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Voices of Concern

Despite the remarkable and widespread popularity of the idea that religious devotion is good for your health, some voices within the scientific, medical, and religious communities have expressed caution about attempts to link religion, spirituality, and medicine in a closer bond. In recent years, several prominent scientists have written about the dangers they see in these connections. Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Texas, and zoologist Richard Dawkins of Oxford University have produced withering critiques of religious interference with scientific inquiry. The late Steven J. Gould of Harvard University published a more moderate examination of the issue, essentially declaring religion and science to be two independent and non-overlapping domains. The New York Academy of Sciences published the proceedings of a conference decrying the current flight from reason, with several contributions describing how religion contributes to this flight. Recent efforts to promote intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory have intensified concerns about the role of religion in science and about the low level of scientific literacy in the US.

Within medicine specifically, researchers and clinicians have expressed apprehension, even alarm, at this trend. I’m among those writers who have published papers that question the quality of the evidence claiming to demonstrate associations between religious involvement and beneficial health outcomes. Our papers also addressed the serious ethical problems that may arise if religious and medical concerns are co-mingled in the context of clinical medicine. University of Kentucky psychiatrist Neil Scheurich calls for a separation of “church and medicine” similar to the “separation of church and state,” endorsing “a medicine that neither exalts nor demeans religious belief, but rather situates the latter among the countless values persons may hold.” That is, Scheurich argues that religion is no less important, but no more important, than any other value a patient may hold. In a thoughtful critique of studies of distant, intercessory prayer that is relevant to the much larger enterprise of testing the health benefits of religious involvement, Dr. Joseph Chibnall and colleagues identify significant scientific and theological problems.

Still others have expressed alarm that scientific studies of the relationship between religion and health come perilously close to attempting to validate the tenets of religion using the tools of science. In his compelling book, Seduced by Science, Steven Goldberg of Georgetown University’s Law Center writes about the increasing trend to subject religious doctrine and belief to scientific examination, arguing that to do so demeans religion. Indeed, nothing could be more trivializing of religion than for it to require marketing in the form of claims that it prevents disease and enhances recovery. In Goldberg’s view, these efforts make religion no different from other cultural institutions of our time.

Finally, the theological community also has raised objections. The Rev. Joe Baroody has criticized how proponents of a connection between religion and medicine misuse the term “faith,” presenting it as a one-dimensional index and defined by a religious activity, such as attending church. Baroody makes the especially interesting point that the thrust of the religion – medicine literature suggests that religiosity is thought to operate in the direction of improving health but that faith, in a more complex fashion, may not always work to this end. Chaplains Thomas O’Connor and Elizabeth Meakes raise questions about the qualifications of physicians to discuss religious and spiritual issues, contrasting the extremely limited exposure to these matters in medical school with the extensive training that health care chaplains receive. Writing from the perspective of social justice, Henry Heffernan, S.J., makes the important point that studies attempting to connect religious involvement with health typically fail to consider the importance of low socio-economic status as a factor in accounting for poor health.