Are Religious People Happier Than The Non-Religious?
(ANALYSIS) So, here’s something I’ve felt compelled to say when I’m giving a public presentation in the last couple of months: “Just say the one true thing.”
It’s my tendency to couch things, to provide all kinds of caveats, or downplay a finding so that I’ve got a bit of wiggle room. And in a lot of areas of social science, that’s still pretty sound advice.
If you look at the relationship between one variable and another, there are often 100 articles that test out the link between the two. A majority may say it’s a positive relationship, but about 30% find no relationship or a negative one. So, a bit of hedging is necessary there.
Today, however, I’m just going to say the one true thing that shows up over and over again in the literature: religious people self-identify as happier than non-religious people. There’s just no mistaking that conclusion. There are ways to try and explain it away, certainly. For instance, maybe the causal arrow goes the opposite way — happier people tend to be more religious. But the upshot is still the same: religious nones are less happy than folks who identify with a faith tradition.
The 2023–2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey asked respondents a very straightforward question: “Generally, how happy are you with your life these days? Are you... very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” In the entire sample (of nearly 37,000 respondents), 28% said they were very happy, 58% were pretty happy, and only 13% were not too happy.
But let me show you how those answers shift when you break it down by level of in-person religious attendance.
Yeah, that’s about as clear as an empirical result gets when you’re doing this type of analysis. For those who report never attending religious services in person, 19% indicate that they are “not too happy” compared to 22% who are “very happy.”
But for nearly every step up in religious attendance, there’s a noticeable increase in overall happiness.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.