Freakonomics Radio - 176. Does Religion Make You Happy?

Episode Date: July 24, 2014

It’s a hard question to answer, but we do our best.

All right. Even Jesus can't keep the heat out in there. Woo, man. Nice and warm. Dumping sweat. I'll tell you what. That's Joel Rogers and his father, Wayne. Yeah, so we're just about to walk into Grace Life Baptist Church and worship with my parents and my brother also.

My sister's about to be here running a little late as usual. So, yeah. We're in McCalla, Alabama, about 20 minutes outside of Birmingham, on a very warm Sunday morning. You've got a high school now. Wow, crazy. It's a, I would say, a fairly typical evangelical service. It used to be an old gym, and so the setting is a little different than a traditional church.

There are no windows in here or anything, but there is a praise band up on the stage. Sometimes there's a choir. The choir is off right now for summer. That's Lori, Joel's mom. She has a lot of friends here. How's it going? How are you? Good to see you. I miss y'all. All right. Hello, Miss Debra.

This is kind of like the fellowship area, and it's fun just to see everybody in here, and you get to see people that might not come to your service. Most people call it hanging out. At the church, they call it fellowship. So it's like the translation. That's the church word. Right. Glad you're here. Let's stand together this morning. We want to go to the Lord in prayer today.

Father God, we bow our hearts before you, and we are so thankful, God, to see you. We went to church with Joel Rogers' family this morning because of an email he sent us. Joel works as a tax accountant in Birmingham. Here's what he wrote. Being devout Southern Baptist, Joel italicized Southern, my parents have steadfastly been giving 10% of their income to the church their whole lives. I recently voiced my opinion that I thought that was too much to give, and my parents and I got into an argument. After a little back and forth, my parents conceded that tithing at 10% may not be the exact amount God expects, but my mother said something that

stuck with me. She said, the 10% they give to the church makes them happier than anything else they spend their money on. Now, Joel goes on here. I've read that people who go to religious institutions consistently are happier than their counterparts. The economist inside me says that money not given to the church would make a non-tither happier, all else equal. So here's what Joel wants to know. Will forfeiting 10% of your income for the right to go to a church and experience a church congregation, will that make you happier or less happy overall? That is the question we'll try to answer on today's show.

Really, Joel is asking two questions, related but separate. One is whether giving away money, in this case to a religious institution, makes you happier. The other is whether religion itself makes you happier. Here are Joel's parents again. I think the world is a better place because of our little bit of tithing. By tithing, I am pleasing God. I'm doing something that God would want me to do. So that gives me happiness in that way, too. And even Joel can see how giving money to the church can have a personal upside.

I mean, if I think back to another thing that I spent $20 on, like a t-shirt or something, like which one would bring me more prolonged happiness? I think the answer is probably giving the money away. But as we'll see in this episode, these questions are not so simple. Does it make me happy to tithe? Would I be happier if I had that 10% in my 401k? I don't know. But you know, my 401k would look a lot better if I had all the 10% that I had given over the years. We thank you, God, for all of this, and we pray it in Jesus' name. And all of God's people said, Amen. Amen. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio,

the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. Okay, we are trying to answer Joel Rogers' question about whether giving money to your church makes you happier in the long run. When you just look at survey statistics, particularly in the United States, you find a strong and consistent positive association between rates of giving and happiness. That's Larry Iannacone. I'm a professor of economics here at Chapman University. I'm Christian. I would classify myself as an evangelical Christian. Giannacone has studied the history of religious giving, including tithing. Tithing literally comes from the word tenth, and traditionally meant 10% of something, usually your income, paid to a church or to religion in general. The term originates as far back as the Bible.

And in ancient Israel, the people of Israel were expected to give a tenth of their income, a tenth of their farm produce to the priesthood and to also help the poor. At some points and places in history, tithing was essentially a government tax, but things have evolved a good bit. In American churches, however, and when you hear the word tithing used today, you're almost always talking about contributions that are freely given to the church, often some fixed percent of people's income, but not necessarily 10%. So in that sense, the term is something of a misnomer, and its use has evolved and changed quite a bit over time.

Yannick Kony can tell us which American denominations are most likely to tithe. It varies some, but you hear it more among Protestants and especially conservative Protestants, those who try to emulate or describe their behavior in terms of biblical traditions. So they're drawing on that ancient term and tradition from the Old Testament. You hear it especially among Mormons, but you also hear it in the assemblies of God and many theologically conservative Protestant traditions. It's not unusual to hear Baptists talking about tithing. Baptists like Wayne Rogers.

I was taught to do it by my grandparents when I was very, very young. My granddad would give me a dollar every Sunday to give to the church. And from the time I was three years old, I would take a little envelope with a dollar in it. So then as I got to be in middle school and high school and started making a little bit of my own money, my grandmother said, well, Wayne, are you tithing off of that money? Larry Yannacone has some data from the General Social Surveys on the rate of giving among different American Christian denominations. At the top are Assemblies of God, Seventh-day Adventists, and Mormons. They average closer to 6 or 7 percent of their income, which is really quite an astonishingly large amount. Baptists, on average, give 3 to 5 percent of their income, which is really quite an astonishingly large amount. Baptists, on average, give 3% to 5% of their income.

Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians give about 1%. So the trend is that the more liberal denominations give less. And then there are the Unitarians. Unitarians, who by many measures are the most liberal of all, give less than 1% of their income to religious causes. According to one evangelical Christian polling firm, 5% of Americans give at least 10% of their income to a religious or other nonprofit institution. Among born-again Christians, that 5% rate jumps to 12%. Now, if you look at the share of religious giving in the whole charitable picture,

you find that roughly two-thirds of Americans' individual contributions go to religious institutions. We could talk at great length about what those institutions do with all that money. Maybe someday we will. But today, we're trying to answer Joel Rogers' question, which is, what does all that giving do for the giver? Larry Yonakoni again. The data that we have suggest a pretty strong positive association between various measures of happiness and well-being on the one hand, and other measures of religious involvement, including giving, on the other. Okay, that sounds fairly persuasive, that giving and happiness go hand in hand. But, as Yannick Kony is careful to point out, there are a number of caveats here.

Just because giving and happiness go together doesn't mean that the giving causes the happiness. Could be that happier people are more likely to give money. Could be that having more money makes you happier, therefore more able to give. Or that being happy makes you likely to make more money, which makes you more able to give. In other words, it's not so easy to establish firm causal proof, as our listener Joel Rogers is looking for, as to whether giving money to your church makes you happier. The answer is complicated. The answer actually speaks to two different elements of research I've done in religion. That's John Gruber. I'm a professor

of economics at MIT. I grew up in a Jewish household with a very religious mother and a fairly not very religious father. But, you know, mom sort of ran things. And so we were, you know, we were reformed, but pretty serious about it. Are you a religious person yourself? No, I'm not. Gruber is, however, very much interested in the questions we're asking today. But with causality in this realm being elusive, Gruber had to get a little creative. This is my first paper on religion. It's called, it's my favorite title of paper I've ever written.

It's called Pay or Pray. And it was actually a bit inspired by an episode from my childhood, which is my father, he's a finance professor. And so he was sort of induced to become treasurer of our temple. And he said, oh, now I'm treasurer of the temple. Oh, good, that means I can go less. Now, that wasn't about giving and going. That was about time and going. But nonetheless, it sort of implied that tradeoff.

The question Gruber was asking in this paper is a subtle one. Does giving money to a religious institution complement going to religious services or act as a substitute? Giving to charity is very tax price sensitive. This is well known in economics that when you give a bigger tax break to charitable giving, people give more. But then no one ever looked, well, what does it do to their attendance? And I found that if you give a bigger tax break to charitable giving, people give more and go less. That is their substitute. Gruber's father, in other words, was more norm than exception. Gruber found that every 1% rise in charitable giving led to a 1.1% decline in religious attendance.

But what about someone like Joel Rogers' parents? They give their 10% to the church and feel really good about it. Is it the giving that feels good? Or is it the going to church that feels good? I would say if it's really going that matters, if it's going to church that matters for their happiness and their well-being, then they should maybe even give less and just go more. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, does attending religious services make people better off? What I find is an incredibly strong correlation, that basically these people are more likely to have higher incomes, have higher education, have more stable marriages, be less likely to be on welfare, essentially be more successful on any sort of economic measure you want to use. One more thing, if you do not already subscribe to this Freakonomics Radio podcast, we believe you should. Just sign up for free at iTunes, and you will get the next episode

in your sleep. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Today, we're in church in McCalla, Alabama. Let's pray. Lord, thank you. Thank you for your love for us that never gives up. With Joel Rogers and his family. Joel's parents give 10% of their income to their church. Here's what Joel wanted to know. Will forfeiting 10% of your income for the right to go to a church and experience a church congregation, will that make you happier or less happy overall? We've already established that the connection between donating to a church and happiness can be hard to prove.

But what about the connection between happiness and religion itself? So I came up with what I thought was a fairly convincing idea for this. That's John Gruber again. He's an MIT economist who's tried to measure whether religion makes people better off. As your listeners know, developing that causal case means finding some factor that changes religiosity but doesn't change happiness. You know, the fact there's this correlation that religious people are happier could just be religious people have higher incomes, religious people live in parts of the country that are happier, whatever. Or it could be that happier people tend to be more likely to participate in religious services. Or more worrisome, what we call reverse causality, than the happier people could be more likely to participate.

Gruber began by looking into the research conducted by sociologists like Rodney Stark. One of the findings in this field is that people are more religious if they're in an area that's more densely composed of their religion. So basically, if you are a Catholic in Boston, you are more religious than a Catholic in Minneapolis. And if you're a Lutheran in Minneapolis, you're more religious than a Lutheran in Boston. Now, why was that religious clustering important for trying to measure the impact of religiosity? That's a fact that was given to me. That's well-documented literature. And so what I said is, well, if you look at who lives where, that's largely a function of sort of what waves of immigrants came over at what time. And certain ethnic backgrounds have certain religions associated with them.

All right. So let me say this. I believe you because you sound believable and you have good credentials. You have great credentials. But as a layperson, and in this case, I speak not only for myself, but I probably represent most of our listeners, that methodology as a means to extricate the causal relationship of attending religion, changing your life, it's a little, I don't know how to say it. Distant. Yeah, distant is a great word. So before we get into the findings, just persuade me a little bit more in as plain English as you can why this variable and why this methodology

is worthwhile and believable to you. Okay. So first of all, this is an unbelievably hard problem because there's lots of things that correlate with both outcomes and religion, and because people who are, say, richer or happier may choose to be more or less religious. So it's clearly a typical kind of difficult pre-economic style problem. So basically, why do I believe my solution? Well, essentially, the starting point for my solution is saying, look, Polish people in Boston are much more religious

than Polish people in Minneapolis. Likewise, Swedish people in Boston, who are otherwise pretty similar, are less religious than Swedish people in Minneapolis. Now, there's no great reason for that, other than the fact they're not around people of their ethnicity, and thus their religion. Moreover, you might say, well, maybe, I don't know, maybe Polish people in Boston are just different in some way. But then, let me go one step further. You might say, okay, well, look, John, that's all well and good, but, you know, Poles and Swedes aren't identical.

Maybe Poles in Boston are different than Poles in Minneapolis, okay? Maybe, you know, they're different from some other dimension. Well, the way I can test that is I can look at participation in other activities. So if you're really worried that, gee, polls in Boston are just different, they should be more likely to be in other clubs or other civic activities or other similar things, and they're not. So except for being more religious, polls in Sweden and Boston are no different. Now, look, is this a bulletproof argument? No.

I mean, let me be honest about this paper. This is the way economics works. This paper was not accepted in a top economics journal. The top economics journals had enough concerns that this was not real, that this paper was published in sort of a second-tier journal. So is this the cleanest paper ever written? No, not by a long shot. But I'm pretty convinced. Right. Okay. So you find that the clustering of national identity has something to do with religious participation. Exactly. Therefore... Therefore, I then look and ask, well, does the clustering of ethnic identity also correlate with economic outcome? And what I find is an incredibly strong correlation, that basically

these people who are clustered with others of their ethnicity are more likely to be more successful, have higher incomes, have higher education, have more stable marriages, be less likely to be on welfare, essentially be more successful on any sort of economic measure you want to use. And just persuade me that it's the religious participation that you feel is a causal driver in that as opposed to, let's say, the ethnic clustering itself. In other words, I could imagine that when there are a lot of polls in Boston, there are network effects that might aid education, health, income, outcomes the way that potentially religious observation does. Right. And the way I want to convince you of that is two things. One is I want to say what what I do is I actually, I can look at what happens to Poles when there are a lot of Italians in Boston. So essentially, because they share the same religion, right, but not much else. So I can actually ask, what happens not just to Poles in Boston? I can control for that. I can essentially say, let me get rid of your own ethnic density. And ask, what happens to Poles with a

lot of other groups that happen to be Catholic in Boston. And so that way, it's not just asking, look, if there's other people of your ethnicity, that's the other people of other ethnicities that share your religion. And then also the fact that, you know, you're no more likely to participate in anything else. So it looks like it's operating through the religion margin. Excellent. Okay, good. Okay. So I have to say that was one of our, I love these – like this show is meant to be primarily entertainment, but we love to teach when we can. And to me, that was like a great teaching sequence there because I think anybody will hear that and really understand the way that someone like you tries to approach a question like that. So that was awesome. Yeah, and look, and I think it's important for your listeners to understand your listeners to understand that, you know, life's not black and white.

And there's not, sometimes there's cleaner answers than others. And sometimes we have a randomized trial and sometimes we don't. And in life, you've got to decide, is the question important enough that you want to answer outcomes in life but actually helps produce them higher levels of education and income, like you said, lower levels of welfare receipt, disability, and divorce. What, if you have any idea, are the mechanisms by which you think religious participation leads to these outcomes? So there's essentially several possibilities. The sort of least exciting possibility is through educational routes, which is maybe when a lot of Catholics, there's more Catholic schools. Now, I don't think that's it, but that is one possible route. I think another route, and the route that I probably find most likely, is the church is essentially a social network

that essentially provides kind of insurance against bad things happening to you, and that it provides a place where you can go and network if you lose a job, you can have people who can help you out if times get tough, loan you money, whatever. Or even if times aren't tough, if you're a successful business person, theoretically, you expand even more if you're successful within your community. Right, but basically churches are the source of social capital in society, are the source of social capital in society. And therefore, if you're around more people like you, that's a bigger community. That's sort of what we call in economics a thicker market. There's more people around who can help you out as you're growing, help you out if you're hurting, that it's really sort of a social insurance notion of a church. And then finally, and most

speculatively, faith itself may produce better outcomes. I know a number of people are very religious. It gives them a calmness and a certainty that allows them to be pretty good for you? Or were you convinced that you were already doing well enough and didn't need it? You know, what it changed in me is it gave me, I probably had the typical secular, rich, liberal skeptic view of religion. Which is what? Which is basically religion sort of a way, open to the masses, you know, kind of the religious right is ruining America. You know, religion is the source of wars in the Middle East. Religion is basically bad. And I think it really changed my views on that, that I really gained an appreciation for the role religion can play in people's lives,

appreciation for my friends who are more religious and a respect for the role religion plays in their lives. But it didn't really affect my religiosity. I think it's something that just has to come to or not. I was kind of forced to go to temple as a kid. I kind of burned out on it, and it's just not, you know, I kind of tried, and I just didn't feel it. So I decided I wasn't going to kind of fake it to make it. So it didn't really affect my life.

But, for example, my wife is, she's Unitarian. We raised the kids Jewish, although she never converted, and now she's going to become a Unitarian minister. And I think that's something I probably wouldn't have been supportive of before I did this research. Now I'm very supportive of her. I think it's great for her. She's getting faith in doing that. Okay, so does religion itself make people better off? As best as John Gruber can tell, the answer is quite possibly. Now, if that's the case, you can see why some people are willing to donate a considerable chunk of their income to their religious institution, which, if you follow this line of questioning through to its natural conclusion, might lead you to think, well, okay, if I'm tithing money to my church and I'm not better off in the

long run, maybe I should get my money back. It turns out that some churches do offer that money-back guarantee. That we are challenging you to take our 90-day tithe challenge. And in 90 days, if you don't feel like God has blessed you, if you don't feel like God has done what his word has said, if you believe God's a liar, then here's what we'll do. We'll refund every dime that you gave during that 90-day period. No questions asked. Perry Noble is the senior pastor of New Spring Church in Anderson, South Carolina. I think the thing about the 90-day tithe challenge is it just tells people, hey,

we're smoking what we're selling here. I believe we've had over 4,000 people total sign up for the challenge since we've started. And between 15 and 20 people total since we've started it a couple years ago have ever asked for their money back. I asked John Gruber, the economist, what he thought of this offer. Well, I mean, I think it's, I guess quite frankly, I think it's terribly misleading. I think that, you know, if we go with the theory that religious participation is good for you because it builds faith and security, the last thing you want to do is have people keeping track, you know, and saying,

God didn't really score me in the last three months, I want my money back. That seems to promote a transactional view of religion, which is damaging. And I don't find that helpful at all. We also ran the tithing refund past the Rogers family. They didn't like it any more than John Gruber. I think that's completely nuts.

It's not Sears. It's very different when you give to the church. But once I give the money away, I expect them to do something good with it, and I don't want the money back. God says, give a tithe, test me, and see if I will pour out blessings. It does not say what type of blessing, and I don't think the blessings have to necessarily be in any way that we can measure it. So I don't see how a church could say that they could have a money back guarantee. It seems like a very selfish reason to give if the only reason you're giving is to get back. So I think it just takes away from the whole how a church could say that they could have a money-back guarantee. It seems like a very selfish reason to give

if the only reason you're giving is to get back. So I think it just takes away from the whole heart of the country. You do get an itemized tax deduction, though, for giving to the church. That's good, 30%. Thank you. with iBooks at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, 1 p.m. Pacific Time. I will answer your questions about our new book, Think Like a Freak, about Freakonomics Radio, anything you want to throw at me. We would like you to send us your questions ahead of time. Tweet them to iBooks. Use the hashtag AskFreakonomics.

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