they are given objective status, when they are taken
to be realities. That, I would suggest, is exactly what we find when we examine human
conceptions of value, meaning and the sacred. In contrast with the long-standing,
dominant tradition of moral objectivism in western ethical philosophy the main thrust of
meta-ethical enquiry in the twentieth century has been to establish that moral principles
are invented rather than discovered (see Mackie, 1977). Likewise, recent psychological
investigations into the attribution of meaning to situations and events suggest that it is
constructive rather than perceptual (see Bandler & Grinder, 1982) and Schumaker's most
recent work, The Corruption of Reality: a unified theory of religion, hypnosis and
psychopathology (1995), presents a strong case for understanding conceptions of the
sacred in the same way.
From the pragmatic perspective of assessing their contribution to mental health value
systems, meaning systems and religious systems would all seem to be on a par. They are
often attributed with objective status though there are good reasons for thinking that they
are all illusions, constructed by human minds with the aim of benefiting human lives.
Whether they do so is a matter for well-constructed empirical enquiries to determine. To
paraphrase one well-known religious teacher `By their fruits shall ye know them'. In
advance of such enquiries being undertaken my personal strategy for `fruit testing' is to ask
of any value, meaning or religious system whether it contributes to the development of the
six characteristics of mental health outlined above.
By way of conclusion I would like to draw attention to one characteristic of religious
systems which makes me doubt their full compatibility with optimum mental health. The
fact that the sacred, the transcendental focus or whatever is difficult to access means that
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most people are dependent on religious authorities for their information about it. This
means, because the sacred is always deemed to be more important than the profane, that
people cannot really trust their own judgements, especially in areas directly affected by or
regarded as deriving from the sacred (such as ethics or the social order). Not being able to
trust one's own judgement and having to rely on and defer to religious authorities inevitably
undermines one's confidence and self-esteem. Whether religions can get around this
objection whilst remaining effective reality distorters is something that only the future can
reveal. In the end it may be that some kind of benefit trade-off is the best that any of us can
hope for.
Notes
[1]
Anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace (1966, p. 52) calls this `the supernatural premise' and argues that it is
`religion's defining characteristic'.
[2]
Taylor (1989, p. 44) argues that the tendency for people to generate positive illusions about
themselves, the world and the future derives from the fact that `they are natural, intrinsic to the cognitive
system'. If she is correct, the issue arises of how negative illusions get started in the first place. One
potentially useful line of speculation might be that which regards them as attempted adaptations to
misperceptions of reality.
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Addendum
Since this article was published in 1998 my wife and I have formed a company, Turning Point
Consulting, and developed our model of mental health into an eightfold scheme, each
component of which is learnable and teachable: The Eight Limbs of Human Flourishing:
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Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1998, pp. 177-187
The 8 Limbs of Human Flourishing
8. Body-Mind
Integration
1. Mental &
Behavioural
Flexibility
2. Self-Belief/
Self-Esteem
7. Effective
Intrapersonal
Communication
6. Effective
Interpersonal
Communication
3. Enabling Beliefs/
Positive Thinking
5. Supportive
Environment
4. Purpose/
Direction in Life
10