On Happiness and Religion

Is correlation causation?

You can tell I’m trying to avoid grading because I spent an hour playing around with a spreadsheet yesterday morning!

I started with the 2024 results of the World Happiness Report, an ongoing study by Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The WHR annually asks nationally representative samples of respondents around the world to imagine a 0-10 scale, with the worst possible life being a 0 and the best a 10, then they’re asked to place their own life on that ladder. Finally, WHR researchers average the last three years for each country and generate a “life evaluation” score.

As reported in this country, the big news was the United States dropped eight spots, falling out of the top 20. With Germany also tailing off considerably, that means that Canada and the UK are the only countries in the top 20 with populations larger than 30 million.

But most of the top 20 remains consistent — and consistently secular.

While religion isn’t one of the six factors — GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption — that the WHR includes in its extended analysis, it’s hard not to notice that countries with very low levels of religiosity tend to score best. For example, the highly secular Nordic countries account for the top 4 happiest in the world (Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden), plus Norway is #7. Most of the non-European countries at the top of this particular chart — e.g., Israel and Australia — also tend to have relatively low numbers in studies like this 2018 Pew analysis of religious commitment around the world.

So here’s what I did to procrastinate yesterday. I made a simple spreadsheet, entering two numbers for every country from that Pew study: its World Happiness score (again, 0-10 scale), and the percent of its population telling Pew that religion is very important to them. Here’s what you get if you turn those two columns of data into a scattergraph:

Sure enough, there’s strong correlation: the happiest countries tend to be the least religious.

That doesn’t prove causation, of course. And another Pew study (2019) found that the most actively religious people around the world tended to be, well, happier.

I’ll spitball a few thoughts below the paywall — and point out some interesting outliers on my scattergraph — but I’d also welcome comments from people who think more about this or are more accustomed to doing quantitative analysis.