religious people are happier..?

david campbell wrote 'American Grace. How Religion Divides and Unites Us'

it is a fascinating and sweeeping look at american religion since the 1950's. the books makes its points based on copious data collected through from surveys of americans.

the book has been mentioned in prominent national news publications (wall street journal, new york times, washington post to name a few.)

on times and seasons there was a two-part interview of campbell placed in print here and here. while i had read in the new york times a halting treatment of one idea coming out of the book (that religious people are happier), i was further intrigued to find one of the co-authors of the book was mormon and that there were a few mormon fact gems to be found within its pages.


returning to the book as a whole though, i will present to you a few of the recent reviews of the book and then a passage from the book itself.

from the washington post (by Michelle Boorstein):

Even as a religion reporter, I was surprised by some of the findings in this hefty new book about American religion by political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell.

Among them: Secularism is increasing most rapidly among the less educated (the opposite of what happened in the 1960s and ’70s); the growth of evangelicalism ended nearly two decades ago; and evangelicals diverge most from the rest of the country in their opposition to premarital sex, not in their views on abortion or same-sex relationships.

…American Grace is still perhaps the most sweeping look yet at contemporary American religion. It lays out the broad trends of the past 50 years, assesses their sociological causes and then does a bit of fortune-telling….[American Grace] is packed with fun facts: The intensity of one’s religious belief is more predictive of one’s politics than religious denomination; about 60 percent of people who switched religious identities didn’t do so because of marriage; 89 percent of Americans believe heaven is not just reserved for people of their own faith. The book also brings to life complex issues such as how politics play out in a synagogue in suburban Chicago and in a megachurch in Minneapolis.”

from the wall street journal (by Wilfred Mcclay):

Perhaps the best and most interesting chapter in this respect is "Religion and Good Neighborliness," which convincingly argues that, contrary to the stock depiction in popular culture, religious Americans make better neighbors by almost every index. They are more generous, with both their time and money; more civically active, in community organizations and political reform; more trusting; more trustworthy; and even measurably happier. The only exception to this list of positive traits: religious people tend to be less tolerant of views that clash with their own. These results hold even when the authors control for such factors as gender, education, income, race, region and age.

and finally, points about religious people's happiness from the book itself (by David Campbell and Robert Putnam)

• As with good neighborliness, the correlation between religiosity and life satisfaction is powerful and robust. It remains strong even when we hold constant the same long list of other factors that might have made the correlation spurious. Other thing being equal, the difference in happiness between a nonchurchgoer and a weekly churchgoer is slightly larger than the difference between someone who earns $10,000 a year and his demographic twin who earns $100,000 a year.

• As with good neighborliness, religious people are more satisfied with their lives mostly because they build religious social networks, thus reinforcing a strong sense of religious identity. A person who attends church regularly but has no close friend there is actually unhappier than her demographic twin who doesn't attend church at all.
  

• As with good neighborliness, religious friends remain very important, even when we compare people with equal numbers of friends overall, and in that sense religious friendship seems supercharged. Moreover, as with good neighborliness, the effects of religious social networks do not depend on maintaining a religiously homogeneous social environment; on the contrary, people whose closes friends are all from the same religion are, other things being equal, less happy than those who friends are diverse.

what think ye? do these ideas fit with your worldview? do they fall short? are they repugnant? life-affirming? do you figure these 'facts' are just a conspiracy of the religious right to recruit new republicans? i haven't read the book in its entirety, but i purchased it from amazon and plan on delving in..:)