A magic bullet to stop smoking!Billionaires Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg last week announced a major financial commitment to lowering the rate of smoking around the world. No doubt the money will go to the traditional mechanisms for reducing smoking – anti-smoking media campaigns, education, and distribution of non-smoking initiatives.
I’ve got a better solution. Just increase the rate at which people attend church or other worship services.
A fascinating analysis of over 100,000 interviews Gallup has conducted since January shows that within this country, there is a strong and direct correlation between smoking and church attendance. The more often Americans attend church, the less likely they are to smoke. This is a robust relationship that holds up even when things like education, age, gender and religious type are controlled for. It just appears that something about being a frequent church attender significantly lowers the probability that one smokes.
This is in the U.S., to be sure. Gates and Bloomberg are trying to stop smoking in developing countries. But the principle may well be transferable.
Let's look at some numbers. Overall, 21% of Americans interviewed in our Gallup Daily tracking program this year say that they smoke. (By the way, that’s down from an all-time high of 45% back in 1954).
But the percentage of smokers is only 12% among those who attend church once a week. Smoking rises to 15% among those who attend almost every week. Then 22% for those who attend once a month, 26% for those who seldom attend church, and finally 31% among those who never attend church.
So knowledge of an Americans’ church attendance alone predicts smoking pretty well. This is a straight linear relationship the likes of which we don’t see all that often in survey data.
The relationship between smoking and church attendance seems to hold up within almost every subgroup of the population I can come up with. For example, there's education. Generally speaking the smoking rate goes down as education goes up. But there is a relationship between church attendance and smoking within every sample of Americans created by education.
Smoking overall is very low among Americans who have post graduate education. But within this highly educated group, 4% of those who attend church weekly smoke, compared to 10% of those who never attend church.
The relationship is stronger among those with high school educations or less. In this group, smoking goes from 17% for those who attend church weekly to an amazing 48% among those who never attend church. Yes, that’s right. No typo. Almost half of Americans who have high school educations or less and never attend church, are smokers.
In terms of gender, smoking goes from 10% among women who attend church weekly to 29% among women who never attend church, and from 14% among men who attend weekly to 33% among men who never attend.
Finally, age. This is very interesting. It has been well-established that the older one is, the less likely one is to smoke. This is attributable either to wisdom (the older one gets, the more one has learned about the negative effects of smoking) or to nature’s taking its grim toll among smokers as they get older, ruthlessly reducing the number of surviving smokers.
Smoking is, as an example, much lower among Americans who have survived to be 70 years of age and older. But even here church attendance matters. Only 5% of those 70 and up who attend church each week smoke. But triple that percentage, 15% of those who are 70 and older and who never attend church smoke.
Among the youngest group of Americans, 18 to 29, the smoking rate is 14% among those who attend church weekly but rises to a whopping 37% among those who never attend. This seems to be a critical finding. If we can get our young people into church, it seems, we may be able to prevent them taking up the nicotine habit.
The effect occurs within every major religious grouping. Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, other Christian religion, non-Christian religion, those with no religion. In every instance, those who attend church the most are the least likely to smoke.
(There aren’t a lot of Mormons who never attend church, but among that group, 34% smoke. Among the much larger group of Mormons who dutifully attend every week, the smoking rate is at a miniscule 2%.)
The exact mechanisms behind this relationship is unclear. To my knowledge there’s nothing specific in the Bible about smoking. However, many evangelical Protestant faiths have had as part of their normative structure a prohibition (or at least frowning upon) social sins such as smoking, drinking, gambling and dancing. This is obviously true of Mormons as well. So one plausible explanation is that highly religious Americans are more subject to religious training/dogma that discourages indulgences such as smoking.
But we also know that church attendance is correlated with higher self-reports of happiness, lower stress, lower anger, and lower sadness. And at the same time smokers are less happy, and more likely to report being angry, stressed and sad. So it’s possible that smokers engage in their habit as a surcease from their negative mental state and/or negative emotions. Church goers find their surcease from these negative emotions in their religion, and therefore may not need the palliative impact of nicotine as much.
Whatever the reasons, Bloomberg and Gates might well sit up and pay attention. One key to reducing the rate of smoking – at least using the American situation as the example -- may well be to get people more into religion.
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