When This Election Is Over, Time For Some Happiness
(ANALYSIS) For many Americans, it’s a challenge to focus on much news beyond the raucous national and local political campaigns till Nov. 5. But late this year or early in 2025, we’ll get something completely different and fascinating — a batch of new findings from the Global Flourishing Study.
Through 2026, this unprecedented academic project is investigating what factors create human happiness, well-being and life satisfaction in 22 widely varied countries, based upon surveys with 240,000 people.
Happiness research is “one of the most vibrant and genuinely exciting fields of scholarship” the past five years, says Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins, adding that such questions are “arguably the most important in the world.” Hard to argue with that.
READ: Americans More Liberal On Moral Issues, Growing Increasingly Pessimistic About The Future
The $43.4 million GFS is an unusual collaboration between Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Project, housed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and Baptist-affiliated Baylor’s top-notch Institute for Studies of Religion (where Jenkins teaches but is not a GFS participant), aided by Gallup polling, with results posted by the Center for Open Science. The 50-some researchers are led by sociologist Byron Johnson, director of Baylor’s institute, and epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele, director of Harvard’s flourishing project.
For years now, Harvard and many other universities have amassed data showing that religious involvement is associated with assorted aspects of good mental and physical health for adults and better life outcomes for youths. But there’s continuing debate over such findings, analyzed in April by this writer.
Aspects GFS is tracking include demography, physical health, mental health, personal finances, politics, childhood upbringing, sense of meaning and purpose, character, virtue and social relationships.
No surprise, preliminary findings last March showed better well-being scores for those currently employed versus those “unemployed and looking for work,” and for those “living comfortably on present income” compared with persons who are “finding it very difficult.” Higher levels of education help. There’s alarming data regarding younger adults. Women reported notably better well-being than men in Japan, and the reverse in Brazil — how come?
On the religious aspects, observers will be especially interested that the results will cover populations of Jews (in Israel), Muslims (Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey), Buddhists (Japan, Chinese Hong Kong), Hindus (India) and varied forms and degrees of a Christian heritage in the United States, United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Spain and Sweden. Also studied are Africa’s Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania.
The first results indicate better human flourishing among respondents who self-identify as religious or spiritual compared with those who do not, but the difference is statistically small. The well-being bonus is substantially higher when respondents say religion is important in their personal lives, and especially if they attend religious gatherings weekly.
GFS is pursuing other questions. Do benefits result from beliefs, or simply from healthy face-to-face involvements that occur with any social organization?
Does a religious outlook provide something unique?
How do various world religions compare on this? Might faith underlie differences on financial well-being or other factors? What public policies foster contentment?
The preliminary GFS findings tabulated peoples’ self-reporting on a scale from zero for no flourishing to 10 for best success. Most nations’ mean flourishing scores fell between 6.5 and 8. So far, only two very different nations ranked below 6.5: highly secular Japan, where it’s said work is the operative religion, and economically troubled Turkey, which increasingly embraces strict Islam.
The United States posted 7.11, satisfactory though not tops. Only Indonesia exceeded an 8 score. This nation’s tolerant version of Islam is far different from that in Turkey and the neighboring Middle East. Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, and Pew Research Center ranks it the world’s most religiously devout nation.
We’ll await full GFS results, but this suggests contrasting understandings of Islam have notably different impacts on everyday life. Will this prove true with, say, Christianity? Curiously, in Indonesia (also Tanzania), there’s little statistical difference in well-being between regular religious attenders and those less involved, whereas active worshippers post notable advantages in Turkey along with Israel, Nigeria and the Philippines.
In future analysis, the GFS team will seek what aspects of religion or spirituality promote what aspects of well-being, what conditions affect the situations across differing nations, and how childhood upbringing shapes everything. Importantly, GFS says the data so far demonstrates only “associations,” but it hopes further annual waves will establish actual cause and effect.
A final note: This writer was prodded to look at GFS by a Jenkins piece in the September Christian Century. Jenkins has provided the most interesting item in many issues of this venerable liberal Protestant magazine, so it’s unfortunate that for whatever reason his column is disappearing after 16 years.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.