Arthur Brooks on Religion and Happiness

by Will Wilkinson on May 17, 2008

In Arthur Brooks’ Gross National Happiness, he makes a great deal of the effect of religiosity on happiness. And there is no disputing the data: in the United States, religious participation is positively correlated with higher levels of self-reported happiness. But he makes rather too much of it, I think, largely because he has decided not to take into account international comparisons but rather stick exclusively with evidence from the U.S. I think this is a huge mistake.

In the AEI forum Thursday, Brooks responded to my criticism by correctly pointing out that cross-country comparisons can be muddied by various cultural differences. Sure. But if you are more or less thoroughly satisfied with the general validity of survey measures, as Brooks claims to be, then there is really no principled reason not to compare results between the United States and Western Europe, which aren’t all that different. Indeed, the differences that do show up in the data are very telling, and they cut strongly against both the substance and rhetoric of Brooks’ strongly pro-religion argument.

I think Brooks is rather too willing to slide from local individual-level correlations — for example, that other things equal, religious folks in the United States say they are happier — to macro-level generalizations — for example, that more religious cultures are generally happier ones. At one point, Brooks implies that the ACLU is hurting national happiness by fighting against public displays of religion.

What you do not learn in the chapter on religion in Gross National Happiness is that countries with some of the lowest levels of religious participation in the world, such as Denmark, Norway, or Finland show up again and again in international rankings as some of the world’s happiest places, usually ahead of the U.S. Moreover, many of the most religious places on Earth are deeply miserable.

You’d think this would be relevant. But Brooks just doesn’t bring it up. He seemed to me to encourage the idea that the relationship between religiosity and happiness is deep, perhaps universal. But it just isn’t. According to a 2007 paper by Lisbeth Snoep in the Journal of Happiness Studies, there is no significant individual-level correlation between religiosity and happiness in the countries she looked at: Denmark and the Netherlands — both among the happiest countries. In his concluding chapter, one of Brooks’ “Happiness Lessons for our Leaders” is “America must defend it’s tradition of religious faith.” But it’s really hard to see why.

Please compare these two charts (click for full size):

That’s from Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.

And that’s from Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox“[pdf].

Secularization has been rapid in much of Europe over the last several decades. But according to Stevenson and Wolfers’ recent paper, happiness has been steadily increasing there all the while — unlike in the U.S., where the measured trend has been flat. It doesn’t take an econometric wizard to eyeball the relationship: religion down, happiness up. Doesn’t this fact simply devastate Brooks’ strong implication that secularization is antagonistic to national happiness? Yes it does.

Note that you don’t have to believe in cross-country happiness comparisons to take this seriously. All you have to note is that average happiness rose while rates of religious participation fell here, here, here, here, and here, etc. And then, given that fact, Brooks may owe us a special story about why he doesn’t think that relationship would hold in the United States, too.

So what are we left with? Brooks rightly points out that in the U.S. a great number of community organizations are anchored in religion. And sociality and community are key to happiness. So, sure, non-religiosity in the U.S. is likely to be a socially alienating and stigmatized kind of non-conformism. I’m trying to track down a paper I think is in the Diener and Suh collection, Culture and Subjective Well-Being, which I recall as saying something to the effect that a good individual fit with prevailing cultural values predicts self-reported happiness. So, for example, people with collectivist values are more likely to be happy in a collectivist society than are people with individualist values in collectivist cultures. But, overall, individualist societies tend to be happier. It seems to me that Brooks has simply found that America has a religious culture, and therefore it’s less trouble to be religious in the U.S., not that religiosity has some kind of deep connection to happiness.

But Brooks writes:

You may not go to church — you may be an atheist. But if you enjoy living in a happy country, you can thank — well, you can thank your lucky stars–that so many of your American compatriots are religious.

Looking at the data, this strikes me as conservative bluster. Almost all the countries that consistently score higher than the U.S. in happiness are much less religious. While conservatives and the religious are indeed more likely to say they are happy in the U.S., it would be a simple error to infer that “gross national happiness” would be damaged were the culture to become less conservative or religious. In fact, cross-national data seem strongly to suggest the opposite. Perhaps we should thank our lucky stars for the salutary influence of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris!

Viewing 26 Comments

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    I haven't explored Brooks idea, but it sounds dumb. However those graphs you post do seem to indicate that the religion-happiness link does appear to be nearly universal. Only Great Britain has the opposite correlation. That's a pretty interesting statistic.
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    It sounds to me like you're both making too much of ambiguous data, and interpreting it to fit your priors.

    One other note:
    "It doesn’t take an econometric wizard to eyeball the relationship: religion down, happiness up. Doesn’t this fact simply devastate Brooks’ strong implication that secularization is antagonistic to national happiness? Yes it does."

    I thought it was becoming cliche to start in on the old correlation/causation diatribe, but apparently not.

    By the way, I agree that it is specious for Brooks not to have taken worldwide data into account.

    Sorry that this was a bit random.
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    I think your reference to Culture and Subjective Well Being is a good explanation for why Brooks would find his thesis supported only in the US.

    Interestingly, in his earlier book he notes that self reported conservatives were more likely to be civically engaged. If the culture and well being thing holds, and Scandinavians are happier because their personal collectivism meshes with society/state, then it really IS just a matter of socializing Americans over generations to be happy with big government. Path dependence might make that very difficult for the diverse and unwieldy citizenry of the US, but just give it enough time...

    Hitchens seems like a deeply unhappy individual. Almost the perfect stereotype of the spiritually depleted and cold communist bureaucrat.
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    Oh yeah? Well why don't you ask all these people how happy they are when they're burning in the Lake of Fire?
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    Exactly, Will. General equilibrium effects are likely to be important here, which makes cross-national data relatively more interesting.

    Only "relatively", though, because if there has ever been a better example of non-random independent variable assignment, I haven't seen it. Since nobody's ever going to find convincingly-valid manipulation in this context, I smell a structural model...
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    Doesn't the state support of religion explain almost all of the difference? In the US, religion must pass a market test, whereas in Europe, wealth transfers mean that don't have to. It's no wonder religion in these countries are held to the same esteem that Haliburton is here.
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    John, That may explain why Europe is secularizing faster than the U.S. But it remains that many European countries have become happier while becoming less religious. It's not clear to me why the mechanism matters.
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    John,

    Europeans don't seem to care for the "market test", so I don't know if that explains much.
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    I think happiness is a variable...experienced and defined differently in these different cultures including our own!
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    Will, good point. Still, if religion was never state supported in Europe, one wonders how attitudes toward religion would be different today, and if perhaps it would just be another factor of many adding to individual happiness. If so, then Brooks' point would still stand. Interestingly, the analysis of Ekelund, Hebert, and Tollison suggests that absent religion, people would simply demand something else (because of an inherent human trait to demand "spiritual services.") If that is true, one wonders what has taken the place of religion in Europe that has not yet taken the place of it here, and whether state support has hastened this development.
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    Speaking as a former Evangelical Christian, I can say that most of the time religion didn't make me happy. However, I did find that there was tremendous social pressure within the church to pretend to be happy. There was even a song our church singles group was pressured to sing which had the lyrics, "I'm so happy, so very happy . . . . "

    I have read that regions of the country with the highest religious identification also have the highgest incidents of negative indices such as abortion, illegitimacy, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, murder, rape, suicide etc. This might be informing us that the religious aren't telling the truth when they are polled.
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    What Imp said.

    I wonder if the form of evangelism in the south is not more than coincidental vis-a-vis the high divorce rates, etc. I suppose in a place where faith healers and the like are popular, the time preference of the general population would also be conducive to getting in over one's head in matters of love and lust.

    It's all about passion.
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    But it remains that many European countries have become happier while becoming less religious. It’s not clear to me why the mechanism matters.

    I agree with your main point, but of course mechanism matters. For instance, happiness in marriage has stayed the same over the last 30 years but that masks the changing dynamics of that happiness: married people talk to each other less than 30 years ago which lowers marital satisfaction, but they earn more household income than 30 years ago which raises it by a similar amount. The result is a wash, but it didn't have to be. Communication could have been more important and marital happiness would have gone down, or money could have been more important and happiness would have gone up.

    Going back to the national comparisons, perhaps loss of religion does lower happiness, it's just that money more than makes up for it. It is certainly possible that happiness could have been higher still in every one of those countries if religious belief/culture had been preserved through whatever means.

    If government policy A leads to a growth rate of 1000% and government policy B leads to a growth rate of 1%, you can't say B was a success (instead of a disaster) just because you are moving in a better direction.

    You used the same fallacy thinking about immigration.
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    Jason Malloy has got it right, but just to put it in 5 words: correlation does not imply causation. In Europe, increasing income drives both happiness and secularization up. In America, higher house prices in blue states drives happiness down and secularization up.

    And yet, I suspect that there is another factor: I suspect that European religion tends to be more gloomy than American religion. I suspect that, in Europe, preachers tell us that we could end up in Hell; in America, preachers tell you that you can go to Heaven.

    OK, I'm grossly exaggerating; but please send in some missionaries!
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    """"""
    I have read that regions of the country with the highest religious identification also have the highgest incidents of negative indices such as abortion, illegitimacy, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, murder, rape, suicide etc. This might be informing us that the religious aren’t telling the truth when they are polled.
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    People who actually practice their faith are happier, have less divorce, yadda, yadda... than any other groups. People who self identify with but don't actually practice their faith are worse than atheists/agnostics.

    Regardless, all "happiness" research is a joke.
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    Brooks strongly implies that an increase in secularization will harm American happiness. That's a causal claim. If you think that, other things equal, p causally implies q, then showing a number of instances of p (secularization) that not only do not coincide with q (decreasing average happiness), but coincide with not-q (increasing average happiness) STRONGLY UNDERMINES the causal claim. That's all I'm saying.

    Yes, Jason raises a logical possibility, but so what? Go ahead and look at the multivariate regression.
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    Will: perhaps your latest comment was not meant as an answer to me, but I'll answer anyway. I interpreted your post not just as a refutation of Brooks (which I would accept) but as making the opposite claim. In particular, your statement: Almost all the countries that consistently score higher than the U.S. in happiness are much less religious is misleading. The European countries scoring higher than the USA in happiness are very small countries, and they might very well score lower than several red states. On the other hand, the big European countries score lower than the USA as a whole.

    As an agnostic (with sympathy for Viking paganism), I have no dog in this fight. What I like about Brooks' work is his challenging the received opinion that people labeling themselves "conservatives" must be grumpy old men. That has nothing to do with religion, of course.
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    If we look towards alternative causation models for Brooks' data...Perhaps the real trend that underlies both data sets is that being part of the majority view makes you happier, as it is harder to fight as the underdog.

    Are religious folk in Tibet happier than the other Chinese who aren't burdened with false beliefs the government wishes to eliminate? My guess would be no.

    I believe it is the oppression of lies that the religious force upon the irreligious that could be the problem in the USA. It's harder to be happy when you have people believing in magical creatures that fly around and that they make decisions with their souls and not their brains- and then you aren't allowed to criticize their false beliefs. Much as it must be difficult to believe in one the various imaginary gods in a place that falsely reveres Mao or Kim Jong-Il.

    Brooks' assertion of causation is ridiculous and certainly subtracts from any assessment of the independence of his work.
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    Where would you rather live, Copenhagen or Lynchburg, Virginia? Nuff said.
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    Actually, according to the World Values Survey and the World Happiness Index, Religious people in Scandinavia score higher on happiness then non-religious people in Scandinavia. This is true for every country in the world, not just the US. High divorce rates is one of the things that reduces US happiness levels. However, If one averages US happiness levels on all the cross-country surveys, the US still score in the top 10th percentile.
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    There is a BIG problem with your article here. You draw faulty conclusions because you compare two variables without keeping other factors constant (you don't bring them into your model). In other words your relationships are spurious. Two of the strongest factors in explaining happiness is income and freedom and control over ones life. These three factors have dramatically increased in Europe over the last 30 years as economic freedom has increased. This explains the increased happiness. See the Econmists Quality of Life Index, The Legatum Prosperity Index and Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) for an explanation (don't take my word for it).
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    Several people who implement their faith are happy in other aspects of their lives and those who don't are sometimes the one that have attain true happiness.
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    I was wondering if anyone had any theories on Ireland. It is the most religious of the European countries on the religious participation chart by a large margin. A Satisfaction with Life Index Map - Map published in White, A. (2007). A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge To Positive Psychology? Psychtalk 56, 17-20.(also on the wikipedia page for happiness) puts Ireland in the happiest of five brackets. That is higher than France and Germany and Spain and the UK, all significantly less religious as a country. It is in the same happiness bracket as Norway and Finland and Sweden and Iceland. How can those Irish people be so happy?
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    Happiness is relative to the individual and their experiences...

    Substance Abuse Treatment
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    One of the common taught phrases of Christ was that "in the world you will have tribulation". Happiness is not a promise of Christ.
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    Here’s the question asked.

    How would you characterize yourself?
    A) A religious nut
    B) Not a complete nut but an intelligent skeptic
    C) A stupid person who believes in God
    D) An intelligent person who sees the folly of religion.

    Now if the subject answers A, B, or C then you asks him:

    How would you characterize you emotional life:
    A) Totally miserable
    B) Dreadfully unhappy
    C) Deeply depress with life
    D) The small happiness I get out of life is hoping there is no God.

    If he doesn’t answer A, B, or C but D then you ask him:

    How would you characterize you emotional life:
    A) Ecstatically happy
    B) Totally happy
    C) Quite happy
    D) Couldn’t be happier
 

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