Religion and Well-Being

The New York Times has just published an interactive map detailing the well-being of Americans, according to a 3-year poll conducted by Gallup.  The map provides an overview of well-being, by congressional district, and can be manipulated to show individual criteria that Gallop used to create their composite.  Among the individual categories are: obesity, stress, exercise, job satisfaction, depression, diabetes, nighttime safety, and inadequate food. 

Anyone with an interest in national polls and state-by-state comparisons, will notice that the maps revealed by the Gallup Well-Being poll have a lot in common with some other maps related to the American mindset.

For starters, here is the composite map detailing Well-Being in America. The darker states are those reporting a higher well-being index, whereas the lighter states are those reporting a lesser sense of well-being.

Now let's take a look at a map illustrating the results of another Gallop poll from 2009 which identified the most religious states in America. The darker states are the most religious, whereas the lightest states are the least religious.

Although the maps are not identical, one can clearly identify the Southeast US as being, by far, the most religious areas of America.  A quick look back to the map of American Well-being, we can clearly identify the Southeast as being the front-runner when it comes to a lack of perceived well-being. 

Another map of interest is a breakdown of the 2008 presidential election results. 

Again, we see some similarities.  Almost all of the states defined by the Gallup religion poll as being "Most religious" or "More religious" went to McCain in the 2008 election.  And with the exception of North Carolina, all states that were defined as "Most Religious" went to McCain.  The very same states with the lowest sense of well-being.  This map, although not an indicator of well-being, does raise some interesting questions, since a ballot often provide insight into the wants, needs, and hopes of the electorate.

Or how about poverty?

While there are countless ways to slice and dice the data provided by polls, surveys, the census, or election results, the correlation between religiosity and well-being, poverty, and political ideology is hard to ignore.  And certainly, just as we know that no state is truly a red state or a blue state (they are actually different shades of purple), we know that there are certainly pockets of highly religious people in less-religious states, and vice versa.  I  am quite aware that I have picked only a few maps here for comparison, and that there are many others out there that may tell other stories, but these came to my mind instantly upon viewing the New York Times Well-Being maps.  But looking over these maps it's hard not to ask some of the following questions:

Are people more religious when they are less happy (or lacking in their sense of well-being)? Or, conversely, are people less happy because they live in more religious areas of the country?

We see that conservatives tend to be concentrated in more religious states, and that is not surprising.  Yet, when we look at the well-being index, one might ask why are those who are less healthy and poorer supporting ideologies that are largely against health care reform and universal coverage?  (One might argue that supporting the conservative, religious values of conservative candidates is more important to these folks than supporting the less religious candidate who wants to provide assistance.)

Why are some of our least religious states like New Hampshire, Washington, Connecticut, Vermont, and Alaska reporting some of the higher instances of well-being?  (North Dakota and Utah are the outliers here, as high well-being indexes and high religiosity -- high concentrations of Lutherans and Mormons, respectively.)

If we were to look elsewhere in the world, we would find that the top four happiest countries in the world, according to Gallup, are Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden. Also according to Gallup data, Sweden, Denmark and Norway were the second, third, and fourth least religious states in the world (Estonia beat them all).

Sociologists have long theorized that, as societies modernize, they become more secularized.  Many scholars state that, as societies learn to answer life's mysteries through the advancement of science and the gaining of knowledge, the need for religion decreases.  This is certainly an area of fierce debate, but as we continue to pore over the expanding ocean of data, we will continue to ask questions about religion's relationship to our well-being.

On Being Perceived as a Condescending Elitist When it Comes to Religion

I think we owe it to ourselves to lift up the hood and really take a look at what we believe, and why. It's never pretty when we are honest about belief. It's easy to hit a nerve, and it's hard to not resort to verbal aggression when nerves are struck. I know. I do it all the time.
 
I get in a lot of discussions about religion, including my lack of it, its encroachment on public policy, or its frequent role in denial of basic human rights around the world.  I am misunderstood a lot of the time. this religion stuff is complex, and i have very complex feelings about it. It's easy to be misunderstood, and i realize that goes both ways.

Although folks like Hitchens would disagree, I never in a million years would believe that religion is a poison or a cancer.  to believe that would be to deny my very existence. I firmly believe that religion has been a powerful force in the shaping of human societies. I firmly believe that without religion, I would not be here writing this right now. I know that religion, along with evolved moral codes, has allowed many societies to become more cohesive, to flourish, and to survive. yes, religion has also been a great force of suffering in history. Nothing is black and white. Everything that is good in our world can also be bad, and every shade in between.

I do not for a second believe that religiosity cannot coincide with intelligence. Some of our greatest minds have been devoutly religious. My parents are two of the wisest and most intelligent people I know. My family members, relatives, and many good friends who are religious are way more intelligent than i could dream of being. I also know many non-religious folks who are morons. Quite a few.

Religion covers a broad range of ideologies and belief systems. And certainly we cannot talk about religion without talking about evolution. After all, everything evolves, including religion. It began somewhere, just like anything else. Not only did it evolve, but it played a role in our evolution. This is true and we have the evidence to prove it. As such, I find it just as open to study and dissection as the fields of geology, biology, cosmology, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. When we do look at religion from this perspective, and looking at the vast range that religion covers, we can make the association of certain religious beliefs to knowledge. We know for a fact that religion evolved partially as a means to understand the world in which its practitioners lived. When humans could not understand weather events, the reasons behind night and day, or why people get sick, they explained them with religious beliefs. throughout history, even as we gained more understanding about life and the cosmos and stopped believing that the gods controlled lightning or that demons caused malaria, we still looked to religion to explain more complex things that elude(d) our understanding. Even today, as sore as it makes people to hear or read it, there is research that shows the associations between broad ranges of religious belief and knowledge/education. As un-PC as it may be to point out, the more primitive fundamentalist beliefs (whether Christian, Muslim, Judaism, etc.) are more often associated with the less educated. The less primitive the beliefs, the more educated the believers (or non-) are. There is data to support it. To deny the connection of these associations is to deny that practitioners of currently practiced tribal rituals to oust an illness-causing demon are doing so partly due to lack of knowledge about human illness and biology. We also have to understand that way before the Abrahamic god came on the scene, there were countless primitive religions that covered the earth. Why is it that it took so long for monotheism to take hold if we are to believe that the Abrahamic god himself created us in his own image to follow him? That is a long, crooked path (with endless forks and dead ends) away from him to only come back in the last few thousand years (mere seconds in the time-line of human history).

You can infer what you will from the above statements. Do I believe that believing in the Genesis creation story (in a literal sense) is due to stupidity? No. Do I believe that believing in the Genesis creation story shows a lack of knowledge about what we have learned about life, the earth, and the cosmos? Yes. I believe mostly, however, that people cling to literal biblical interpretations mostly because of willful ignorance. people do not want to invest in understanding the oceans of data supporting evolutionary theory and natural selection. They do not want to consider the mountains of transitional species in the fossil record. They do not want to appreciate the vast, unimaginable stretches of time involved in evolutionary change. It is difficult for people with our lifespans to envision even 1,000 generations, much less hundreds of thousands, or millions. We look at our own children as they grow and do not notice how much they have changed until we look at a photo from the recent past. the change that occurs so slightly from generation to generation over millions of years is impossible for us to fathom.

We are usually told the stories of religion at a young age. We believe them because they are as true to us at that age as is the sky being blue. As we grow older, to unlearn certain stories, or even the literalness of certain stories is like denying our very existence. We fear we will slip down the path to not knowing ourselves; admitting one thing in the Bible is not true will make the entire house of cards collapse before us. This does not have to be true. Francis Collins of the NIH, and former head of the Human Genome Project consistently speaks of the coexistence of religion and evolution.  He is at once an Evangelical Christian and a staunch proponent of evolution.   These things are not irreconcilable. 
 
I realize that the above could further cement the impression that I believe that fundamentalist Christians (or Muslims, etc.) are ignorant, and that I am evolved and more knowledgeable. I don't know why I am how I am. but I can say that I have gotten here not without an incredible amount of research, soul-searching, self-education, and a daily thirst for further understanding the mechanisms that dictate the way life works and how the cosmos behaves.

I would never say that there is not some supernatural force out there that has set it all into motion. I do not know this. There are always things that humans will not understand about the cosmos and about life. But because we cannot explain things does not mean that we must ascribe those things a supernatural origin. I don't know for sure that pixies do not live in the forest, but I have to assume that they do not until I have something that proves to me otherwise.

But the fact that I don't entertain supernatural explanations about the world does not mean that I believe that anyone who believes in demonic possession, or ghosts, is not intelligent. They're certainly entitled to believe those things. I may wonder, however, if they have really ruled out all other possibilities. I may get upset if my tax dollars go to fund ghostbusters, and I may become vocal when public school science teacher teaches my child that ghosts may be just as good an explanation for why a door closes on its own as changes in air pressure. I may even ridicule him. But that doesn't make me a condescending elitist.  However, that will not stop the ghostbusters from thinking I believe they are stupid. 

And so it goes.



This piece appeared previously on happyrobot.com.