And it’s something you might never expect: religion.
That’s right—it’s that simple: If you want to be happier, get up off the couch and go to church.
A new five-year study underway by Gallup, Harvard and Baylor University is looking at the question of whether religiosity can add to “flourishing,” defined as “living in a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good.” In other words, happiness. And they’re finding it does.
“People who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier.”
The study’s very name, the Global Flourishing Study, is a pretty good clue to its focus: Around the world, in various belief systems, what does it take to truly “flourish” in life?
And while it isn’t yet complete, there are preliminary results. “Faith repeatedly comes up in them as an important variable linked to flourishing,” said Byron Johnson, director of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
It’s even numerically quantifiable: The “flourishing” score is 0.23 points higher for someone who says religion is an important part of their daily life. Your “happiness likelihood” jumps even higher if you attend church at least weekly—0.41 points higher.
Of course, the pollsters are trying to explain where this happiness comes from—which part of religious faith contains the secret? Johnson thinks it may be focusing on others, as taught by most religions, while Brendan Case, associate director for research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, says lifelong experience counts.
“One of the best predictors of participating in a religious community as an adult is having participated in one as a child,” he said, “and participation as an adult is very strongly associated with flourishing in the present.”
But it’s never too late to start.
According to the study, the specific faith or denomination wasn’t all that important: Apparently, whether you’re Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Scientologist, Zoroastrian, Bahá’í, or otherwise religious, believing, communing and becoming part of something greater than yourself quite simply makes you happier.
In his celebrated essay “Religious Influence in Society,” Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard explained why. “Let a man know he is himself, a spiritual being, that he is capable of the power of choice and has the right to aspire to greater wisdom and you have started him up a higher road,” he wrote.
A champion of religious tolerance who was well aware of religion’s role in the creation of happiness, Mr. Hubbard described how “Man, since the dawn of the species, has taken great consolation and joy in his religions.”
And the research just keeps bearing it out. “People who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than either religiously unaffiliated adults or inactive members of religious groups, according to a … Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from the United States and more than two dozen other countries,” one article reads.
It’s why, in spite of faith being vilified by decades of cynical prognosticators boasting about how many fewer Americans are attending church these days, religion has held its own—and is on its way back.
Megachurches, defined by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research as Protestant Christian congregations with membership exceeding 2,000, are rapidly growing.
These churches often have multiple locations—70 percent do today, as compared to just 23 percent in 2020—to serve their large and growing congregations. There are even “gigachurches,” with congregations exceeding 10,000. And they’re growing, too.
Scientology, for its part, is expanding like never before in history under the leadership of David Miscavige. The size, sweep and scope of the religion has multiplied 50 times over in the last 40 years, with newcomers now stepping into Scientology Churches and Missions worldwide every 60 seconds.
So, all in all, it’s an exciting time to be religious—possibly, hopefully, the beginning of a great turnaround in American religious life.
Because, once the studies are complete and broadly known—once people learn that happiness is alive and waiting inside the doors of a church, temple, monastery or mosque—we just might see a great resurgence of individuals turning to religion to make them whole.
And if they find happiness in their own faith, without objecting to that of anyone else, won’t that be a great and glorious time in the history of man?
