Christianity Today Book Review: More Than a Magic Pill, by Kathryn Butler (M.D. Columbia) (reviewing Rebecca McLaughlin, How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life (2025)):
In her latest book, Rebecca McLaughlin, author of the award-winning Confronting Christianity, offers a surprising new remedy for those chasing after health. The cure she recommends doesn’t populate influencers’ top ten lists. It requires no health insurance or physician approval, and market research doesn’t quantify it.
Yet “the script is for something that—if taken at least weekly—could elongate your life expectancy by seven years, significantly increase your chance of happiness, and substantially reduce the likelihood you’ll suffer from depression.”
What could this impressive prescription be? A vitamin? A step-counting app? An intermittent-fasting regimen?
McLaughlin suggests none of these. Rather than pills or strength training, for optimal wellness she recommends a resource freely available to all and life-giving for those who pursue it: church.
In her latest, brief book, How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life, McLaughlin highlights the mental, physical, moral, and spiritual benefits of regular church attendance. … [She] offers a pathway for true healing. As she does in Confronting Christianity, McLaughlin demonstrates keen insight into the reservations of young skeptics.
McLaughlin outlines compelling research on the physical and mental health benefits of church attendance. She draws heavily from the work of Tyler VanderWeele, professor of epidemiology and director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Unlike researchers on this topic from decades past, who primarily produced underpowered cross-sectional studies, VanderWeele and his contemporaries have conducted robust longitudinal studies with cohorts numbering in the tens of thousands.
The findings are striking. Church attendance reduces all-cause mortality by nearly 30 percent over a 15-year period and protects woman against suicide by 400 percent. Weekly churchgoing in women over 40 is as protective against death as annual mammograms, McLaughlin writes. Those attending services more than weekly at age 20 have “a roughly seven-year greater life expectancy than their nonchurchgoing peers.” Churchgoing protects against alcohol, smoking, and drug abuse and decreases the odds of depression by one-third. …
The greatest gift McLaughlin offers her readers isn’t an invitation to church, however. It’s an invitation into a relationship with the one who makes church so priceless in the first place.
As someone leery of pragmatism, I confess I was wary when I received McLaughlin’s book. The true allure of church isn’t its health benefits or even its social community but the gift of worshiping the God who gave his one and only Son. Period. We worship because he deserves it. He’s worthy of our time, attention, and adoration, and against the backdrop of God’s holiness, all practical justifications for church ring hollow or even seem degrading.
I was relieved and delighted, however, to discover that although McLaughlin hooks readers with promises of wellness, she lands at the true heart of the matter: the gospel. Drawing from Matthew 9:12–13, McLaughlin emphasizes that more than we need self-help books, pills, or uninterrupted sleep, we need Jesus:
The great physician doesn’t merely pop a magic pill into our hands and wish us luck. He takes our moral sickness on himself and gives his life in place of ours. … In the end, you could attend church all your life and live to ninety-five and never take the pill that really counts.
In How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life, McLaughlin introduces skeptics to data, invites them to church, and finally guides them toward the one by whose wounds we are healed—no pills, planks, or apps required.
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