Among Jews in Israel, the more religious the group, the better its members rate their health and happiness. A new analysis of national survey data found a near “dose-response” pattern running from secular Jews at the bottom to the ultra-Orthodox at the top.
The study is by Jeff Levin of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, who is also affiliated with Duke University School of Medicine, and his Baylor colleagues Matt Bradshaw and Byron Johnson. It was published online in the Journal of Religion and Health on July 5, 2024.
Five shades of Jewish observance
The data come from the Israeli sample of the Global Flourishing Study, a 22-nation survey run by Baylor and Harvard universities with Gallup. In Israel, interviewers used a stratified, probability-based sample and spoke with respondents in person, in Hebrew or Arabic, between November 2022 and November 2023.
The analysis covered 2,916 Jewish adults, grouped by the categories Israelis commonly use. Of them, 41.8% identified as hiloni (secular), 19.3% as masorti lo dati (traditional, non-religious), 10.6% as masorti (traditional), 13.8% as dati (religious or Orthodox) and 14.4% as charedi (ultra-Orthodox).
Respondents rated nine aspects of health and well-being: physical health, mental health, health problems that limit activity, bodily pain, depression, anxiety, suffering, happiness and life satisfaction.
A steady climb with each step of religiousness
For eight of the nine measures, scores moved in a consistent gradient. Physical health, mental health, happiness and life satisfaction rose from the secular to the ultra-Orthodox. Pain, depression, anxiety and suffering fell across the same groups.
The gaps between the ends of the scale were wide. On a 0 to 10 scale, secular Jews rated their physical health 7.82 on average and charedim 8.92. Mental health went from 8.29 to 9.49, happiness from 7.57 to 9.04 and life satisfaction from 7.07 to 8.87. On a 1 to 4 depression scale, scores fell from 1.74 among secular Jews to 1.20 among the ultra-Orthodox.
Only health problems that limit activity showed no clean gradient, although the groups still differed significantly.
The results held after adjusting for age, sex, education, marital status, urban or rural residence, income and whether respondents were born in Israel. Pairwise tests with a strict correction for multiple comparisons confirmed most of the differences, especially between the two most religious groups and everyone else.
What the survey cannot show
The authors note that the survey captures one point in time and relies on single questions, so it cannot establish that religious observance causes better health. Some measures were also vague; the question about health problems did not ask what the problems were.
Data collection also ran until November 23, 2023, after the October 7 attacks. The authors do not believe this changed the overall findings, since it fell at the tail end of 11 months of fieldwork, but they say there is no way to know for certain.
The Global Flourishing Study is planned to run five annual waves, so the same Israelis can be followed over time to test whether the religious gradient holds.
Study Details:
- Title: Religious Differences in Physical and Mental Health among Israeli Jews: Findings from the Global Flourishing Study
- Authors: Jeff Levin, Matt Bradshaw, Byron R. Johnson
- Journal: Journal of Religion and Health
- Publication Date: July 5, 2024
- DOI: 10.1007/s10943-024-02078-5