The Happiness Quotient

FIRST HE discovered that conservative religious people give more, in Who Really Cares? Now Arthur C. Brooks is writing about happiness, according to Maggie Gallagher, and the happiest people are—wait for it—religious conservatives.

Really, this should surprise nobody. We know that the worst thing in the world is to have nothing to do and nothing to contribute. Naturally, conservatives are happier than liberals.

For Brooks, one of the great surprises was the enormous "happiness gap" between political liberals and political conservatives that has persisted over the last 35 years.
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Of course, conservatives are more likely to be religious and to be married, both important contributors to happiness. Religious liberals, for example, are happier than secular liberals, but neither group is nearly as happy as people who say that they are both religious and conservative. Fifty percent of religious conservatives are very happy and just 5 percent are not too happy.

Freedom, according to Brooks, makes people happier. But people are also happier when they live under “moral constraint.”

What makes people happy is freedom and community. That seems a paradox. How can you be free and yet bound into a community that may shame you and judge you?

That’s how liberals think. We conservatives know better. You make yourself happy when you are free to bind yourself in loving service to others. As Minette Marrin wrote back in 2001: compassion and community without compulsion.

Somehow that notion has a familiar ring.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.