We might have suspected it all along, but now a new Gallup survey proves it: faith enhances quality of life. The two-year-long survey based on close to 700,000 interviews compared people’s wellbeing with their self-defined religious adherence, and discovered that Jews — and Mormons — are faring better than the rest.
If Mitt Romney a committed Mormon were to base his choice of vice president on the results of a recently released Gallup survey on religion and wellbeing he might well want to consider selecting an observant Jew as his running mate in this November’s election.
The survey by Gallup one of the world’s leading polling organizations contained good news for both America’s Jews and Mormons — and even better news for the most religious members of both groups. In a two-year study process involving hundreds of thousands of interviews Gallup sought to determine among other things how members of different religious communities would score on a series of indexes dealing with issues of physical mental and emotional health and wellbeing.
Based on at least 1000 interviews each day with adults across the United States the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measures the overall wellbeing of the American populace based on six subindexes:
The survey based on an analysis of the data emerging from 676000 interviews conducted in 2010 and 2011 found that Jews and Mormons have the highest wellbeing of all faith groups and those with no religious identity have the lowest overall wellbeing outcomes. The Gallup survey’s three religion categories were: “very religious ” referring to those for whom religion is an important part of daily life and who attend religious services at least weekly or almost every week; “nonreligious ” describing those for whom religion plays no role in daily life and who almost never attend services; and “moderately religious ” those who fall somewhere in between the first two groupings.
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