PROVO, Utah — If you believe in God and don’t know the term “human flourishing” yet, you are missing out on statistics that would reinforce your faith, major researchers said this week at a Brigham Young University conference.
Human flourishing studies is a rising new sector in American academic circles that has secular research teams taking a fresh look at why so many scientific studies have found religion and religious observance to be so good for people, speakers said at BYU’s Religious Freedom Annual Review.
The role that religion plays in human flourishing is also a reason believers should rally to defend religious freedom, speakers said. Others noted the similarities between flourishing and covenants.
“(Flourishing) is not a term that we tend to use in Latter-day Saint terminology, but it’s a very important one,” said Brett Scharffs, director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU, which is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“It’s unfamiliar in Christianity more generally,” Harold Koenig, the founding co-director of Duke’s Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, told the Deseret News. “It’s pretty new, and it seems to be picking up steam.”
Science shows how religion improves human flourishing
Koenig credited Harvard’s Tyler VanderWeele with popularizing the term human flourishing beginning in 2017. Koenig himself completed a systematic review of published, quantitative academic studies a few years earlier that showed religious involvement is related to less depression and faster recovery from depression.
Koenig’s slides illustrated studies that showed religious involvement is related to greater wellbeing and happiness, more social support, greater meaning and purpose, more hope and more optimism, living longer and reduced alcohol and drug use and abuse.
“We’ve got a whole wealth of statistics to back up these notions that one’s connection to a living religious community can be a source of strength and perseverance and resilience in life,” said the Rev. Dr. David Latimore, director of the Betsey Stockton Center for Black Church Studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary.
People who regularly attend religious services also are less likely to attempt and complete suicides or die of despair, be diagnosed with cancer or high blood pressure or coronary artery disease and are likely to have better immunity functions.
The list goes on and on.
“Flourishing is beginning to emerge as a way to integrate all of these discrete elements of a life well lived,” said Matthew Lee, a Baylor University professor who is the lead author of the massive new Global Flourishing Study.
Koenig created a diagram that places holiness and living a holy life at the center of human flourishing. He said the field of study is a boon to believers.
The religious values at the center of human flourishing
“It reinforces everything. It reinforces what the Bible and the Book of Mormon and these things are all saying, and it’s good to have some reinforcement in this time and age,” he said.
In fact, some at the conference enjoyed what they considered an irony: Religions have been teaching flourishing concepts forever, and researchers are just catching up.
“We need meaning, we need belonging, we need a moral vision,” BYU law professor Shima Baughman said. “For millennia, religion has been one of those powerful forces offering exactly that.”
Lee agreed.
“The field of flourishing is relatively new,” he said. “Philosophically and theologically, it goes back thousands of years, but in terms of an integration of the humanities with social science research, it’s relatively new.”
That field includes VanderWeele’s Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. Its website says it was founded “for the purpose of integrating knowledge from the empirical social sciences and the humanities on topics central to human flourishing such as purpose, virtue, marriage and family, religion, work, forgiveness, close social relationships and the promotion of human well-being.”
The covenant path and human flourishing
The term “flourishing” isn’t perfect because it doesn’t resonate in every language, culture or faith tradition, Lee said.
Terms that fit better for some are the good life or flavorful life, complete wellbeing or wholeness amidst adversity.
“Covenant path” might resonate most within the Church of Jesus Christ, where the faithful make sacred covenants in temples.
“In Latter-day Saint terminology, we tend to use something more akin to ‘building covenant communities,’” BYU’s Scharffs said.
“I would suggest that these (covenants) create relationships — vertical relationships and horizontal relationships," he said. “The vertical relationships are between us as individuals with God. Also important are the horizontal relationships that are created one with another.”
Baylor’s Lee made a similar point.
“Flourishing is not just about what we are doing but how others are loving us into being and how we are invited to love them,” he said. “So flourishing is fundamentally relational, and that separates it from other contracts that will to the moment. The other point is that this is inherently energizing.”
The covenants Latter-day Saints make are promises rooted in values like obedience, fidelity, love and service, Scharffs said.
“When we create covenant communities gathered around these temples, we are creating communities with enough people to run and provide service in those temples, people who are committed to living lives of fidelity, love and service,” Scharffs said. “These become communities where human flourishing is possible, where we can live in horizontal communities of love and service as well as vertical communities of commitment to God.”
Religion helped overcome the worst age of American divisiveness
Latter-day Saint writer Shaylyn Romney Garrett is the co-author of a book that looked back at the last time America was as divided as it is today, the Gilded Age from the 1870s to late 1890s.
That period was marked by industrialization, unprecedented prosperity but inequality, public gridlock, narcissism and social Darwinism, Garrett said.
America pulled itself back together through a cultural and moral revolution that changed societal values, including a movement in Christianity away from individual salvation to a social gospel that cared for the vulnerable.
Garrett said the data supporting that finding is breathtaking. It was the backbone of the book she co-authored with Robert Putnam, “Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.”
“It’s not just a nice sentiment to think that religion can help us flourish personally or can help certain groups of society find hope in moments of feeling downtrodden,” she said. “It’s also true, in the data, that we can move our entire society in the direction of flourishing if we can reorient our values, and no one is better placed to do this than religious leaders and religious practitioners, as well.”
Religion’s impact on flourishing is reason to defend it
The BYU conference emphasized human flourishing as a reason for defending religious freedom.
Latter-day Saint scripture promises God’s people will flourish in the latter days, said Elder Marcus B. Nash, a General Authority Seventy of the Church of Christ.
“It stands to reason that this prophesied flourishing will go hand in hand with the free exercise of religion,” Elder Nash said.
He said the American covenant is to work together and doggedly, unitedly seek common ground.
“This requires the people be guided and motivated by principle, not political expediency,” Elder Nash said. “It requires that we understand that the practical meaning of unity in the political life of a free society does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together.”
He called religious freedom the last and always best hope for instilling good and worthy principles into the mind and souls of “We, the People.”
“Cultivating principles enables us to learn to differ without demonizing, to disagree without being disagreeable, to work with others with opposing views to forge common ground,” he said.
Two years ago, the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter awarded President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with the inaugural Morehouse College Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize.
‘The highest level of spirituality is sustainable cooperation’
At Tuesday’s conference at BYU, he said religion’s positive role in society is to promote peace and unity.
“The highest level of spirituality is sustainable cooperation,” said the Rev. Dr. Carter, founding dean of the Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse.
“Religion’s positive role helps people experience our world through a lens of value creation, bestowing love on everyone we encounter,” he said. “That includes the will to forgive and love — as Jesus said, ‘even your enemies,’ affirming every person’s humanity as worthy of respect."
Garrett, the Latter-day Saint writer, said she is finding courage to talk openly about social technologies in her faith that actually bring people into relationships. For example, Latter-day Saints are assigned to congregations based on geography, which brings church members from different racial and socio-economic groups into close contact.
“I’m sensing a shift in the world where in the past religious communities have been dismissed a little bit,” she said.
“I think even academics are beginning to recognize that we’ve tried a whole bunch of stuff, and (societal indicators) just keep going down,” she said. “Yet religion knows something and maybe can help us to learn.”