Does Faith Make You Happy?

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Mother Teresa, the Nobel prize-winning nun who dedicated her life to serving the poorest and sickest in India, always appeared to be cheerful and joyous.

But her letters, collected and published in 2007, indicate that she struggled to feel God's presence during at least the last 50 years of life. So, she must not have always “felt” happy. But it didn’t stop her from continuing her commitment to her mission and or her practice of joyfulness.

I’m always surprised to read about saints and saintly people, canonized or not, who maintain their joyfulness in the face of hardship and struggle. The conditions in which they lived don’t seem that joyful. Are they faking it? Unlikely, in my view. Is it possible that their lives exhibit what is beyond happiness, what is meant by “joy” about which I wrote in last week’s blog?

Rarely a Distinction

In the secular world, there’s rarely a distinction made between happiness and joy. So, for our purposes, we’re going to address the question – disputed by believers and non-believers alike – whether people of faith are “happier” than those who are not.

I came across a recent article on this subject in an opinion piece in the Deseret News by Stephen Cranney entitled, “Are Religious People Happier? The Science is Pretty Clear.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that the Deseret News is a highly regarded, weekly newspaper that is widely circulated. It’s owned by a subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. I checked Deseret News on a site call Media Bias/Fact Check. The site rates the Deseret News “high”

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for “factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record.”

At the outset, Cranney writes that debates about the impact of religion have been raging for a long time, but that one facet of the debate is largely settled. From the standpoint of statistics and empirical evidence, religious people are happier.

“The literature on health in general and religion is vast,” he writes. A 900-page book from Oxford University Press, “Handbook of Religion and Health,” summarizes the research. It reviewed 326 articles on the relationship between health and “measures of religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction,” and found that “79 percent of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1% reported that they were less happy (The rest found no or mixed findings).”

But finding a correlation isn’t the same as finding a cause-and-effect result. And a more precise question is, “Does religion cause happiness?”

 

The book found “a dozen studies that were randomized control trials — the gold standard of establishing cause and effect — where people were randomly assigned to different religious interventions, and in more than half of them, simply assigning people to various interventions encouraging them to be more religious led to measurable increases in happiness.”

How to Measure It

But how do you measure happiness? As with other such studies, you ask people.

“The happiness-faith relationship is strong,” Cranney writes, “enough that it shows up almost any way you slice the data or ask the question. …With the exception of a few very particular contexts in those 1 percent of studies finding a negative relationship, whenever you run an analysis on this, the religious are almost always happier.

Critics may say they’re not surprised at this because so many believers are “delusional” about the afterlife, believing that their spirits will survive death. But I believe faith is rational, that there are good reasons for belief in God and the afterlife.

Mother Teresa, I’m guessing, was unaware of these studies but I’m sure they would mean little to her. She maintained her faith, despite doubt and periods of emotional drought, and was rewarded with a sense of joy.