Do religiosity and spirituality really matter for social, mental, and physical health?: A tale of two samples.

Some prior research has found that religiosity and spirituality can be related to health. However, the relationships are inconsistent, measures of religiosity and spirituality are often problematic and conflated with the health outcomes they are supposed to predict, and very little research on this topic specifies which aspects of health supposedly benefit from religiosity and spirituality. Using two sets of survey data (Sample 1N = 347; Sample 2N = 404), we examined whether religiosity and spirituality had direct or indirect effects on physical, mental, and/or social health. We found that spirituality, when conceptualized as belief and experience of the supernatural, had no direct or indirect effect on physical, mental, or social health. Religiosity had a small but significant direct effect on social health in one sample but not the other. We consider our findings in relation to religious privileging in the United States and how proreligious biases can lead to health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]