The highly religious, on average, get together with extended family more regularly than the non-highly religious, according to the Pew Research Center’s third “U.S. Religious Landscape Study.” The highly religious are more satisfied with family life and just plain happier in general.
That said, the power of religion in our lives has its limits. According to the study, for example, the highly religious are no more likely than the nonreligious to exercise regularly (that’s “exercise,” not “exorcise”). The highly religious are just as likely as their irreligious peers to overeat.
But possibly most attention-grabbing was the revelation that the faithful are not particularly socially conscious. That is to say, when it comes to issues of social consciousness, “people who pray every day and regularly attend religious services appear to be very similar to those who are not as religious.” But is it true? It all depends on whether one buys the researchers’ definition of “social consciousness.”
According to Pew, the highly religious failed to recycle at rates any higher than the nonreligious. “And when making decisions about what goods and services to buy,” Pew says, the highly religious “are no more inclined to consider the manufacturers’ environmental records or whether companies pay employees a fair wage.”
What’s interesting about this isn’t that the religious are indistinguishable from the nonreligious on these questions, but that these are the measures by which one is judged to be socially conscious or not. Because, as Pew readily reports, the highly religious are significantly more likely to volunteer regularly and to donate “money/time/goods to the poor.”
You might be forgiven for thinking that these latter are a better measure of real social consciousness—a willingness to devote one’s own time and treasure to improving the lives of the poor and suffering. But according to Pew that’s just “community involvement” (which sounds as though it might be a measure merely of one’s willingness to play in a bowling league).
The honorific “social consciousness” is reserved, instead, to describe the effort-free behaviors of the morally self-congratulatory, the folks who think well of themselves for buying, say, a Prius or even a Tesla rather than a Camaro.
In any case, maybe there’s a reason the religious don’t outrate the non-religious when it comes to the pieties of environmentalism—they already have something to believe in, thank you very much.
