By Message Staff
In a survey of 26 countries, Pew Research Center found that people who regularly attend worship services are more likely to be happy as well as civically engaged than those who are not religiously active. This group also was less likely to smoke or drink, however, Pew did not link this tendency to greater health outcomes.
Regarding happiness, religiously active people in 19 countries were more likely to be “very happy” than their fellow countrymen. Pew said “the gaps are striking” in a number of these countries, including an 11 percentage point difference in the United States (36 percent of the actively religious described themselves as “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of the inactively religious and 25 percent of the unaffiliated).
Pew said their findings were “consistent with prior studies,” adding that actively religious people in the United States are more likely to “vote in national elections” and are “more engaged in community life in the sense that they belong to at least one nonreligious organization.”
As for physical health, Pew nuanced that its findings “are more complicated.”
Religiously active people are less likely to use alcohol or tobacco, but “they aren’t significantly different from the ‘nones’ in their frequency of exercise or whether they’re overweight,” Pew said.
