Perhaps this sounds familiar: A church group spent a week in a developing country, building houses for people most Americans would consider desperately poor. Although proud of their work, some volunteers also voiced that, despite their many material needs, their hosts seemed to enjoy a deeper sense of happiness than many Americans living in affluent cities and comfortable suburbs. They were generous, with deep commitments to their faith, families, and communities.
What’s going on? Are the perceptions of greater happiness or generosity merely a tourist’s fantasy, or are these reflections of deeper realities? How do we compare to our neighbors, whether down the street or across the globe? And what is “happiness” anyway?
We might answer these questions by looking at gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, economic inequality, or health outcomes like life expectancy. We might rank countries based on responses to a single question about how an individual would rate her life, from ‘best’ to ‘worst possible.’”
These are surely important factors, yet they only scratch the surface of what makes a flourishing life. Flourishing encompasses how humans live deeply and well—not only with mental and physical health or financial security but also with a sense of meaning and purpose; the cultivation of one’s character; close relationships and community; and, for many, the pursuit of sacred transcendent goods, such as salvation, peace, or union with God.
To better understand how flourishing is distributed globally and the key pathways of how individuals and communities attain it, we (alongside our funders and colleagues) launched the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a groundbreaking five-year longitudinal study of over 200,000 adults across 22 countries, representing well over 40% of the world’s population.
Instead of conducting a one-time poll, the GFS follows the same participants across five years—a more robust way to study people’s lives. In our first wave of research, participants were surveyed about their lives—both now and how they saw themselves when they were 12—including their emotions (such as feelings of happiness, peace, or loneliness); their beliefs (about God, the government, and others); and their behaviors (charitable giving, religious service attendance, showing love to others).
The GFS is unprecedented in both its scope and its rigor, and on April 30, 2025, our team of over 40 researchers published the results in Nature, the world’s leading science journal.
The results of the first GFS wave are rich enough to transcend brief summary, but when considered as a whole, striking patterns emerge. First, we find that countries with higher GDP per capita often have lower “composite flourishing,” which is an average of scores on 12 questions covering six broad domains of flourishing (self-rated happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security).
For instance, even after factoring in self-rated financial security, middle- and low-income countries such as Indonesia, Mexico, Kenya, and Tanzania (GDP per capita in 2023: $1,211) have higher average composite flourishing scores than affluent countries such as the US, Sweden, Germany, and Japan. Tanzanians, in one of the world’s poorest countries, report a greater sense of overall flourishing than do affluent and stable Swedes.
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If we look beyond composite flourishing to specific aspects of a good life, we find economically developed countries have high average scores for self-rated financial well-being, access to education, and life evaluation. Yet poorer countries have higher scores for positive emotions, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and social connection and relationships. In some middle-income countries, such as Indonesia, Mexico, or the Philippines, people even rate themselves as healthier than do Americans, Swedes, or Japanese.
The two countries with the highest and lowest mean scores for composite flourishing—Indonesia and Japan, respectively—are emblematic of this split between “humanistic” and “material” flourishing. It may seem more intuitive that Indonesia, with a GDP per capita of $4,876 and a life expectancy of 74 years, would lag well behind Japan, with a GDP per capita of $33,766 and a life expectancy of 85 years, on many self-reported aspects of flourishing. Yet the GFS tells a more complex story: Of the 22 countries, Indonesia had the highest national average and Japan the lowest for many facets of flourishing, ranging from positive emotions and meaning to character and financial security.
It’s possible that the Japanese, similar to East Asians more generally, might interpret some of these items or scale their responses differently than other populations. Yet Japanese participants also have the lowest scores on yes-no questions, such as whether they have a close or intimate friend.
On the whole, the pattern is striking. Some countries with the greatest wealth and longevity may have achieved these goods at the cost of a fulfilling life. This first wave of GFS data can’t yet establish these divergent causes, but there are clues: Countries such as Indonesia, Mexico, and Israel, with higher degrees of humanistic flourishing and the highest composite flourishing overall, also have higher than average rates of marriage, community participation, friendship, and religious belief and participation. This suggests that, for most people, flourishing is found above all in dense and overlapping networks of
loving relationships.
One of the most striking findings from the first wave of the GFS is the strong association between religious identity and flourishing. Across the 22 countries, there is a 0.81-point gap (on a 10-point scale) in composite flourishing between those who attend religious services at least weekly and those who never attend. Regular attenders are also significantly more likely to report volunteering, showing love and care to others, and having a higher sense of meaning and purpose, among other aspects of a good life.
This is consistent with previous research (mostly, though not exclusively, on Americans) that religious service attendance in particular is a powerful predictor of health, well-being, and subsequent flourishing. None of this evidence definitively proves church attendance causes better health and well-being. Yet the fact that similar associations arise when we compare attendance in childhood with subsequent adult well-being markers is a further clue that the link is causal, and future waves of GFS data may be able to strengthen the case.
Let’s take Indonesia as an example. Indonesia has the highest scores in the GFS for many aspects of flourishing; it is also highly religious, with 98% of the population identifying as either Muslim or Christian and 75% attending religious services at least weekly.
Israel is another unique example in the GFS as both a high-income country ($54,370 per capita GDP) and flourishing in a number of areas, with the third highest average scores for happiness and meaning and the lowest rate of loneliness in the GFS domains. It is also distinctly religious among wealthy GFS countries, with 32% of its population attending services at least weekly, a rate nearly 50% higher than America’s.
Sweden and the United Kingdom, by contrast, where only 4.5% and 15% of the GFS sample are regular service attenders, have the 19th and 20th lowest averages, respectively, for meaning and purpose. And in Japan, just over 3% of the GFS sample attends religious services at least weekly, while only 20% said they even believe in “God, gods, or spirits.” The more secular the country, either in religious adherence or participation, the more its population tends to report a lack of meaning, belonging, and good character.
Humans aren’t merely “religious” in a general sense; they belong to particular religions and particular religious communities. We will publish additional analyses of the GFS data examining how flourishing is distributed across each of the sample’s largest religious families: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. For now, we can highlight points of interest.
The most obvious fact about the religious traditions represented in the GFS is their internal diversity: Turkey and Indonesia are both large, overwhelmingly Muslim countries, but the former has the second-lowest mean score for composite flourishing and the latter, the highest in the GFS. It would be difficult to generalize about “the Muslim world” from such diversity. Christians in the GFS reflect fascinating variety as well. In Tanzania, 73% of Christians (half of whom are Roman Catholic) said they have had “a life-changing religious experience,” whereas in deeply Catholic Poland, only 9% of Christians reported the same. Christianity generally and Roman Catholicism particularly have quite different textures in each of these countries.
Across the 22 GFS countries, young people reported the lowest levels of flourishing on average, while the oldest populations reported the highest levels of flourishing. This is striking: It differs from other studies, particularly those focused on life satisfaction, which have historically found age patterns to be U-shaped—higher at either end of life and lower in the middle. In contrast, the GFS found that flourishing is essentially flat from age 18 to 49 and then rises steadily through the oldest cohorts.
These patterns appear not only for happiness but also for meaning, character, relationships, and even self-rated health, as younger respondents now see themselves as doing as poorly as the middle-aged. While this pattern does not hold for all countries—the U curve still holds for most outcomes in India and Japan, and flourishing decreases with age in Poland and Tanzania—this new age pattern is widespread and concerning. It suggests young people are not doing as well as in previous generations.
It isn’t clear from this cross-sectional data whether this represents a new age-pattern—where we would expect today’s young people to see their flourishing increase over time—or instead a new cohort-pattern—where young people would be at the peak of their own U curve, with further depths of languishing to come.
GFS data about loneliness, religious identity, and community identification have far-reaching implications for the way we live. First, the stark divide between the prosperous but potentially more hollow lives of “developed” nations and the less wealthy but perhaps fuller lives of “developing” nations raises serious questions about whether or how to pursue much-needed public health improvements, political reforms, and economic growth in the latter countries without compromising meaning or fulfilling relationships.
This is a question not only for the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum but equally for Christian organizations that work to alleviate global poverty, disease, and hunger. The challenge is to engage in genuinely holistic development, so that focusing too much on the material conditions of the world’s poor doesn’t undermine vibrant, loving communities.
The lessons this divide suggests for lower- and middle-income countries, however, are not necessarily the same ones it offers wealthier countries. In the US, UK, and Sweden, for instance, meaning and purpose actually increase with education. In the US in particular, this pattern might reflect how decades of deindustrialization have driven less-educated Americans out of the middle class and helped foster an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” These communities arguably need a revival of stable, socially valued work for a source of meaning and dignity as well as income, alongside other pathways to flourishing.
Second, the GFS further strengthens the case that religious participation can be a vital resource for many aspects of flourishing. While religion indisputably matters a great deal for the developing world, the strongest associations with flourishing from religious service attendance in the GFS are found in the most secular countries, where likely only the most faithful of believers attend. These findings should serve as a wake-up call for places such as the US, where weekly religious participation has declined by about a third from 2000 to the present. As two of us wrote previously for CT, falling service attendance represents not only a spiritual crisis but also a public health crisis, with profound effects on loneliness, isolation, depression, suicide, and addiction.
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As Christians who are also researchers, we are heartened by the evidence that church attendance offers most people not only the hope of salvation but also a more “abundant” life (John 10:10)—a life of meaning, friendships, and virtue—now. Nonetheless, we would caution against citing this or other empirical research as evidence of God’s particular favor for one confession or communion over others. Religious service attendance was associated with greater flourishing across the vast majority of GFS countries, although in a few countries, the effects were indeterminate (and we do not have sufficient data to make claims about causality outside of North America).
From the scattered house churches of the apostolic period down to the present, Christians have been a communing people, heeding the biblical warning against “neglecting to meet together” (Heb. 10:25, ESV). Of course, corporate worship can be inconvenient (as anyone trying to get small children out the door on a Sunday can attest) or a source of hurt (as anyone who has attended church long enough can attest). Nonetheless, while some may see “going to church” as a relic of times past, empirical research serves as a reminder of what Scripture says: Gathering as believers is essential and powerful. This is true even—perhaps especially—in the most secular countries, where religious communities increasingly resemble the committed clusters of the early church, whose evident differences from their neighbors made them salt and light in a world that knew nothing of the gospel.
Finally, besides its implications for communal and religious life, the GFS highlights the struggles of young adults compared to their elders and to earlier generations. The GFS can’t yet tell us what is driving this shift, but our findings are certainly consistent with the important work done in recent years by Jean M. Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, and others who have sounded the alarm about the harmful effects of smartphones, social media, and video games on youth. These technologies increasingly crowd out healthy face-to-face friendships and edifying, enlivening activities in the natural world. The GFS findings should also encourage us to seek out the wisdom and instruction of the elders among us, as many of the oldest populations around the world report the highest levels of flourishing in the latter stages of life.
By the time you read this, our team will be analyzing the second wave of data in addition to completing further analyses on the first wave. As we follow these participants, we will be able to make increasingly precise observations about how particular aspects of people’s lives—like experiencing loneliness or gratitude, giving to charity, or feeling politically enfranchised—affect other aspects. We will be able to make more confident assertions about how particular aspects of religious life, such as service attendance, prayer, or forgiveness, impact longer-term flourishing.
We hope these insights contribute to more holistic public-health or policy prescriptions for individuals, communities, and nations. Along the way, we will continue to share updates with Christianity Today, helping unpack the findings and implications for Christian readers around the world.
For now, however, the data confronts us afresh with Jesus’ question: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matt. 16:26) We in the West have many reasons to be grateful for all that our extraordinary prosperity has bought us, but it seems that flourishing, at least, is still not for sale.
A version of this article appeared in print in the May/June 2025 issue under the title, “Measuring the Good Life” on p. 84.
Brendan Case is the associate director for research at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University.
Katelyn N. G. Long is a researcher at the Human Flourishing Program and at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
Byron R. Johnson is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and the codirector of the Global Flourishing Study.
Tyler J. VanderWeele is the John L. Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the codirector of the Global Flourishing Study.
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