Debates about the impact of religion in the world have been going on for a long time. There is one facet of that debate, however, which, scientifically speaking, is largely settled. From the standpoint of statistics and empirical evidence, how much do we know about whether religious or nonreligious people are happier?
A lot, it turns out. The literature on health in general and religion is vast. An Oxford University Press book summarizing the research on the subject, for example, comes in at almost 900 pages. In the analysis in this “Handbook of Religion and Health,” they reviewed 326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of “religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction,” finding that 79% 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).
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