God wrote the law of human happiness into human nature, and the data keeps finding it. A new Institute for Family Studies analysis of the Global Flourishing Study found that Americans from almost every religious group report "significantly higher flourishing overall" than the unaffiliated. The gap holds for men and women alike.
The study, run by Harvard's Human Flourishing Program and Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, follows more than 200,000 people in 22 countries. It measures happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships and finances. In the U.S. sample, the religious score higher in every domain but money. The widest gap, nearly 3 points, is in meaning and purpose, wrote the IFS authors, Jenet Erickson and W. Justin Dyer.
On the 10-point index, unaffiliated men and women both score 6.90. Catholic men and women both score 7.47. Among adults 18 to 29, Catholics score 7.08 and the unaffiliated 6.06. About 1 in 10 of the unaffiliated rate their happiness a 9 or 10, the authors wrote. Among Baptists and evangelicals, the share is closer to 1 in 4. Health follows the same line. Among men, 12% of the unaffiliated rate their mental and physical health a 9 or 10, IFS charted. Among Catholic men the share is 19%, and among Baptist men 23%.
That is the natural law at work. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that its first precept is that "good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided." Man is inclined to preserve his life, to the "education of offspring," and "to know the truth about God, and to live in society." Health, family, faith and friendship are not lifestyle choices. They are what a man is made for. Keep them and he thrives. Abandon them and he withers.
Pope Leo XIII called the natural law "nothing but our reason, commanding us to do right and forbidding sin." It binds the Baptist and the atheist as surely as the Catholic. It rewards whoever keeps it.
So why do Catholic men trail Baptist men, at 7.64, and Catholic women trail Latter-day Saint women, at 7.92? The gaps are small, and IFS did not test them; it compared each group only with the unaffiliated. Catholics score above Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Where Catholics lag, the fault is not in Catholic teaching. It lies with Catholics who no longer keep it. The IFS chart counts every self-identified Catholic, the woman at daily Mass and the man who has not gone since his confirmation. Weekly Mass attendance among self-identified Catholics has fallen from 44% in the 1970s to 18% today, IFS reported in its September study, "The Devout Difference," sponsored by the Catholic campus ministry FOCUS.
The same study shows what fidelity buys. Only 39% of churchgoing Catholics and 21% of nominal Catholics fully agree that marriage is a permanent bond, against 52% of churchgoing Protestants. Among Catholics who hold that view, 83% are happily married. Among those who do not, 70% are. Among ever-married adults ages 35 to 54, churchgoing Catholics were the least likely of the groups IFS compared to have divorced or separated, at 27%. Nominal Catholics stood at 36%. Catholics who live the faith marry happier and divorce less. Cafeteria Catholics give that advantage away.
The Church's teaching on the home is clear. In Arcanum, Leo XIII wrote that "the husband is the chief of the family and the head of the wife." The wife "must be subject to her husband and obey him; not, indeed, as a servant, but as a companion." He taught the "perpetual indissolubility" of marriage. A home ordered this way rests on nature and is raised by grace.
Money is the one domain where faith gives no edge. That should surprise no Christian. Christ warned that "a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). St. Paul wrote that godliness "holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come" (1 Tim 4:8).
Nothing in these numbers indicts the Church. The fault lies with the Catholics who left her teaching at the parish door. The remedy is the one the Church has always given: go to Mass, keep the commandments, marry for life and raise children in the faith. Nature and grace still reward the man who does.
