Health Disparities Between Religious Majority and Minority: A Cross-National Analysis

Abstract

Background

Scholars have found that as a multi-facet phenomenon, religion has a complicated relationship with people’s health well-being. However, current research on health and religion has left a vacuum in understanding why we observe widespread health disparities between the majority and minority religious groups.

Purpose

The present study is aimed at two purposes. First, we conduct a cross-national comprehensive examination of the relationship between religious minority/majority status and self-rated health. Second, we investigate the moderating potential of political contexts on the relationship in question.

Methods

Drawing from the 2010–2014 wave of World Values Survey, we construct an analytic sample containing about 70,000 individual cases nested within 51 countries, and apply multilevel modeling to account for the hierarchical data structure.

Results

We first find that religious minorities are less likely to report good/very good health status relative to members of majority group. However, we note that the religious minority health disadvantage is driven by a few country outliers. After exclusion of any of these country outliers from the analysis, there is no significant health difference between majority and minority groups. Moreover, we find that political contexts moderate the health effect of being a religious minority. In countries with low levels of democracy or heavy religious restriction on minority groups, people of minority groups are less likely to report good/very good health compared with those belonging to majority group. By contrast, in societies with high levels of democracy or low levels of religious restriction, the health dispartities between religious majority and minority groups become non-significant. A series of sensitivity analysis, including using multiple-imputation sample and different ways of coding key variables, provides credibility to the results.

Conclusions and Implications

This study’s findings suggest that religious minorities experience health disadvantage, only when minority groups are denied of political and religious freedom. Compared with past works that mostly focused on a single or a few societies, this study provides large-scale, cross-national evidence for the issue of religious minority health. This study also adds to our understanding of how political context shapes the health impacts of religion.

Appendix

Tables

Table 3 Distribution of country-level variables per country

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Table 4 Percentage of reporting good/very good health for majority and minority religious groups of each country

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Table 5 Percentage of reporting good/very good health for each religious group (the majority group bolded)

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Table 6 Robustness check with a continuous self-rated health variable (Model 1 and 2), a different definition of majority religion (Model 3 and 4), and removing the countries with a mixture of Shiite and Sunni Muslims (Model 5 and 6)

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Table 7 Items for state restriction on minority religions

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Table 8 Model results based on multiple-imputation sample (Individual N = 73,145; Country N = 51)

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Table 9 Robustness test on countries with a significant number of minority respondents

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Table 10 Robustness test on three-wave models (Individual N = 171,079; Country-wave N = 133)

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