Religiosity as a Protective Factor of Psychological Well-being among Older Black, White and Asian Christians in the United States

Research suggests that older adults in stressful situations are more likely to use spiritual coping resources than other age groups in order to cultivate meaning in their lives in general as well as in difficult life situations. Based on the stress and coping framework, this study examines the role of religiosity in terms of spiritual connectedness as well as church attendance in predicting depressive symptoms among U.S. older Asian, Black, and White Christians in the context of functional limitations. Our findings suggest that older American Christians are not a homogenous group. Specifically, older Asians, when compared with Whites, reported more frequent church attendance but lower levels of spiritual connectedness, and higher levels of functional limitations and depressive symptoms. In the additive model, spiritual connectedness did not independently explain the variance in depressive symptoms for any racial group. In the interaction model, church attendance was found to be a robust factor in accounting for lower levels of depressive symptoms only for Asians, and spiritual connectedness moderated the negative impact of functional limitations on depressive symptoms only for the Black Christian sample. This finding provides support to the argument that although Blacks struggle with health difficulties, they are more likely than Whites to seek solace from religion through a personal sense of spiritual connectedness with a supernatural, omnipotent God. Among the older Asian Christians, this and other literature suggest a rather stable trend of improved depressive symptoms with higher levels of religious involvement among this population. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.