Hope and Healing: Exploring the Effect of Physical Illness on Religiosity in a Longitudinal Sample of Americans

This paper uses longitudinal data from 2002 to 2021 to investigate the extent to which physical illness is predictive of religiosity in the United States. Specifically, it leverages multiple rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), a survey of over 8000 Americans born between 1980 and 1984. Conditional fixed-effects logistic regressions are employed to examine the sample of respondents with changes in religiosity across survey rounds. All in all, the findings suggest that when people with less religious attachment experience physical illness, hope for healing and support draws them back to religion.