The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [87]
Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a recent American poll said more religion was the best tool to strengthen family values and improve moral behavior, 85 percent said it would help parents better educate their kids, 79 percent opined it would cut crime. Regardless of the plausibility of these beliefs, churchgoers in the United States smoke less, drink less, and are less likely to be overweight. They are more likely to be married and they report having more active social lives. They are also happier for it.
The happiness gap between those who go to church every week and those who never go is about the same magnitude as that between the richest 20 percent of Americans and the poorest living among the bottom fifth. All this happiness tends to be good for people. Over a period of eight years, a group of sociologists and demographers tracked the mortality of thousands of people who participated in a national health survey in 1987. They found that going to church once a week added seven years to life expectancy at age twenty: twenty-year-olds who went to church were expected to live until age eighty-two. Those who didn’t were only expected to make it to seventy-five.
One can even price the benefits: the extra happiness reported by more religious Americans over their less devout fellow citizens is similar to the happiness premium experienced by people who make more money. Americans pray on average 8.1 times a week. The happiness boost from praying one more time a week is equivalent to that of making roughly an extra $12,500 a year, in current dollars.
JUST AS A car is more valuable in a sparsely populated suburb than to somebody in a dense city with a vast subway network, the proclivity of believers to comply with religious rules will depend on their options outside the faith. Women are consistently more religious than men. Since they typically earn less at work, religious investments require less sacrifice of them in terms of forgone income. From the 1950s onward, church attendance declined after states repealed so-called blue laws that forced retailers to close on Sundays. Churchgoers had more options to spend their time, so they went to church less often. Consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs rose sharply.
People can pay for afterlife benefits with their time—in church, praying, etc.—or with their money. The rich, who have lots of money, yet little time, donate more; the poor, who have more time on their hands, go to church more often. This is not unlike shopping—the poor spend more time at it and typically find more bargains than the rich, who can’t bother to go bargain hunting.
And taxes that change the relative value of time and money can alter the composition of religious investment. In the United States, when the government increased tax breaks for charitable contributions, people reacted by increasing their donations but going less often to church. Each 1 percent increase in religious charity was accompanied by an average decline of 0.92 percent in church attendance, as people who contributed more money felt less of an urge to spend their Sundays on a hard wooden pew.
People select their very flavor of faith through cost-benefit calculations of the most mercenary kind. People with more opportunities in the secular world, those with higher wages and a higher cost of time, will choose less demanding faiths as they will have more to lose from strict moral codes. In the United States, France, and Britain, highly educated people go more often to church than those with less education. But they tend to disbelieve the more extreme religious propositions, such as the reality of miracles.
In the United States, educated Christians choose relatively mild mainstream Protestant denominations, like Presbyterianism. Jews, the best-educated believers, are the least likely to buy the literal truth of the Bible. They go to the synagogue for the social rewards.
By contrast, the most fervent and strict religions tend to be popular among the least educated, which have fewer options elsewhere and are thus