In Pursuit of Happiness

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. Take Oxford University Press’ “Handbook of Religion and Health,” a nearly 1,200-page tome published in 2012 that addresses the topic, among other areas of research. The authors analyzed 326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of “religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction,” finding that 79 percent of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1 percent reported that they were less happy (the rest found no or mixed findings).