In his book “What Is It Like to Be an Addict?” philosophy professor Owen Flanagan says he dislikes the tendency of some clinicians to “generalize about (addicts) in ways we know to be inaccurate, such as that we are all self-medicating, or that all use is preceded by powerful craving, or that we were all victims of trauma.”
It is tempting to oversimplify the causes of addiction and even the ways that people recover from it. But Flanagan calls addiction “psychobiosocial,” a word which begins to get at the complexity of its causes. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to reducing addiction. But, according to some recent research, religion can help.
Researchers at prominent universities including Harvard and Stanford conducted a meta-analysis of 55 longitudinal studies, which collectively included more than half a million participants. They found that there was a “significant protective association,” related to both prevention and recovery, between spirituality and usage of alcohol and other drugs.
Under the study’s criteria, spirituality can include individual prayer or meditation, but also regular involvement in a religious community. The authors found a “consistent 13% risk reduction extended across the studied drugs … a figure that reached 18% for individuals engaging in spiritual or religious communities,” which was defined as greater than weekly religious service attendance.
They found only positive results from religious involvement, no detrimental ones, when it came to substance use.
This will not be news to many, of course. Twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous have long relied on ideas about a “higher power” and communal support in order to help their members achieve sobriety. Even people like journalist Katie Herzog, who did not find AA particularly useful in her initial attempts to quit drinking and who ended up using medication to get sober, eventually went back to AA because it helped her find social supports for the long term.
Of course, it’s not only that religious communities provide a sense of purpose and meaning and that they offer a community. Religion also supports other structures — like stable families — that also make drug abuse less likely. Religion generally encourages marriage and childbearing, but also provides rituals for families to spend time together whether at a house of worship or at home.
One question that readers will reasonably ask is whether correlation can tell us anything about causation. Are religious people simply less likely to engage in substance use because they also come from environments that frown on it or because they believe that a higher power doesn’t want them to use? It is hard to say, particularly with recovery programs. Some research suggests that AA is no more effective than any other treatment program.
When it comes to child-rearing, however, the results are remarkably consistent. Last year, I interviewed Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, who also happens to be one of the co-authors of the new JAMA study. He and a colleague had previously conducted a study and found that if you wanted to predict whether a child would have a drug problem, the No. 1 factor was, Humphreys told me, “not race or income or education or even parents’ drug use.” It’s whether they are “being raised in religious home.”
The largest effects were found in Jewish, Latter-day Saint and Muslim homes. The findings, he said, resulted in “multiple academics getting really angry.” He says that these findings about the positive impacts of religion “makes a certain type of person uncomfortable.”
But the findings about how religious communities can prevent children from using or abusing drugs in the first place are particularly important. Research shows that if young people can make it into their early 20s without engaging in drug, alcohol or tobacco use, their chances of becoming addicted as an adult are negligible.
The JAMA authors make clear that the government obviously shouldn’t be involved in the promotion of a particular religious viewpoint, but government is not the only agent that can help with our addiction crisis. Health professionals, for instance, can ask, “Are religion or spirituality important to you in thinking about health or illness at other times?” and “Do you have, or would you like to have, someone to talk about religious or spiritual matters?”
They note that while not all clinicians will be able to relate to religious involvement, “they can acknowledge their value as part of patient-centered care.” Indeed, the tendency of some to shy away from these findings, that is “not encouraging such community participation,” the authors note, “may potentially neglect an important health resources that supports people in a time of need.”
