Religion and Well-being
A large body of research suggests that, as compared with religious individuals, people who lack a creed are less likely to be happy and healthy – surely the two most important earthly concerns – and tend to lose out on at least seven years of life, some estimates suggest. Several large-scale population studies have reinforced a single premise: the more you engage with religious activities, the better off you are.
Yet many people are less certain about their beliefs than ever before. Non-believers number between 500 million and 750 million worldwide, according to one analysis. In the past two decades, the percentage of the U.S. population that proclaims its religious affiliation as “none” has more than doubled, to about 15 percent. Many of these individuals do not identify as atheists; even so, many of them conduct their life outside the religious establishment. Although research on this population is only now emerging, a recent study found that people who were less committed to their religious creed were actually less happy than avowed atheists.
If the shifting beliefs of a growing number of people portend lower health and a less contented outlook, knowing exactly how religion benefits its followers becomes a matter of public concern. Several recent studies have sought to answer this question by examining it with greater resolution. For the first time, researchers have collected a representative sample of the world that measures religiosity and happiness. They found that the positive effects of religion depend enormously on where you live. Religious people may be happier than their godless coun-terparts, but only if the society they belong to values religion highly, which not all societies do. For atheists and the growing ranks of unaffiliated individuals, these findings bode well. Although many questions remain about how nonbelievers can acquire the health benefits of religion, scientists are now finding that secular communities of like-minded people can offer similar social support.
To examine how the U.S., where being religious is the cultural norm, compares with the rest of the world, psychologist Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and his colleagues conducted a global survey, including a state-bystate sample in the U.S. In line with earlier findings, two thirds of those surveyed regarded religion as important to their life. The states, however, varied by a factor of two: in Vermont, 44 percent rated religion as important, compared with 88 percent in Mississippi. In the states where religion was very important, people were much more likely to be living in difficult circumstances. They also had lower subjective well-being than people living in less religious parts of the country. Did religion make them happier, as previous studies had shown? Absolutely, according to the data – but they were worse off than the contented residents of more affluent states, where religion mattered less.
Globally, people in 154 countries were surveyed, with an average of 3,000 people per country. Overall, three out of four reported that religion was important in their life.
Again, the devil was in the details. The countries in the sample varied in religiosity by a factor of six, ranging from 16 percent of respondents in Sweden agreeing that religion was an important part of their life to 99 percent affirmation in Bangladesh, Egypt, Sri Lanka and Somaliland. In this global poll, a tough environment also tended to coincide with greater national religiosity. If you live in a nation where daily existence is difficult, your life satisfaction is generally lower. In those countries, being more religious appears to grant you a premium on happiness that your less religious neighbours do not enjoy. If the living is easy, however, both nonbelievers and religious people have similar, relatively high subjective well-being. This effect held true for all religions represented in the sample – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam.
More important, whether a person was struggling or thriving was nowhere near as predictive of religiosity as a society’s conditions and norms. “Do you have individual choice about what you believe? Yes, but there are strong influences in society – whether everyone around you is religious,” Ed Diener says. “That’s the eye-opener for me, that societal forces led to religiosity rather than individual forces.”
For nonbelievers, these are heartening data. They bolster the idea that believers will accrue more psychological benefits only in places that value religion more, and vice versa. It means atheists are not permanently shut off from some fountain of happiness – although they may want to find a like-minded community to live in.
Sandra Upson, Scientific American Mind