Religiosity over the Life Course and Flourishing: Are There Educational Differences?

Abstract

Background

Human flourishing offers a more inclusive and comprehensive assessment of well-being beyond the absence of mental illness. Research on religion and well-being has generally focused on singular measure of mental or physical well-being and emphasized different stages rather than longer stretches of the life course. This study seeks to address these gaps.

Purpose

We focus on the interaction between transitions in religiosity and educational attainment in predicting flourishing in mid-life adults. By positioning the effects of transitions in religiosity across levels of education—a common axis of stratification for religious belief and behavior—we test the enhanced resource perspective that the better educated may benefit more from sustained or increased religiosity over the life course.

Methods

Data for this study come from MIDUS, a nationally representative sample of United States adults (N = 3030). We created a composite measure of flourishing across the psychological, social, and emotional domains and conducted a series of regression models.

Results

We observed that people with stable high religiosity between childhood and adulthood had the best flourishing profiles, suggesting that the association between religiosity and flourishing may begin to take shape in childhood. We found that both stable high or increases in religiosity between childhood and adulthood were found to be most beneficial for the flourishing scores of the college educated compared to those with less than a college degree. We found no support for the hypothesis that the less educated “substitute” religion as a compensatory mechanism for their deficiency in secular resources.

Conclusion and Implications

While flourishing has typically been excluded as an outcome of study in the burgeoning religion-health literature, the results of the current study suggest much could be learned from its inclusion. At the population level, studying flourishing—with attention to differences by educational and religious dimensions—might represent a more useful way to understand how people can achieve a state of happiness and come to realize more meaningful lives.