Spirituality/Religion & Happiness
Happiness Encyclopedia XVI from the Happiness PhD Project...
“The truth is what works.” — William James
I’m not going to tell you which religion, faith, or spirituality is right for you. But I will tell you, to maximize happiness, you should have some.
If you’re skeptical, please read on.
Research reporting from the Harvard Human Flourishing Program makes a compelling case for the role of faith in happiness.
Large longitudinal studies suggest that religious service attendance has numerous positive effects on well-being such as reductions in all-cause mortality, depression, suicide, and more. (1)
These findings are supported by several meta-analyses including a 2022 project by researchers at the Human Flourishing Program and the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard, under the leadership of Dr. Tracy Balboni. Their systematic review of the relationship between religion and health was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It showed religious participation was beneficial with respect to longevity, depression, suicide, smoking, drug use, alcohol abuse, and various aspects of quality of life and well-being. (2)
Beyond this research, we can look to some more anecdotal accounts from giants of psychology who seem to have observed a similar picture. In How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie cited psychologists Carl Jung and William James as advocates for faith, spirituality, or religion in the good life.
William James said that “faith is one of the forces by which men live.” In his Varieties of Religious Experience he proposes that believing in something, especially one’s ability to achieve a difficult task, can actually help make it true. He believed that faith can motivate individuals to take action, persevere through challenges, and, in doing so, create the very outcomes they envisioned. He also argued that faith, particularly religious faith, could be a powerful motivator for ethical and moral action.
Above all, he ascribed a pragmatic value to faith, spirituality, and religious practice: that it is not necessarily an end in itself (although, if you are a devout believer, it may be), but it is an end to something else: namely, a better life. James observed that it bore beneficial “fruits” – like sense of purpose, contentment, resilience in suffering, and a greater tendency for moral action.
Along those same lines, Carl Jung observed that he had treated hundreds of patients for psychological issues, and the common root of their pathology was lacking a spiritual or religious orientation towards the world. And the common denominator of all those who made a recovery was adopting such an orientation.
So, again, I do not want to prescribe to you a certain religion, creed, or tradition. Our discussion simply centers on research and expert experience that suggest that religion is a useful “tool” in cultivating happiness.
So perhaps “tool” is a good word. I don’t say that in a condescending way. But in the same way that a business philosophy can be a tool for navigating an economic environment. Or the same way a map can help you arrive at a destination. Perhaps a religion, spiritual tradition, or sort of faith can be a psychological buffer and – especially if you have some organized, faith-based community around it – a relationship-building mechanism to promote a better life.
In today’s world, many of us de facto worship cultural values, political ideals, and what we see as objective facts. For many, money, power, status, political dogma, etc. have become their religion.
David Foster Wallace illustrates this point brilliantly in This is Water.
[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
The problem is these secular ideals, as David Foster Wallace points out, often lead us down fruitless rabbit holes, and they don’t have a lot to say about how we should behave or our place in the universe. Perhaps our sort of “secular toolkit” is incomplete.
When it comes to a religious, spiritual, or faith-based orientation, we need not know completely why or how it works, simply that it does. But I wager there are some real practical, tangible mechanisms at work here.
First, faith may help you to bear the burdens of life. Rather than you shouldering the weight of suffering yourself, it gives you a broader psychological base to find meaning in it, fight through it, or come to peace with it. In many cases it gives you a sense of relief in turning over those burdens to some greater operative force.
Secondly, humans are meant for connection. On a practical level, faith-based communities and institutions create a pretext of shared values and activities to promote social connection. Even if you just went to a weekly AA meeting or a happiness book club once per week, there is some value in simply having the structured facilitation of social connect. Further, if you are in touch with a greater being of the universe you will have a means of overcoming loneliness and the fear that comes from the absurdity of contemplating being alone in the infinite expanse of space. There is no need to feel alone when you are one with “God”, “the creator”, “the essence”, “divine love”, or whatever you wish to call it.
Finally, I reckon humans are the only living beings that are able to thoroughly conceptualize the future and the concept of self-identity. This gives us the uniquely terrible privilege of being acutely aware of our own mortality. How can one cope with such an absurd predicament as being alive, aware of being alive, and aware that this aliveness will soon end? It is like a fish trapped in a small puddle under the bright sun. Faith in some divine order may offer a way of coping with this.
To close, I’ll offer a broader perspective on faith. If you have the faith of your youth or some tradition (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, etc.) that is all well and good. I encourage you to practice it with sincerity and within an organized community of some sort.
If not, perhaps you can carve out some philosophy or thesis that fulfills the following requirements:
(I) you have trust in some higher order power that helps you to cope with lived experiences and feel at peace with your mortality and the many inherent absurdities of the human experience
(II) you have some shared identity and structure to facilitate quality social connection
(III) you have some system for morality and ethical action including what you de facto “worship” and ascribe value to in your daily life
You may consider the universe itself as your God. Or perhaps to you the laws of mathematics or physics have some divine power in them. Or maybe deep ecology which ascribes almost a spiritual bent to our place on planet earth.
I’ll leave you with a final thought from Suzuki Roshi who offers a beautiful passage in Zen Mind Beginners Mind. He talks about believing in nothing.
I found out that it’s necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. We have to believe in something which has no form, or no color. Something that exists before any form and colors appear. This is a very important point. Whatever we believe in – whatever god we believe in – when we become attached to it, it means our belief is based on a more or less self-centered idea. If so, it takes time to acquire -- to attain perfect belief, or perfect faith in it. But if you are always prepared for accepting everything which we see is appearing from nothing, and we think there is some reason why some form or color or phenomenal existence appears, then, at that moment, we have perfect composure.
Ultimately, we have all come out of nothing. Infinite forms come out of the vast darkness of space to manifest galaxies. The carbon atoms that compose our bodies were born in the hearts of stars billions of years ago. The words that you’re reading now flowed out of the emptiness of my mind and are now a flashing into your consciousness – reaching out across time and space.
Perhaps you can touch the inherent mysticism, grace, or wonder of beingness. Perhaps the universe itself has some element of what we may call divine or God. And considering this, know that you are the universe too. What else could you be?
You are the universe experiencing itself. And that insight alone may be what faith is all about.
Sacks, C. A., et al. (2016). Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among U.S. women. JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(8), 1219–1220. | Kim, E. S., & Kawachi, I. (2016). Perceived neighborhood social cohesion and preventive healthcare use. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 50(6), 876–885. | VanderWeele, T. J., Li, S., Tsai, A. C., & Kawachi, I. (2016). Association between religious service attendance and lower depression among U.S. women. JAMA Psychiatry, 73(8), 845–851. | Stavrova, O. (2020). Religious attendance and physical health: Evidence from a longitudinal study of middle-aged and older Europeans. International Journal of Epidemiology, 49(6), 2030–2038.
Balboni, T. A., VanderWeele, T. J., Doan‑Soares, S. D., Long, K. N. G., Ferrell, B. R., Fitchett, G., … Koh, H. K. (2022, July 12). Spirituality in serious illness and health: A systematic review and expert consensus. JAMA, 328(2), 184–197.
