[citation needed]
Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women (2016) - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar....
> Women who went to any kind of religious service more than once a week had a 33% lower chance than their secular peers of dying during the 16-year study-follow-up period.
Not does it account for organized religions ability to forcibly displace other social support (community gathering) organizations. (Social support was the largest factor in improved health among religious people in the study).
Study also excluded, by design, any effects religious services may have on causing cardiovascular problems or cancer, on confounders due to already sick people finding religion.
I would hazard a guess the removed bit is actually very important, because having a social network has been shown to improve lives: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+network+and+old+age&ia=web (hopefully that's enough citation), and regularly showing up to congregation is probably a huge step in having a social network.
The basic idea is let's measure what the gift cost and what the receiver valued it at. But not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that is measured, matters. The study should have accounted for the strength of relationship between the gifter and gifted and how it was affected by the gift. It should have measured social status of the gifter before and after. These deepened bonds and increased social status could pay off later in the year. The 2001 paper Poverty and public celebrations in rural India (https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/2528.html) examines that idea and finds it to be true.
When you're looking at an institution that has developed independently thousands of times across human history in wildly disparate cultures, you need to ask yourself what benefit it brings before dismissing it.
This comment reminds me of the teenage atheists who think religion is worthless because it's a bunch of made up stuff they don't believe is true. Regardless of what they believe, religion has indepdendatly developed and flourished in a number of cultures. Religion brings benefits to it's members, such as living longer, happier lives.