Those Who are Very Religious Have A Higher Wellbeing Regardless of the Particular Faith

By Hayli Harding --
09 Jul 2015 --

Previous documentations showed that Americans who consider themselves most religious are also those with the highest wellbeing.

Gallup Health Ways Well-Being Index has been taking interviews to determine the relationship between religion and well-being across religion. In the most recent findings, their earlier analyzations had been confirmed. The previous documentations showed that Americans who consider themselves most religious are also those with the highest wellbeing. The recently released results of the current survey demonstrated that this pattern is persistent across the major religions in American. There are some differences between different religious groups discovered over 676,000 interviews based on the wellbeing indexes.

Major US Religions

The studies found are based on a variety of surveys with the major religions in America: Jewish, Mormon/Latter-Day Saints, Muslim/Islam, Roman Catholic, Other Non-Christians, Protestants/Other Non-Catholic Christians, and those who are None/Atheist/Agnostic. The results found that those who identify as moderately or nonreligious within the Jewish, Mormon and other Non-Christian denominations have about the same wellbeing levels, which are persistently lower than those who consider themselves “very religious”. In addition, those who identify as Mormon, Protestant, Catholic and None and are non-religious have a somewhat higher wellbeing than those who are more religious.

The main reason this relationship works is that religiosity, according to previous research, is heavily related to age, race, region, gender, state, ethnicity, child-bearing and marital statuses, and socio-economic statuses. In addition, wellbeing is heavily related to all of the above listed factors as well. By analyzing sub-indexes related to religion and wellbeing, one can determine where groups fall and soar. According to the research, Muslims score highest on the Life Evaluation and Physical Health areas, while Jews score higher on Basic Access and Protestants score lower on Life Evaluation and Physical Health. Overall, religious intensity is greatest for Mormons (73.4%) with Protestants, Roman Catholics and Mormons not far behind. Non-Christian religions and those with no formal religion identify as least religious.

These findings have confirmed the previously found relationships between wellbeing and religiosity in earlier Gallup research. As Gallup looks deeper into these connections, there will be more information between wellbeing and religion.