Body and spirit: Religious beliefs have impact on self-image

"Heavenly Bodies" is what Diane Spangler called a talk she gave recently — a title that sums up the push-pull of faith and flesh. People want to look divine, sometimes in both senses of the word. Some of us wear burqas, and some of us use Botox. We worry about both the here-and-now and the hereafter and try to figure out what matters. We think of our bodies with both shame and delight.

An associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, Spangler has spent a lot of time considering the relationship between religious doctrine and the body. In her talk last week at a University of Utah symposium on body image, she reported on research showing that Mormon college students have significantly better "body satisfaction" than students from other religions or from no religion.

Her thesis: Mormon theological doctrine about the body in general is what leads those LDS students to be happy with their own bodies in particular.

That's not to say that most men and women who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like everything about their bodies. Spangler herself does research on eating disorders, and some of the women in treatment are from BYU. Like most Americans — 80 percent of women and 60 percent of men, according to one national study — many LDS women look in the mirror and are at least mildly unhappy. Still, Mormons are more satisfied than most, she says.

The studies seem on their face to be counter-intuitive. Spangler's own studies, as well as two Texas studies, included women at BYU — a university well-known for its high percentage of women in the market for a spouse. Wouldn't they be even more prone to fret about their looks?

Two of the studies, conducted by Jody Oomen-Early at Texas Women's University, surveyed women age 18 to 30 about a related issue — eating disorders. Oomen-Early, who did her graduate work in health sciences at BYU, wondered if religious devoutness was correlated with increased eating disorder behaviors, a question that first occurred to her when an anorexic student at TWU told her that she felt she was "good" when she denied herself, and sinful when she ate.

Oomen-Early's research found that the more devout a Baptist or Methodist woman, the more likely she was to have eating disorder behaviors. But — and this surprised her — more devout LDS women were less prone to eating disorder symptoms. "Religious devoutness seemed to be a protective factor in LDS women," says Oomen-Early.

"Correlation does not equal cause or effect," Oomen cautions. "It just tells us that there is some kind of relationship there."