Religion provides happiness because of the social ties, study claims

The rea­son re­li­gious peo­ple are hap­pi­er than oth­ers is be­cause of the so­cial con­nec­tions of­fered by their faith group, not so much be­cause of the spir­it­u­al be­liefs, a study sug­gests.

Au­thors of the re­search, pub­lished in the De­cem­ber is­sue of the Amer­i­can So­ci­o­lo­g­i­cal Re­view, claim they have found the “se­cret in­gre­di­ent” that ex­plains why re­peat­ed stud­ies have linked re­li­gion to great­er life sat­is­fac­tion.

“Our study of­fers com­pel­ling ev­i­dence that it is the so­cial as­pects of re­li­gion rath­er than the­ol­o­gy or spir­it­u­al­ity that leads to life sat­is­fac­tion,” said so­ci­ol­o­gist Chaey­oon Lim of the Uni­vers­ity of Wis­con­sin-Mad­i­son, who led the stu­dy. “Friend­ships built in re­li­gious con­grega­t­ions are the se­cret in­gre­di­ent in re­li­gion that makes peo­ple hap­pi­er.”

Lim and co-author Rob­ert D. Put­nam of Har­vard Uni­vers­ity used da­ta from the Faith Mat­ters Study, a pan­el sur­vey of a “rep­re­sent­a­tive” sam­ple of U.S. adults in 2006 and 2007. Ac­cord­ing to the stu­dy, 33 per­cent of peo­ple who at­tend re­li­gious ser­vic­es eve­ry week and have three to five close friends in their con­grega­t­ion re­port that they are “ex­tremely sat­is­fied” with their lives. “Ex­tremely sat­is­fied” is de­fined as a 10 on a scale rang­ing from 1 to 10.

In com­par­i­son, only 19 per­cent of peo­ple who at­tend ser­vic­es week­ly, but who have no close friends in their con­grega­t­ion call them­selves ex­tremely sat­is­fied. On the oth­er hand, 23 per­cent of peo­ple who at­tend ser­vic­es only sev­er­al times a year, but who have three to five close friends in their con­grega­t­ion are ex­tremely sat­is­fied with their lives, the re­search­ers re­ported. Fi­nal­ly, 19 per­cent of peo­ple who nev­er at­tend ser­vic­es say they’re ex­tremely sat­is­fied with their lives.

“To me, the ev­i­dence sub­stanti­ates that it is not really go­ing to church and lis­ten­ing to ser­mons or pray­ing that makes peo­ple hap­pi­er, but mak­ing church-based friends and build­ing in­ti­mate so­cial net­works there,” Lim said.

“One of the im­por­tant func­tions of re­li­gion is to give peo­ple a sense of be­longing to a mor­al com­mun­ity based on re­li­gious faith,” he said. “This com­mun­ity, how­ev­er, could be ab­stract and re­mote un­less one has an in­ti­mate cir­cle of friends who share a si­m­i­lar ident­ity. The friends in one’s con­grega­t­ion thus make the re­li­gious com­mun­ity real and tan­gi­ble, and strength­en one’s sense of be­longing to the com­mun­ity.”