Religion, spirituality and belief: Mortality

Religion is not routinely collected on death records in Scotland. The data presented below was produced in a research paper in 2015 and may not represent the most up-to-date patterns and trends.

Using data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study and the Scottish censuses of 1991, 2001, and 2011, Millard et al (2015) produced mortality rates by religious group for Scotland, standardised for sex and age. They found that:

• Between 1991 and 2009, there was variation in mortality rates by religious grouping;
• Both males and females who reported their religion as Roman Catholic, or as having no religion, tended to have the highest mortality rates;
• Both males and females who reported their religion as Other Christian, or as Other religion, tended to have the lowest mortality rates;
• Mortality rates for males were higher than for females across nearly all of the religious and social class categories for which rates could be calculated;
• For both males and females, mortality rates generally increased from Social Class I to Social Class V;
• Differences in mortality between religious groups increased slightly when the interaction with social class was accounted for;
• However, accounting for the interaction with deprivation dramatically reduced the differences in mortality across religious groups.