Religious Engagement and Living Well

This chapter focuses on the debate over whether religion does more harm or good. Throughout history, religion and medicine have collaborated, sometimes through the same person. Even nontheists have clashing presumptions regarding whether religion undermines or enhances prosociality. Religion, argued Christopher Hitchens, "is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Religions "exhort people to pursue causes greater than their personal desires." Extrinsically motivated religion has even, at times, provided self-justification—by thinking God is on one's side—for ingroup bias, opposition to equal rights for women and sexual minorities, and war. Yet religious engagement, especially in the relatively religious Western countries such as the United States, correlates positively with happiness, health, and helping behaviors. Various measures reveal a positive association between religious engagement and human flourishing across individuals, and a negative association across aggregate places.