Can Religion Make You Happy?

As concerns mount about America’s “loneliness epidemic,” some religious leaders have sought to market themselves as a potential cure. An academic and a rabbi co-wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe last year saying as much. “While this epidemic of loneliness is unprecedented, our approach to solving it doesn’t have to be,” they write. The op-ed writers bristled at the notion that religious groups’ role in addressing the problem is no more important than secular institutions like fitness centers.

But how do we know? Religion as the fix for the loneliness epidemic strikes me as undertheorized.

My guest on today’s episode of Good on Paper is Arthur Brooks. Brooks is the former president of the American Enterprise Institute and is now a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches classes on leadership and happiness. He’s also a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where he has written that happiness comes, in part, through faith.

This conversation is centered on the “nones”—people who identify with no religion and who, according to Brooks, are unhappier (at least on average).

“People who do have a strong sense of religious practice in their life—they just tend to be happier,” he says.” They tend to be happier people. They have a greater sense of organization in their life. They have a better sense of community. They have an underlying physics to their life, and they’re not trying to figure things out in the same way. And life is complicated. There are things that are going to pull you in every direction all the time. And it’s nice to have something that you can actually count on, whether you agree with every single part of it or not.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Jerusalem Demsas: Religion’s influence is waning in America.

Today, roughly 28 percent of American adults identify as either atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” In 2007, just 15 percent of Americans identified with no religion. That’s all according to the Pew Research Center.

It’s taken as common sense that this is a problem. Just 16 percent of people in a September 2022 poll said that religion’s decline was good, while a plurality said the decline was a bad thing. These conversations have become bound up in larger concerns about the loneliness epidemic and the decline in Americans hanging out.

My colleague Derek Thompson wondered in a recent article if “in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it.”

The surgeon general put out a report last year on “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” Religious groups have sought to market themselves as a solution. One Boston Globe op-ed argued that “religion can play a critical role in alleviating the loneliness epidemic.”

Now, to lay my cards on the table, I’m a Christian. But I’m also skeptical about the broad narratives around the loneliness crisis, about the broad brushstrokes used to paint people who don’t consider themselves religious, and the treatment of church as a panacea for all our social ills. After all, it’s not like life was perfect before the declines in religiosity.

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This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And today, I asked Arthur Brooks to come on the show to talk with me about whether religion can solve America’s loneliness epidemic.

Brooks was the former president of the American Enterprise Institute but now is a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches a class on leadership and happiness. He’s also a contributing writer for , where he has written that happiness comes, in part, through faith.