To keep life interesting, I pastored a church for three and a half years, most of it straight through the pandemic. I married people. I buried people. I sat bedside with people dying, wishing I could do something more than pray.

What is religion for? Communities of faith? Spirituality?

Is any of it good for us?

It is for some – argued often solely for the benefits of regularly connecting with others. When Harvard researchers went looking for why weekly attenders live longer, what they found was social support, not belief.

But I don't mean what a religion teaches. I mean what it does to a person. If somebody sits in a pew for thirty years, what should be different about them at the end of it?

If it isn't making a life measurably better, I'm now convinced it's doing damage. When a man tells me his beliefs make the world kinder, and his house is cold and his kids don't call, why would I want what he has?

I believe there's amazing value in sacred writings and spiritual exercises. That's exactly why I'm looking for answers here.

Say you hire a personal trainer. Fifty-two sessions, once per week for a year. At the end you're not stronger, your sleep is no better, your sex life is no more vibrant, and your bloodwork reads the same.

You'd fire them, and you'd be right to. You showed up fifty-two times. Nobody would accept "but the trainer really believes in the program" as an answer.

Now jump into the realm of religion: an hour a week for thirty years is more than fifteen hundred sessions. Same standard. What should be different?

Most of us would agree: life should be better. More joyful, more kind, more peaceful.

I'm not seeing that metric play out in the lives of many religious folks – and I want to know why not.

Across sixty years of research and 811,663 people, religious people do come out slightly more generous and honest. But it depends on who's holding the clipboard. When people grade their own goodness the link is more than twice as strong as when somebody measures what they actually did. The authors think we grade ourselves generously.

And when 1,252 adults got pinged through the day about what they'd just done, good and bad, religious and non-religious came out the same.

Then there's my favorite. In 1973, two researchers sent 67 seminary students across campus to give a talk, some of them on the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the way, each one passed a man slumped in a doorway, coughing and groaning.

The students running late stopped about ten percent of the time. The topic of the talk made no difference. Neither did any measure of how religious they were.

Being in a hurry beat the sermon.

I've been the guy in that study. My doorway is my own kitchen, when Annette needs five minutes and I have a call. When Ava wants to show me something and I'm too busy.

There's a line from The Desire of Ages I've quoted here before. Fair warning, it's a religious setup:

I preached on that a few times while I was pastoring. I wondered why the elders didn't like it. I later found out a handful of them had cheated on their wives and were doing their best to profess.

I believe spiritual health impacts mental and physical health. I believe our spiritual health is where we find meaning and purpose and connection with others.

Here’s what I do to grow my spiritual life:

I read old things. Books I consider sacred, mostly. Not the news. Book readers had a 20% lower risk of dying over twelve years, and books beat newspapers. Nobody who wrote before I was born was trying to make me angry today for a click. You can feel the difference by the time you flip the page.

I pray. For me that's talking to a personal being. I say what I want like I'd say it to a friend, hand over what's too heavy, and assume whoever's on the other end wants better for me than I want for myself. Because of how I grew up, the clearest picture I have of that is Jesus. I haven't found a better model for how to treat people, or for how far to go for somebody who'll never return the favor. So my prayers are straightforward. Make me more like the man who laid down his life for his friends. To Annette. To Ava. To the friend who calls at a bad time.

I get outside. Woods, mostly, sometimes the sauna – the desert when possible. Mindful Meditation itself is real but modest. Gratitude holds up on its own, and awe in nature beat every other positive emotion at predicting how people were doing a week later. Six weeks of loving-kindness practice raised vagal tone — an actual cardiac number you can watch. Your nervous system gets better at kindness the way your legs get better at hills. The outdoor threshold looks like 120 minutes a week.

I give people my time. Selfishness is the thing in me that fights hardest, and going out of my way for somebody is how I get a hand on it. Volunteering tracks with 24% lower mortality. And in 846 adults followed five years, stress predicted dying sooner — except among people who spent those years helping somebody. For them the link disappeared. Informal helping beats the organized kind.

Annette and I set aside 20% of what we make to give away. Honestly, it sits there for months sometimes, until somebody actually needs it. The sick. The suffering. Something that puts hope back in front of a person who ran out of it. I'd rather it wait on the right person than go somewhere that doesn't need it. When researchers scanned people while their money went to charity, reward circuitry lit up — and lit up more when they chose it.

Ok so we do all these things, do we get benefit beyond hoping for an afterlife insurance policy?

With physical health we are pretty clear. You exercise, you sleep, you eat — those are inputs. You get graded on strength, resting heart rate, A1C, quality of sleep.

Reading, prayer, service and giving are inputs too. So what are the outputs?

In a letter written to a group of folks in Galatia two thousand years ago there is a list of benefits that should arguably be seen in a thriving spiritual life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

The author called it fruit. A farming word, tangible and easy to understand. You don't grow fruit by wanting it. You tend the tree — and the soil of your own heart — and anybody walking by gets to benefit from what shows up.

Here's where I'm at now. I think we should measure our spiritual health the same way we measure our physical and mental, and there are better ways to do that today than ever.

Patience comes in three measurable kinds, and the same research trained it — raising patience and lowering depression against a control group. Forgiveness trains too. Self-control shows up mostly in how you treat other people. And Harvard is scoring 200,000 people in 22 countries right now in the Global Flourishing Study, where one of the six domains is character and virtue.

Two of the nine have no test yet. Nobody's built one for goodness or faithfulness.

Ask yourself why you snapped at somebody last night and you'll likely answer with an excuse. I've got a temper. I'm just not a patient person. I've got a lot going on.

But what if a lot of what we call a character problem is really a health problem?

Sleep. After a sleepless night, helping drops and the brain network that reads other people goes quiet — and giving fell across three million charitable donations after the spring-forward hour. One lost hour, and a whole country gave less. A bad night also makes the amygdala louder and loosens the prefrontal cortex's grip on it. This is important, because choosing kindness over selfishness is a muscle to be strengthened — the prefrontal cortex overpowering the amygdala's reactive response.

Blood sugar. 107 married couples measured theirs nightly for three weeks and stuck up to 51 pins into a doll version of their spouse. Lower evening blood sugar meant more pins. Whatever the mechanism, it aims at the person you love most.

Inflammation. Volunteers got a shot that causes inflammation or a fake one, and nobody knew which. The real shot lowered mood — by making them feel cut off from people. You can give a healthy person inflammation and make them feel unloved. Bad sleep, bad food and chronic stress do a quieter version every day.

So when kindness feels impossible, try a different question first. When did you last sleep well? When did you last eat something real? When did you last go on a long walk in the woods?

Address those and there's more fruit that will blossom.

Pick one input and one output. Just one of each, for this next week.

Being religious has a power to change the world – for good or for worse.

May our practice align more closely with our profession.

-Jared

Every study above is linked inline. Two caveats worth knowing: the attendance findings are observational, not causal. And the famous 2008 result that spending money on others makes you happier failed a direct replication in 2022, which is why it isn't in here.

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

How to Breathe for Better Health

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