Click here to read: Economic Survey Summary Report
This report focuses on one aspect of some PEW economic survey data that were made available for general analyses from the PEW website (http://www.pewresearch.org/data/download-datasets/). There where hundreds of attributes within the survey, but the one that came up to be the most significant in terms of human satisfaction was religion. This was a surprise to the researchers, but it comes as no surprise to those who are trying to serve God to the best of their abilities.
Those who reject all religious affiliations often do so because they feel they will miss out on something if they get involved with any religious group. The results of this economic survey are quite interesting in this regard. This survey was not performed by or on behalf of any religious group.
Are You Missing Out Because You are Religious?
by Dave Brown
Introduction and Definitions
The purpose of this article is to provide a biblical context for a scientific analysis of economic data collected for general economic research purposes. The instrument used had over 100 questions of which only a few dealt with religion or satisfaction in life; it was not at all a religiously-oriented survey. Click here to review a report on the results of the survey. This link is also at the end of this article.
Let us begin our discussion of the survey by defining what is meant by the word happy in our current culture:
1. Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy.
2. Cheerful; willing: happy to help.
3. Characterized by good luck.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All humans have an emotional perception of what it means for them to be happy, although quite often long term satisfaction is masked by short-term perceptions. The use of drugs is an excellent example. It is difficult to say that one is happy when there is a specter of ultimate doom hanging over their behavior. True happiness must be characterized by a freedom from anxiety when we are in our normal state of mind (not when we are high on drugs or the charisma of the crowd).
The word “hap,” which few of us have ever used, gives us some insight – it means fortune or chance (neither positive nor negative). We often use the word “perhaps,” which incorporates the words per and haps. Per in perhaps means: according to. So perhaps means: according to chance. It applies to something that has some probability that it could happen, but yet it is not certain. We only state this to elaborate on the third definition of happy given above: characterized by good luck.
The biblical word blessed is translated happy in some of our more modern translation, but there should be no confusion that God’s blessing to the faithful could be a matter of chance – the reward for their faithfulness and its resulting behavior is certain. The good luck or good fortune that we have is the result of God’s plan for us. This should be accompanied by a feeling or joy that is one of happiness. Consider the following scholarship:
BLESSED
(bles'-ed) (barukh): Where God is referred to, this word has the sense of "praise," as in 1 Sam 25:32, "Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel." But where man is in mind it is used in the sense of "happy" or "favored," and most frequently so in the Psalms and the Gospels, as for example, "Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the wicked" (Ps 1:1); "Blessed art you among women" (Luke 1:42); "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matt 5:3).
(from International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Electronic Database Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)
We suggest that as we used the terms today, happiness is an inner feeling of satisfaction and peace, while the state of being blessed provides the outward favorable conditions that will ultimately cause this inner feeling. The quest for happiness must rank among the human’s greatest pursuits. Everything else is subservient to it.
After all, if we perceive ourselves to be happy, does it really matter if we are poor, have bad family relationships, have no good friends, or any other downside? If a person still perceives himself/herself to be happy despite all of these things, we must accept the fact that they are happy (at least for the present). While most of these things (riches, friendships, family, etc.) would seem to support happiness, we are convinced that none of them is necessarily a good proxy for true happiness. Someone could, in fact, have the worst of all worlds with the physical list given above, and yet still be happy if their hope was in eternity and not in this world. Similarly, someone else might have “all of the good things of this life” and still be miserable – examples are legion in the entertainment world. Many who take their own lives seemingly have everything in this world and everything to live for. There is no doubt, however, that prior to taking their lives, they were of all people the least to be called happy.
Understanding this is the key to understanding the findings of the survey. Immediately below we discuss the results of a randomized scientific survey of people across the United States. One might ask, how should these people know? Is it not just their opinion? Our answer is that in this case perception is indeed reality, because if a person perceives himself/herself to be satisfied and happy, then by the definition discussed above, they are. So in this case, since perception is reality, a survey does not just give us their opinions, are far as happiness is concerned, it tells us exactly how they are feeling about things at the time.
Summary of Survey Results
The analysis of the data began as a comparison of attitudes in the various regions of the country: South, West, Northeast and Midwest. When the various attributes of the survey were compared for the South as opposed to the rest of the country, three out of five of the most significant factors were related to religion. These factors (questions) were:
The South region was over-represented in the “Protestant” category and about as expected in the “Christian” category. (Our interpretation of the “Christian” response is that they did not consider themselves affiliated with any denomination.)
In determining happiness, the one attribute of primary interest was the question: ”How is your life (on a scale from one to 10)?” This was a direct measure of the personal assessment of how things are as compared to how they might be on average. The response “neither that good, nor that bad” was response 5. It was found that the South region was significantly higher in their 10 response, and the other responses generally had them high in the 7 and 8 responses as well. No other factors seemed to have as high a correlation with the happiness factor as religion. This was indicative of a hypothesis that religion was the cause of the higher satisfaction.
In order to test this hypothesis, the Southern region was no longer in the comparison. Instead, two subsets of the data were created based on religious service attendance: (a) More religious: attendance to religious services at lease once or twice a month; vs. (b) Less religious: attendance a few times a year or less – including 42 respondents who refused to respond or claimed they did not know. The more religious subset had 1571 respondents, while the less religious subset contained 1396 respondents.
In order to buffer out the possible monetary influence on happiness, a comparison was made between the two subsets’ annual incomes. The only significant difference was that the more religious had a significantly higher responses in the $30,000 to $40,000 per year salary range. So it was concluded that it was very unlikely that income was a factor.
As for the happiness indicator, those more religious were over-represented in the highest happiness categories: 8, 9 and 10, with 8 and 10 being statistically significant. The less religious were over-represented in the lower categories, namely 4, 5 and 6, of which 4 was found to be statistically significant. Interestingly few respondents of both subsets opted for the lowest (1, 2 or 3) categories. A total of 116 (8.51%) of the less religious subset indicate a 1,2 or 3; while this number was only 98 (6.4%) for the more religious subset, further validating the conclusion.
Conclusions
The conclusion that those who are more religious (as measured by being more inclined to attend their various religious services) is quite clear and verified by statistical tests. No further underlying cause for this can be determined from the data that exists. A large number of comparisons of other variables were performed in order to surface some underlying cause, but none could be found. There is no reason to suppose that anything other than the religious belief per se was causing the perception of greater happiness.
Finally, there was nothing in this study that compared any one religious classification against another.
Click here to review a report on the results of the survey.
What are the conditions of salvation given by Jesus?
Return to the Pilgrim's Page
This report focuses on one aspect of some PEW economic survey data that were made available for general analyses from the PEW website (http://www.pewresearch.org/data/download-datasets/). There where hundreds of attributes within the survey, but the one that came up to be the most significant in terms of human satisfaction was religion. This was a surprise to the researchers, but it comes as no surprise to those who are trying to serve God to the best of their abilities.
Those who reject all religious affiliations often do so because they feel they will miss out on something if they get involved with any religious group. The results of this economic survey are quite interesting in this regard. This survey was not performed by or on behalf of any religious group.
Are You Missing Out Because You are Religious?
by Dave Brown
Introduction and Definitions
The purpose of this article is to provide a biblical context for a scientific analysis of economic data collected for general economic research purposes. The instrument used had over 100 questions of which only a few dealt with religion or satisfaction in life; it was not at all a religiously-oriented survey. Click here to review a report on the results of the survey. This link is also at the end of this article.
Let us begin our discussion of the survey by defining what is meant by the word happy in our current culture:
1. Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy.
2. Cheerful; willing: happy to help.
3. Characterized by good luck.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All humans have an emotional perception of what it means for them to be happy, although quite often long term satisfaction is masked by short-term perceptions. The use of drugs is an excellent example. It is difficult to say that one is happy when there is a specter of ultimate doom hanging over their behavior. True happiness must be characterized by a freedom from anxiety when we are in our normal state of mind (not when we are high on drugs or the charisma of the crowd).
The word “hap,” which few of us have ever used, gives us some insight – it means fortune or chance (neither positive nor negative). We often use the word “perhaps,” which incorporates the words per and haps. Per in perhaps means: according to. So perhaps means: according to chance. It applies to something that has some probability that it could happen, but yet it is not certain. We only state this to elaborate on the third definition of happy given above: characterized by good luck.
The biblical word blessed is translated happy in some of our more modern translation, but there should be no confusion that God’s blessing to the faithful could be a matter of chance – the reward for their faithfulness and its resulting behavior is certain. The good luck or good fortune that we have is the result of God’s plan for us. This should be accompanied by a feeling or joy that is one of happiness. Consider the following scholarship:
BLESSED
(bles'-ed) (barukh): Where God is referred to, this word has the sense of "praise," as in 1 Sam 25:32, "Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel." But where man is in mind it is used in the sense of "happy" or "favored," and most frequently so in the Psalms and the Gospels, as for example, "Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the wicked" (Ps 1:1); "Blessed art you among women" (Luke 1:42); "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matt 5:3).
(from International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Electronic Database Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)
We suggest that as we used the terms today, happiness is an inner feeling of satisfaction and peace, while the state of being blessed provides the outward favorable conditions that will ultimately cause this inner feeling. The quest for happiness must rank among the human’s greatest pursuits. Everything else is subservient to it.
After all, if we perceive ourselves to be happy, does it really matter if we are poor, have bad family relationships, have no good friends, or any other downside? If a person still perceives himself/herself to be happy despite all of these things, we must accept the fact that they are happy (at least for the present). While most of these things (riches, friendships, family, etc.) would seem to support happiness, we are convinced that none of them is necessarily a good proxy for true happiness. Someone could, in fact, have the worst of all worlds with the physical list given above, and yet still be happy if their hope was in eternity and not in this world. Similarly, someone else might have “all of the good things of this life” and still be miserable – examples are legion in the entertainment world. Many who take their own lives seemingly have everything in this world and everything to live for. There is no doubt, however, that prior to taking their lives, they were of all people the least to be called happy.
Understanding this is the key to understanding the findings of the survey. Immediately below we discuss the results of a randomized scientific survey of people across the United States. One might ask, how should these people know? Is it not just their opinion? Our answer is that in this case perception is indeed reality, because if a person perceives himself/herself to be satisfied and happy, then by the definition discussed above, they are. So in this case, since perception is reality, a survey does not just give us their opinions, are far as happiness is concerned, it tells us exactly how they are feeling about things at the time.
Summary of Survey Results
The analysis of the data began as a comparison of attitudes in the various regions of the country: South, West, Northeast and Midwest. When the various attributes of the survey were compared for the South as opposed to the rest of the country, three out of five of the most significant factors were related to religion. These factors (questions) were:
- Religion – categories of religions in the US (including options for “Don’t know,” “refused to answer,” and “Nothing in particular.”)
- Born-Again Or Evangelical Christian (Yes/No – the two were considered to be similar indicators); and
- How Often Do You Attend Religious Services?
The South region was over-represented in the “Protestant” category and about as expected in the “Christian” category. (Our interpretation of the “Christian” response is that they did not consider themselves affiliated with any denomination.)
In determining happiness, the one attribute of primary interest was the question: ”How is your life (on a scale from one to 10)?” This was a direct measure of the personal assessment of how things are as compared to how they might be on average. The response “neither that good, nor that bad” was response 5. It was found that the South region was significantly higher in their 10 response, and the other responses generally had them high in the 7 and 8 responses as well. No other factors seemed to have as high a correlation with the happiness factor as religion. This was indicative of a hypothesis that religion was the cause of the higher satisfaction.
In order to test this hypothesis, the Southern region was no longer in the comparison. Instead, two subsets of the data were created based on religious service attendance: (a) More religious: attendance to religious services at lease once or twice a month; vs. (b) Less religious: attendance a few times a year or less – including 42 respondents who refused to respond or claimed they did not know. The more religious subset had 1571 respondents, while the less religious subset contained 1396 respondents.
In order to buffer out the possible monetary influence on happiness, a comparison was made between the two subsets’ annual incomes. The only significant difference was that the more religious had a significantly higher responses in the $30,000 to $40,000 per year salary range. So it was concluded that it was very unlikely that income was a factor.
As for the happiness indicator, those more religious were over-represented in the highest happiness categories: 8, 9 and 10, with 8 and 10 being statistically significant. The less religious were over-represented in the lower categories, namely 4, 5 and 6, of which 4 was found to be statistically significant. Interestingly few respondents of both subsets opted for the lowest (1, 2 or 3) categories. A total of 116 (8.51%) of the less religious subset indicate a 1,2 or 3; while this number was only 98 (6.4%) for the more religious subset, further validating the conclusion.
Conclusions
The conclusion that those who are more religious (as measured by being more inclined to attend their various religious services) is quite clear and verified by statistical tests. No further underlying cause for this can be determined from the data that exists. A large number of comparisons of other variables were performed in order to surface some underlying cause, but none could be found. There is no reason to suppose that anything other than the religious belief per se was causing the perception of greater happiness.
Finally, there was nothing in this study that compared any one religious classification against another.
Click here to review a report on the results of the survey.
What are the conditions of salvation given by Jesus?
Return to the Pilgrim's Page