Highly religious Americans are happier, more likely to be involved with their families and more likely to donate time, money or goods to help the poor, but are no more likely to exercise, recycle or make socially conscious consumer choices than those who aren’t highly religious.
That’s the findings of a new Pew Research Center study released in the US last week. The research, which draws on a previous nationwide telephone survey but is primarily based on a second survey of 3,278 people, found that while 40 per cent of highly religious US adults – defined as those who engage in prayer every day and attend religious services each week – described themselves as “very happy”, the figure dropped to 29 per cent among the less religious.
Meanwhile, almost 50 per cent of the highly religious said they gathered with their extended family at least once or twice a month, just three in ten of the less religious did so. While 65 per cent of highly religious adults said they had donated money, time or goods to help the poor in the past week, this figure dropped to 41 per cent among the less religious. And 45 per cent of highly religious people said they had volunteered in the past week compared with 28 per cent of those defined as not highly religious.
But the study also showed that in other areas of everyday life – such as interpersonal interactions, attention to health and fitness and social and environmental consciousness – results for the highly religious and less religious were very similar. This included highly religious people being as likely to say they lost their temper recently, as likely to have told a “white lie” in the past week and being as likely to have overeaten in the past week as the less religious. Highly religious people were also no more likely to have said they exercised regularly, recycle more or consider issues such as a manufacturer’s environmental history or whether they are paying a fair wage in their decisions to buy goods and services.
The study found that these differences between the highly religious and less religious were not just within the US population as a whole but even within religious traditions themselves, such as between highly religious Catholics and less religious Catholics.
Elsewhere, the study shows that among Christians, only 63 per cent say praying regularly is “essential to being a Christian”, only 42 per cent say reading the Bible or religious materials is essential and only 35 per cent say attending religious services is essential.
~ www.pewforum.org/files/2016/04/Religion-in-Everyday-Life-FINAL.pdf
