Young conservative women are three times as likely to report having a happy life than liberal women — and the key factors driving the happiness gap are faith and family, a new study has found. Attending church together is twice as important to marital happiness than regular date nights, the same researchers conclude.
In all, 37% of conservative women say they are “completely satisfied” with their life, compared to 12% of liberal women, according to data researchers Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey of the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) drew from the 2024 American Family Survey.
“Conservative women ages 18-40 are married at rates that are 20 percentage points than liberal women in the same age group. And whereas over half of conservative women in this age group attend church weekly, only 12% of their liberal peers do,” write Wilcox, a professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and Bailey.
Among young women between the ages of 18 and 40, only conservatives boast of an outright majority who are married (51%) and attend church weekly (55%). Liberals are most likely to be single (40%) or cohabiting (17%) and to attend church seldom or never (65%).
Conversely, 29% of liberal women report feeling lonely a few times a week or more, compared to only 11% of conservative women and 19% of moderates. The survey finds “a large part of this loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance,” reports the study.
Young white liberals are the most likely demographic to have been diagnosed with a mental illness, according to a study that found 46% of white liberals between the ages of 18 and 29 had been diagnosed with a mental disorder, compared to 21% of conservatives the same age.
Some analysts have tied higher rates of liberal depression to progressives’ tendency to engage in catastrophic thinking, a cognitive distortion that predicts the chance of worst-case scenarios as improbably high
If you want to have a happy marriage, don’t make the wedding the only time you go to church, according to a separate IFS study on the four factors that contribute to a happy marriage. Regular church attendance does twice as much to make a happy home than going on regular date nights, finds the study released earlier this month.
The happiest marriages grow between two spouses who are committed, protective, religious, and romantic.
“Republicans continue to enjoy significantly happier marriages and somewhat more stable families with children than Democrats,” stated IFS researchers Wilcox, Wendy Wang, and Sam Herrin, summarizing their research brief released last October. Republicans were also more likely to say they were “very happy” with their marriages than Democrats (65% to 54%).
Their conclusions dovetail with a host of other surveys tying lifetime satisfaction, personal thriving, and deep-seated happiness to marriage, children, and faith.
Gallup researchers added that “ideologically conservative parents report higher-quality and more harmonious relationships with their children compared with liberal or moderate parents.”
Additional studies have found:
Americans who believe in God and value their marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than their secular and single counterparts, according to a March 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC poll.
Americans who regularly attended religious services were 44% more likely to consider themselves “very happy” than those who attended infrequently or never, found the Pew Research Center in 2019.
“Regular churchgoers are between about 30 percent and 50 percent less likely to get divorced, compared to Americans who are unchurched,” wrote Wilcox and Wendy Wang last February.
Christians who consistently read the Bible scored higher on the Human Flourishing Index than non-practicing Christians or Nones, especially on finding a “meaning and purpose” to their lives, a American Bible Society study reported in June 2023.