By Nancy Frazier O’Brien
Catholic News Service
Left photo: Lugi and Rita Picone get ready to serve at the first-ever Meatball Cook-off sponsored by St. Vincent de Paul School, Mays Landing, on Jan 21. A researcher jokingly suggested pastors plan more church suppers because of the benefits of church friendships.
Bottom right photo: Ken Blankenbuhler and Rich Mercados present their entry at the Knights of Columbus, All Saints Council, 10th Annual John J. Heinz Memorial Cook-Off and Dinner on Feb. 25. The event was held at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Linwood.
WASHINGTON — Harvard public policy professor Robert D. Putnam has a tongue-in-cheek suggestion for pastors: “Spend less time on the sermons, and more time arranging the church suppers.”
That’s because research by Putnam and Chaeyoon Lim, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shows that the more church friends a person has, the happier he or she is.
“Church friends are super-charged friends, but we have no idea why,” Putnam told a Feb. 16 summit on religion, well-being and health at Gallup world headquarters in Washington. “We have some hypotheses, but we don’t know for sure.”
The researchers found that nonchurch friends do not provide the same benefit in terms of well-being and that other measures of religiosity — belief in God or frequency of prayer, for example — do not serve as a reliable predictor of a person’s satisfaction with life.
“People who frequently attend religious services are more satisfied with their lives not because they have more friends overall (when compared with individuals who do not attend services) but because they have more friends in their congregations,” the two researchers wrote in the American Sociological Review.
And churchgoing alone without making friends does not improve well-being, they found.
“In short, sitting alone in the pew does not enhance one’s life satisfaction,” Putnam and Lim wrote. “Only when one forms social networks in a congregation does religious service attendance lead to a higher level of life satisfaction.”
At the summit, Gallup unveiled its latest studies on how religion affects well-being, both in the United States and worldwide.
Reviewing data from more than 676,000 participants in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index interviews in 2010 and 2011, Gallup researchers found a statistically significant relationship between religiousness and well-being, after controlling for such demographic variables as age, gender, race and ethnicity, geographic location, socio-economic status, marital status and child-bearing status.
The researchers defined participants as “very religious,” “moderately religious” or “nonreligious,” depending on their answers to two questions — is religion an important part of your daily life and how often do you attend your church, synagogue or mosque.
The study found that those who were considered “very religious” — 41 percent of the population — not only had higher well-being but were much less likely to smoke and more likely to exercise and eat five fruits and vegetables a day, said Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor-in-chief and the immediate past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Those who were in the “nonreligious” category — about 31 percent of the population — had a higher level of well-being, however, than the 28 percent of the population that is considered “moderately religious.”
“This study does not allow for a precise determination of why this might be the case,” said a Gallup report on the data. “It is possible that Americans who have higher well-being are more likely to choose to be religious than those with lower well-being, or that some third variable could be driving certain segments of the U.S. population to be more religious and to have higher well-being.”
The report also postulated that the “more meditative states” and faith in a higher power associated with religion have been used as ways to “lower stress, reduce depression and promote happiness” and that Christianity’s emphasis on charitable acts and “positive relationships with one’s neighbors” might “lead to a more positive mental outlook.”
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