TruthBook Religious News Blog

10/09/2008

A Gallup poll surveying over 140 countries and all major religions found that people who consider themselves "highly religious" are more likely to donate to charity, volunteer, and help strangers in need.

Though donating to charity was more common than volunteering, highly religious people still reported doing more of both than less religious people. The gap is smaller between highly religious and less religious when it comes to helping strangers.

The survey can't conclude whether religiosity makes one more likely to help others, or if generous people are more attracted to religion. Most faiths have traditions of helping others, such as charity among Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.

Labels: charity, Gallup Poll, religiosity, volunteering

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Why We're Happy

By Arthur C. Brooks
Posted: Monday, June 16, 2008

According to hundreds of reliable surveys of thousands of people across the land, happy people increase our prosperity and strengthen our communities.

But today's leaders and policymakers seem to have forgotten this. To hear politicians talk about gross domestic product, health-care reform, and Social Security, you'd think that this nation's Founding Fathers held as self-evident that we are endowed by our Creator with the ability to purchase new, high-quality consumer durables each and every year, or to enjoy healthy economic growth with low inflation and full employment. The Founders didn't talk about these matters, not because they're unimportant, but because they believed happiness went deeper.

As a professor of business and government policy, I've long been interested in the pursuit of happiness as a national concept. According to hundreds of reliable surveys of thousands of people across the land, happy people increase our prosperity and strengthen our communities. They make better citizens--and better citizens are vital to making our nation healthy and strong. Happiness, in other words, is important for America. So when I chanced upon data a couple of years ago saying that certain Americans were living in a manner that facilitated happiness--while others were not--I jumped on it.

First, just what is happiness? Most researchers agree that it involves an assessment of the good and bad in our lives. It's the emotional balance sheet we keep that allows us to say honestly whether we're living a happy life, in spite of bad things now and then.

You might suspect that Americans are getting happier all the time. After all, many (though clearly not all) are getting richer, and this should make them better able and equipped to follow their dreams. On the other hand, there's a lot of talk about the good old days, when kids could play outside without any worry about being kidnapped. And there's a great deal of stress in this country right now, due to financial concerns, negative workplace environments, and chronic health problems, among other pressing issues.

But average happiness levels in America have stayed largely constant for many years. In 1972, 30 percent of the population said they were very happy with their lives, according to the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey. In 1982, 31 percent said so, and in 2006, 31 percent said so as well. The percentage saying they were not too happy was similarly constant, generally hovering around 13 percent.

The factors that add up to a happy life for most people are not what we typically hear about. Things like winning the lottery, getting liposuction, and earning a master's degree don't make people happy over the long haul. Rather, the key to happiness, and the difference between happy and unhappy Americans, is a life that reflects values and practices like faith, hard work, marriage, charity, and freedom.

Happiness Predictor 1: Faith

Roughly 85 percent of Americans identify with a religion, and about a third of Americans attend a house of worship every week or more. These statistics have changed relatively little over the decades. By international standards, America's level of religious practice is exceptionally high. In Holland, for example, just 9 percent of the population attends church on a regular basis; in France, it's 7 percent; in Latvia, 3 percent.

In general, religious Americans (those who attend a place of worship almost every week or more) are happier than those who rarely or never attend. In 2004 the General Social Survey found that 43 percent of religious folks said they were very happy with their lives, compared with 23 percent of secularists. Religious people were a third more likely than secularists to say they're optimistic about the future. And secularists were nearly twice as likely as religious people to say "I'm inclined to feel I'm a failure."

The connection between faith and happiness holds regardless of one's religion. All nonpartisan surveys on the subject have found that Christians (Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and others) and Jews, as well as members of many other religious traditions, are far more likely than secularists to say they're happy. It also doesn't matter if we measure religious practice in ways other than attendance at worship services. In 2004, 36 percent of people who prayed every day said they were very happy, versus 21 percent of people who never prayed.

Of course, not every religious person is happy; neither is every secularist unhappy. Nonetheless, it's clear that faith is a common value among happy Americans.

Happiness Predictor 2: Work

If you hit the lottery today, would you quit your job? If you're like most Americans, you probably wouldn't. When more than 1,000 people across the country were asked in 2002, "If you were to get enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, would you stop working?" fewer than a third of the respondents answered yes.

Contrary to widely held opinion, most Americans like or even love their work. In 2002 an amazing 89 percent of workers said they were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. This isn't true just for those with high-paying, highly skilled jobs but for all workers across the board. And the percentage is almost exactly the same among those with and without college degrees and among those working for private companies, nonprofit organizations, and the government.

For most Americans, job satisfaction is nearly equivalent to life satisfaction. Among those people who say they are very happy in their lives, 95 percent are also satisfied with their jobs. Furthermore, job satisfaction would seem to be causing overall happiness, not the other way around.

Happiness Predictor 3: Marriage & Family

In 2004, 42 percent of married Americans said they were very happy. Just 23 percent of never-married people said this. The happiness numbers were even lower for other groups: Only 20 percent of those who were widowed, 17 percent of those who were divorced, and 11 percent of those who were separated but not divorced said they were happy. Overall, married people were six times more likely to say that they were very happy than to report that they were not too happy. And generally speaking, married women say they're happy more often than married men.

Marriage isn't just associated with happiness--it brings happiness, at least for a lot of us. One 2003 study that followed 24,000 people for more than a decade documented a significant increase in happiness after people married. For some, the happiness increase wore off in a few years, and they ended up back at their premarriage happiness levels. But for others, it lasted as long as a lifetime.

What about having kids? While children, on their own, don't appear to raise the happiness level (they actually tend to slightly lower the happiness of a marriage), studies suggest that children are almost always part of an overall lifestyle of happiness, which is likely to include such things as marriage and religion. Consider this: While 50 percent of married people of faith who have children consider themselves to be very happy, only 17 percent of nonreligious, unmarried people without kids feel the same way.

Happiness Predictor 4: Charity

We've all heard that money doesn't buy happiness, and that's certainly true. But there is one way to get it: Give money away.

People who give money to charity are 43 percent more likely than nongivers to say they're very happy. Volunteers are 42 percent more likely to be very happy than nonvolunteers. It doesn't matter whether the gifts of money go to churches or symphony orchestras; religious giving and secular giving leave people equally happy, and far happier than people who don't give. Even donating blood, an especially personal kind of giving, improves our attitude.

In essence, the more people give, the happier they get.

Happiness Predictor 5: Freedom

The Founders listed liberty right up there with the pursuit of happiness as an objective that merited a struggle for our national independence. In fact, freedom and happiness are intimately related: People who consider themselves free are a lot happier than those who don't. In 2000 the General Social Survey revealed that people who personally feel "completely free" or "very free" were twice as likely as those who don't to say they're very happy about their lives.

Not all types of freedom are the same in terms of happiness, however. Researchers have shown that economic freedom brings happiness, as does political and religious freedom. On the other hand, moral freedom--a lack of constraints on behavior--does not. People who feel they have unlimited moral choices in their lives when it comes to matters of sex or drugs, for example, tend to be unhappier than those who do not feel they have so many choices in life.

Americans appear to understand this quite well. When pollsters asked voters in the 2004 Presidential election what the most important issue facing America was, the issue voters chose above all others was "moral values." This beat out the economy, terrorism, the Iraq war, education, and health care as people's primary concern. Pundits and politicians would certainly like us to think otherwise, and critics scoffed at the conclusion, interpreting it as evidence that ordinary Americans were out of touch. But moral values are critical to Americans. This suggests that, as a people, we do best by protecting our political and economic freedoms and guarding against a culture that sanctions licentiousness.

Lessons for America

The data tell us that what matters most for happiness is not having a lot of things but having healthy values. Without these values, our jobs and our economy will bring us soulless toil and joyless riches. Our education will teach us nothing. There will be no reason to fight--or to make peace, for that matter--to protect our way of life. Our health-care system will keep us healthier, but what's the point of good health without a happy life to enjoy?

The facts can help remind us of what we should be paying attention to, as individuals and as families, if we want to be happy. There's also an important message here for public policy and politics. We must hold our leaders accountable for the facts on happiness and refuse to take it lightly when politicians abridge the values of faith, work, family, charity, and freedom. Candidates running for office should be grilled about happiness in debates and by the press, and their answers should determine our votes.

Our happiness is simply too important to us--and to America--to do anything less.

Arthur C. Brooks is a visiting scholar at AEI. He is the author of Gross National Happiness (Basic Books, 2008).

Labels: Arthur C. Brooks, charity, faith, family, freedom, happiness, marriage, values, work

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Saturday, March 22, 2008

Money buys happiness if you spend it on someone else: study

Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, March 20, 2008

OTTAWA - Money can't buy happiness, say the experts. But a Canadian psychologist says spending it can make us happier - as long as we spend it on someone else, not on ourselves.

Even giving away as little as $5 gives a measurable boost to our happiness for that day, says the study by Elizabeth Dunn's team at the University of British Columbia, and a colleague at the Harvard Business School.

She and her grad student, Lara Aknin, approached a small company in the Boston area. The boss was planning to give profit-sharing bonuses to employees, but the workers didn't yet know the details.

Then each employee got a cheque for between $3,000 and $8,000 (average $5,000). The psychologists waited a while, giving them time to spend the money.

Some bought motorcycles, some spent on vacations, on gifts, even a swing set for the kids.

"People who spent more of their bonus on others - either on gifts for others or on charitable donations - reported greater happiness," she says. (This is after taking into account how content they were to begin with.)

"In other words, people reaped greater happiness from the bonus if they spent it on others. Whereas spending it on themselves didn't really lead to any benefits," no matter how much money they received.

Lab studies on student volunteers backed up the same findings. (Students given free cash from $5 to $20 were told to spend it on themselves, or on others.)

And the findings held in a random survey of 630 Americans that asked about their level of happiness, their incomes, and how much money they tend to give to charity or spend on gifts.

The study team didn't distinguish between giving to strangers (through charity) and spending on others that the workers knew, such as relatives. A happy feeling that lasts for six to eight weeks, she notes, is a major effect. And the increase in the happiness of these workers showed up as very large.

"I know that it doesn't fit what most people would expect. We actually did a separate study... and found a significant majority of people felt they would be happier spending money on themselves" rather than on others, Ms. Dunn says.

And the religious side of this? That it's better to give than to receive, for instance?

"I'm not a very religious person," she confides. "But there are certain religions that really advocate giving, and religious people do tend to be happier. So perhaps one of the benefits of religion that previous research has documented lies in the tendency to advocate charitable giving."

She's not done yet. She wants to ask "exactly what is causing this effect? Is it that people start to feel better about themselves? Is it that relationships are strengthened? Is is that people are simply spending more time with others? We're just now investigating these studies."

Labels: charity, Elizabeth Dunn, happiness, money, Tom Spears

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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Giving Makes You Rich

by Arthur C. Brooks
November 2007 Issue

(Page one of two - as always, click on "external link" for full article)

New proof that it pays to be charitable.

In John Bunyan’s 1684 classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, the character Old Honest poses this riddle to the innkeeper Gaius: “A man there was, tho’ some did count him mad, / The more he cast away, the more he had.” Gaius solves the riddle thus: “He that bestows his Goods upon the Poor / Shall have as much again, and ten times more.”

Less poetically, the idea is this: Giving makes you rich. A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but quite backward-sounding to an economist. You obviously have to have money before you can give it away, right? Or in the pithy words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions—he had money too.”

Well, it turns out that Gaius was right, and new economic research backs him up. Emerging evidence—crunchy statistics from real data, not the mushy self-help stuff—supports the contention that giving stimulates prosperity, for both individuals and nations. Charity, it appears, can really make you rich.

The United States is a remarkably charitable nation. The Giving U.S.A. Foundation estimates that Americans donated nearly $300 billion to charity in 2006—more than the gross domestic product (the annualized value of goods and services produced within a nation) of all but 33 countries in the world. More than three-quarters of this came from private individuals. Additional research suggests that between 65 and 85 percent of Americans give to charities each year.

How does all this generosity relate to our high average levels of prosperity? Let’s begin with individuals and families. The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, completed in 2000, is a survey of about 30,000 people in more than 40 communities across the U.S. and is the best single source of data available on the civic participation of Americans. The S.C.C.B.S., which takes into account differences in education, age, race, religion, and other personal characteristics, shows that people who give charitably make significantly more money than those who don’t. While that seems like common sense, it turns out that the link in the data between giving and earning is not just one-way. People do give more when they become richer—research has shown that a 10 percent increase in income stimulates giving by about 7 percent—but people also grow wealthier when they give more.

How do we know this? When two variables like giving and income are interrelated, economists use something called an instrumental variable to see which is pushing and which is pulling. In a nutshell, that means selecting something that’s closely related to donations but not directly to income, like volunteering. Volunteers tend to be money givers and vice versa because of the same charitable impulse. But income doesn’t always directly affect volunteering. (While people have differing amounts of money, they all have the same amount of time.)

We start by predicting how much money people would donate based on how much they volunteer, regardless of income. This projection essentially strips out the role of income in giving. Next, see if that predicted donation level correlates with income. If it does and the correlation is positive, it means that giving pushes up income and not just vice versa.

Labels: Americans, Arthur C. Brooks, charity, generosity, Giving U.S.A. Foundation, income, Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, wealth

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Sunday, September 02, 2007

Doing Good, and Feeling Better

Why Giving Back Could Make You Happier … and Healthier

By John Stossel and Sylvia Johnson
Aug. 20, 2007

How good would it feel if someone just gave you $1,000?

Last fall, Oprah Winfrey thrilled audience members with these words: "You will each go home with $1,000."

Then she said there was a catch: "You have to spend the money on someone other than your family."

They still applauded, but the smiles looked a little forced.

Yet maybe she did her audience a favor, because even though the audience had to give the money away, it could get back even more than they gave.

Stephen Post explains why in his new book, "Why Good Things Happen to Good People."
He reveals that new science shows giving -- money or time -- not only feels just as good as getting, but can actually improve your health.

"Giving is as good for the giver as it is for the receiver. Science says it's so. We'll be happier, healthier, and even -- odds are -- live a little longer if we're generous," Post said.

"Public health isn't just about bugs and staying away from lead. It's about doing unto others, and at the right dose, science says it's very good for you," he said.

Arthur Brooks, author of the new book, "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism," also knows a lot about the current research on charity.
Brooks said, "There's evidence that it helps people with their asthma, in cardiovascular disease, weight loss, insomnia. When people have a lot of happiness, they do a lot better in their health as well."

Helping Others, Healing Themselves

That was true for former heart patients at Duke University Medical Center.
They were asked to visit current heart patients -- no particular agenda, just to listen and lend support. By doing that, the volunteers had better health after their heart attacks.

A similar study at the University of Miami by Dr. Gail Ironson followed HIV patients who volunteered, like Katherine Marshall Scott, who talks to teenagers about avoiding infection, and Stephen Baker, who counsels fellow HIV survivors.
These and other HIV patients who helped others had lower stress levels and higher immune resistance.

Scott's disease-fighting cells went up, from 200 to 800.

Baker says he could feel how volunteering improved his health.

"To get involved with someone else's problems makes your problems look a lot less," he said.

Service Learning

Many high schools require their students to volunteer.

It's called service learning. And oddly, even though the charity is forced, it still brings happy results. Teachers say students who volunteer raise their grades, and get higher SAT scores.

Abington High School student Jeff Rohrback said, "After service learning started, I got so involved into it, I started paying attention more, picked up my grades."
So "20/20" decided to see whether we could find a similar effect.

We put an ad on Craigslist recruiting people who were not currently volunteers. We introduced them to Post, and asked them to try it for one week.

But first, Post had them fill out a questionnaire that asked how they felt about life, like how often during the week they felt calm and peaceful.

Children for Children, whose mission is to get children involved in giving, agreed to help us, as did the Salvation Army, which has many different programs, from soup kitchens to after-school activities for kids.

Then off they went -- bringing donated books to children at an elementary school, then reading to the kids and making scarves with the kids. One spent time in a truck handing out food to the poor. All four worked at a Harlem soup kitchen.

One week later we had them answer that questionnaire again.

This time their answers about how often they felt "calm and peaceful" changed from some of the time to most of the time.

The Helpers' High

"The helper's high has been measured physically," Post said. "We know there's an actual physiological state. It's quite euphoric."

The helper's high shows up in MRI brain scans.

People who give money show brain activity that's associated with feel-good chemicals like dopamine -- the same brain activity that happens when you receive money.
National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Jordan Grafman showed us the brain scans.

"Those brain structures that are activated when you get a reward are the same ones that are activated when you give. In fact, they're activated more," he told us.
We asked our volunteers after their week of service who had gotten more out of the experience: the people they helped, or they themselves?

Volunteer Daniel Smith didn't hesitate with his answer. "No brainer. Me, definitely."

Lelani Clark also felt renewed from her single week of volunteering.

"I just felt energized," she said. "We were so caught up in this energy of helping that it was like a buzz -- like a spiritual buzz."

Winfrey's audience members reported that, too. After a week of giving money away, many said they were changed.

Maybe we should call it selfish to help others, because it seems to help the givers more.

"If you want to define selfishness so widely as to include the warm glow that people feel in the aftermath of selflessly giving to others, guess what, we need more of it, not less of it," Post said.

So try it.

Get out and give your money or your time. You'll help someone else. … And you'll feel good, too.

This story originally aired on December 1, 2006.

Labels: 20/20, Arthur Brooks, charity, generosity, health, John Stossel, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Post, students, Sylvia Johnson

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

A pious nation?

Though the United States is considered a deeply religious country, a glance at America today reveals a society divided by wealth and poverty, tainted by violence and often oblivious to the common good. A country of believers? Perhaps. But saying is one thing, doing quite another.

By Tom Krattenmaker

There can be no doubting the piety of American society in this, the first decade of the 21st century. It's old news by now: The powerful influence of conservative Christians on culture and politics. An outwardly Christian president in the White House. Survey data showing the vast majority of Americans pray, believe in God and consider religion important in their lives.

"Pious," however, means something different than "religious." While both convey devotion to God and ultimate truth, "pious" also suggests showiness, sanctimony, even hypocrisy — a gap between words and action. Such a gap, unfortunately, seems glaringly on display when we survey the social landscape around us. If one is to judge by our care for the common good, American society today is more pious than consistently and truly religious.

Let's start with violence, a phenomenon hard to square with New Testament teachings about living in peace and Old Testament commandments not to kill one another.

The massacre at Virginia Tech this spring might seem an extreme case. Defenders of gun rights warn against overreaction, claiming that mass shootings, however horrific, are quite rare. In truth, Virginia Tech-style massacres happen every day, albeit in less dramatic form. Statistics show that gun violence kills close to 30,000 people a year in America, or about 80 a day — more than double the number slain in Blacksburg, Va. Is this what one should expect of a country guided by Jesus, the "Prince of Peace"?

Then there is the violence projected by our government. Here, too, it is impossible to claim that America is a peaceful nation in the image of Christ. Under the Bush administration, the United States has pursued an aggressive foreign policy and a war in Iraq that theologians struggle to justify with Christian doctrines about morally defensible war. Certainly, the case can be made that dangerous forces left our government with no choice but to fight. But the question must be raised again: Is our behavior as a nation consistent with our ostensibly Christian character?

'Do unto others'

Although debates have raged for centuries over the essential meaning of Christianity and other religions, few would argue against the central importance of the Golden Rule. This is not merely the bias of a liberal writer. Asked by CNN recently to define Christianity, Richard Land, leader of the theologically conservative Southern Baptist movement, said, "It means to do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

How as a society are we living up to this religious imperative? We could do better. There is something deeply irreligious about the growing gap between our wealthiest and poorest citizens.

Surely, conservative-minded believers will respond that charity and philanthropy flourish today, that Christian compassion is best expressed through means other than government. They're partly right. Americans, religious and secular alike, have reached out impressively to Gulf Coast flood victims. We have donated billions of dollars to charities, churches and educational institutions. Americans shovel snow from neighbors' driveways, volunteer at soup kitchens and shell out for more expensive energy-saving light bulbs to curb our impact on global warming. On the national policy level, President Bush has on occasion lived up to his creed of "compassionate conservatism," especially with his efforts to combat AIDS and poverty in Africa.

But stories of individual big-heartedness cannot forgive a general direction in our politics that leaves shocking numbers of children without health insurance and decent educations.

The Bible has been playing a prominent role in the intensifying debate over immigration. Until very recently, the most outwardly religious people took what can be argued is the irreligious stance. According to 2006 polling data, white evangelicals — a group characterized by its taking the Bible very seriously — favored a more conservative (read: inhospitable) policy toward immigrants than other U.S. citizens. This, in spite of numerous passages in the Bible that emphasize hospitality to strangers and compassion for all God's people.

Compassion and faith

As is happening on this and other issues, the myth of the evangelical monolith is being exposed. More evangelicals are publicly embracing care for the earth and service to the poor, broadening an agenda that seemed stuck on hot-button social issues. And groups from across the Christian spectrum have been speaking up for immigrants. May these compassionate stands of religious America become ever more the norm.

For now, we have what we have: A society of decent individuals who usually do the right thing — but a culture nonetheless marred by violence, greed and politics that often display a hard-heartedness unbecoming a country like ours. We may disagree about the manifestations of our social morality deficit — conservatives will emphasize abortion and sexual immorality; liberals, economic injustice — but we can surely agree that we're capable of something finer.

Given that many social ills have grown worse during a time of Christian revival in the public arena, it's tempting to blame religion. Tempting, and also wrong. It's increasingly obvious that those who led us to our current state have heeded political ambition and expediency — citing faith when it's helpful, jettisoning it when it's inconvenient.

And on goes the pointless argument about whether America is a "Christian nation." Whether this country is Christian depends entirely on how we define the terms, of course. Our Constitution: secular. Our history and culture: religious.

And what do we mean by "religious"? If we're talking about rhetoric, volume and public display, it has been a very religious time indeed. If we mean behavior that creates peace, extends compassion to the less fortunate and reaches out to strangers outside our borders, we have a way to go. If we are a Christian nation, shouldn't we more consistently behave like one?

Tom Krattenmaker, who lives in Portland, Ore., specializes in religion in public life and is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Labels: Bible, charity, Christian, compassion, faith, God, Golden Rule, government, Jesus, piety, politics, religion, Unites States, violence

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Friday, May 18, 2007

Why Religion (Still) Matters

by Gary Bauer

Posted: 05/18/2007

Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset devoted a lifetime to studying what made America different. Like Tocqueville a century earlier, Lipset discovered that America's exceptionalism-what set Americans apart most distinctly from their European cousins-was founded on a set of values deeply rooted in religious practice. This religiosity was not only preeminent in shaping America's national character, but also elemental to understanding its unparalleled prosperity.

Lipset's observation about the indispensability of religious practice to American life came to mind recently with the release of a study on the societal benefits of religion. Released last December, "Why Religion Matters Even More: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability," has not gotten a lot of publicity in the media; but its findings are increasingly relevant, especially now as debates over religion's proper role in society continue to rage, and as the impact of religion on our politics has emerged as a decisive national campaign issue.

Authored by Pat Fagan, William H.G. Fitzgerald Research Fellow in Family and Cultural Issues at the Heritage Foundation, the report examines the last ten years of empirical research on the effects of religion on a host of social indicators.

Fagan's conclusion? Religion has never mattered more: to individuals, families and society at large.

Consider these findings:

* Research shows marriages in which both spouses frequently attend religious services are 2.4 times less likely to e nd in divorce than marriages in which neither spouse worships. In fact, researchers at Duke University Medical School found that religious attendance is the
most important predictor of marital stability.

* One study discovered that men who attend religious services at least weekly were more than 50% less likely to commit an act of violence against their wives than were peers who attended only once a year or less.

* W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia found that a father's religious attendance was positively associated with his involvement in activities with his children, such as one-on-one interaction, having dinner with his family, and volunteering for youth
activities. In fact, fathers' frequency of religious attendance was a stronger predictor of paternal involvement with their children than employment and income-the factors most frequently cited as pivotal.

* Research b y Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University highlighted the robust relationship between religious practice and charitable giving. In a general survey population religious individuals were 40% more likely than their secular counterparts to give money to charity and more than twice as likely to volunteer.

* Eighty-seven% of over 100 studies reviewed concluded that religious practice is significantly correlated with reduced incidence of suicide and depression.

Research further shows that, as Fagan explained in a recent interview, "the single biggest new finding was the effect of religious practice on the poor. There is an intriguing indication that they benefit more than those with more income, and benefit significantly." Religion's impact on the poor, studies reveal, is especially compelling on outcomes related to drug use, academic progress and juvenile delinquency.

In one study of young males from impoverished inner-city Chicago and Philadelphia, for instance, researchers found that a high level of religious attendance was associated with a 46% reduction in the likelihood of using drugs, a 57% reduction in the probability of dealing drugs and a 39% decrease in the likelihood of committing
a non drug-related crime.

Fagan's research demonstrates that, on an entire range of outcomes-from domestic abuse, educational attainment and marital stability to substance abuse, violent crime and even immigrant assimilation-the practice of religion is a powerful predictor of personal wellbeing and societal stability.

Some may wonder how religion can have such a profound effect on so many seemingly unrelated social indicators. It is because, as Fagan explained, religious practice transforms people at a fundamental level. "It changes the man or woman, not the outcome. The changed man or woman then has many different manifestations of their changed self...in their relationships with others, with work, with material things, in family life, in citizenship. They don't set out to do things differently. They set out to be different persons, and then we see all these different changes."

That's a point worth repeating. Religious practice extends beyond mere inputs and outputs, moving deeper to change hearts and minds, and foster values like charity, humility, patience, prudence and compassion, which in turn affect the decisions people make and, thus, the outcomes they experience.

In the end, Fagan's research reveals, in his words, "a steadily growing body of evidence from the social sciences [that] demonstrates that regular religious practice benefits individuals, families and communities, and thus the whole nation."

It also highlights a paradox that even casual observers of American life can appreciate: At a time when many politicians rail against the infusion of religion into public life, science is establishing religious practice to be a potent antidote to many of our most entrenched social problems.

Labels: charity, families, Martin Lipset, religious practice, society, the poor, values