Spiritual, Religious, or Both? The Answer May Surprise You

What helps people feel happier and less anxious: belonging to a religion, or having a personal sense of spirituality? Researchers asked nearly 3,000 Jewish adults in Israel this question using data from the Global Flourishing Study. Each person was sorted into one of four groups: spiritual only, religious only, both, or neither.

An internal sense of spirituality, more than religious identity alone, may be what truly moves the needle on happiness.

Then the researchers looked at five things: overall mental health, depression, anxiety, happiness, and life satisfaction. The results were striking. People who said they were both spiritual and religious reported the best well-being across the board. Those who identified as spiritual only tended to feel better than people who were religious only or neither.

People who said they were neither scored the lowest on most measures. This pattern held up even after accounting for differences in age, income, education, marriage, and other background factors. The researchers also looked at subgroups within Israeli Judaism, from ultra-Orthodox to secular, and found a similar trend in most groups, with one interesting twist: among secular Jews, the pattern reversed, and religious-only identification was linked to slightly better well-being than spiritual-only. The findings suggest that an inner sense of spirituality, a personal connection to something transcendent, may matter more for mental health than simply identifying with an institutional religion, at least in this population. But the combination of both appears to be the most powerful of all.