Religious attendance is consistently correlated with higher levels of contentment and satisfaction. Here’s what the research into that connection has revealed.
By Julia Flynn Siler
The San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, a correctional facility located on the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay, seems an unlikely place to find happiness.
But the Rev. George Williams, a chaplain there, is flourishing. He leads Catholic masses for about 200 incarcerated men on Sundays in English and Spanish and offers pastoral support during the week. Sharing his faith with inmates has been a source of joy for the bespectacled and soft-spoken priest.
“I look forward to going to work every day,” Williams, who has served as a prison chaplain for 30 years (and at San Quentin for about half that time), told me. It’s like “drinking grace from a fire hose.”
It doesn’t matter which faith. Similar correlations are found among people practicing Christianity as well as Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and other faiths—and for people living and working in and outside of prison walls.
An influential Pew Research Center study, for example, showed that people who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier than unaffiliated or inactive members of religious groups. They also tend to be more civically engaged. These findings, released in 2019, were based on an analysis of survey data from the U.S. and more than two dozen other countries (chart below) including the U.S. (ranked in the bottom half) and Mexico (ranked at the top.) The study also suggests that countries where religious engagement is dropping, like the U.S., could be at risk for declines in social and personal well-being.
Happiness among the most active followers
Regardless of faith, those actively engaged in congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged. The unaffiliated and people who are inactive members of religious communities are much less likely to identify as “very happy.”
Mexico 71%
Colombia 58
Ecuador 56
Australia 45
Japan 45
Singapore 43
Uruguay 43
New Zealand 41
Brazil 38
Netherlands 38
South Africa 38
Kazakhstan 37%
Peru 37%
Argentina 36%
United States 36% About one in five people in the United States are unaffiliated, a rapidly growing group since the late 20th century.
Taiwan 35
Germany 30
Chile 25
Slovenia 21
South Korea 21
Estonia 20
Russia 20
Ukraine 19
Spain 13%
But the authors of the Pew study cautioned that the nature of the connections need further study: “the numbers do not prove that going to religious services is directly responsible for improving people’s lives.”
Health doesn’t always track with happiness. People active in a religious community are less likely to smoke or drink, but not more likely to exercise, to have lower obesity levels, or to give themselves high ratings on health.
So, what is it about faith that seems to be improving wellbeing? And does one need to believe in God or practice faith to reap the benefits?
Scientists wonder: Does religion cause happiness? A huge new study is underway.
A team of scholars, in partnership with polling firm Gallup, has begun a five-year study of over 200,000 participants from 22 countries, to figure out what leads to what researchers call flourishing. To flourish is to be more than merely happy; it’s a metric meant to show if people are “living in a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good.”
The project is led by Tyler J. VanderWeele, director of Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, and Byron Johnson, director of Baylor University’s Institute for Study of Religion. Their effort, called the Global Flourishing Study, is set up to deepen our knowledge about the link between flourishing and religion, as it asks people around the world a set of questions about their well-being (including happiness), as well as collect data on their demographic, social, economic, political, and religious backgrounds.
Some preliminary results have already been released. “Faith repeatedly comes up in them as an important variable linked to flourishing,” says Johnson.
This ongoing project is doing something that most previous studies of faith and happiness have not. It is tracking people’s responses to the survey over a period of years (versus gauging them at one single point of time), which may help researchers draw conclusions about causality.
That data isn’t in yet. But the results obtained so far back up what Pew and other researchers have found. The average flourishing score was 0.23 points higher for someone who says that religion is an important part of their daily life than for someone who does not – and 0.41 points higher for someone who attends a religious service at least weekly.
The researchers suspect not all religious experiences have an equal impact on happiness. For instance, the study is examining whether participating in religious services as a child impacts later happiness. “One of the best predictors of participating in a religious community as an adult is having participated in one as a child,” says Brendan Case, the associate director for research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. “And participation as an adult is very strongly associated with flourishing in the present.”
What religion can teach the non-religious about happiness
So, what is it about religion that supports happiness? Baylor’s Johnson says that focusing on others – something that most religious traditions teach – has the benefit of improving one’s own life, health, and flourishing.
Harvard’s Case thinks it’s the social support provided by religious communities that seems to be key, as well as their offer of meaning, purpose and consolation. “Religious communities are probably so ubiquitous in human cultures because they satisfy a fundamental human urge, or perhaps even need, for a moral community oriented toward the sacred, or divine or transcendent,” Case says, paraphrasing the French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s account of why human beings are intrinsically religious animals.
For Kelli Fleitas, a middle-aged mother of two teenagers, that sense of transcendence comes from singing in church. While she wishes her two teens still wanted to attend services as they did when they were younger, she’s grateful for her own experience – particularly the months that she and her fellow choristers sang carols before holiday services, including “Nova, nova,” a hymn set to 15th Century English text and accompanied by a musician playing on a recorder. Fleitas experiences happiness when she blends her voice with others at church. Singing, for her, is an active form of prayer.
For non-believers, other types of communities, such as bowling leagues and Rotary Clubs, may offer some of the same sense of purpose, rituals and community that religion does, as the Harvard political scientist emeritus Robert D. Putnam described in his book “Bowling Alone.” (Though Case cautions they might not be as powerful of an influence as religious groups).
“Lift up your hearts,” intoned Chris Rankin-Williams, the rector of the small parish church she attends. “We lift them to the Lord,” responded the children, couples, and old people standing in the circle in unison. A few minutes later, worshippers took turns offering prayers. During her turn, Fleitas offered a prayer of gratitude for her experience of singing with her choir over the holidays. “My heart is so full,” she said.
