Conservative Women 3 Times Happier Than Liberal Peers for These Reasons
Ben Johnson /
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 and 28% of moderates, according to data that researchers Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey of the Institute for Family Studies drew from the 2024 American Family Survey.
What accounts for these vast differences in life satisfaction? The science pinpoints two factors: marriage and church attendance.
“Conservative women ages 18-40 are married at rates that are 20 percentage points higher 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,” writes Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and Bailey. “Together, these two factors account for about half the ideological gap among young women in a multivariate analysis of life satisfaction that included controls for factors like race, education, and income.”
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. “Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”
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. But Wilcox and Bailey say the Right-Left “ideological divide does not appear to be just a consequence of negative thinking; it also seems to flow from the fact that liberal young women are less likely to be integrated into core American institutions—specifically marriage and religion—that lend meaning, direction, and a sense of solidarity to women’s lives.”
Since loneliness derives from the Left’s estrangement from purpose-giving institutions, “any efforts to bridge this ideological gap in young women’s emotional well-being will seemingly require not only a change in thinking but also a renewal of young liberal women’s connection to America’s core institutions—family and faith,” they conclude.
But the two institutions of marriage and religion work best together, they find.
The 4 Factors That Make for a Good Marriage Include … Church Attendance
If you want to have a happy marriage, don’t make the wedding the only time you go to church, according to separate Institute for Family Studies research 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 titled “For Better: Four Proven Ways to a Strong and Stable Marriage,” which analyzed data from the 2022 State of Our Unions Survey.
The happiest marriages grow between two spouses who are committed, protective, religious, and romantic.
People who regard their marriage as one of the most important parts of their life are more likely to have a “very happy” marriage, both among women (399%) and men (234%). Couples who go to church together are twice as likely to be “very happy” than couples who have regular date nights. Wives are 112% more likely to say they are “very happy” if they go to church with their spouse, and husbands are 212% more likely. By comparison, 56% of wives and 114% of husbands feel happy thanks to date nights.
That results in a partisan gap between red states and blue states. “Republicans continue to enjoy significantly happier marriages and somewhat more stable families with children than Democrats,” stated Institute for Family Studies researchers Wilcox, Wendy Wang, and Sam Herrin, summarizing their research brief released last October. “One bottom line is that a majority of young Republicans are married, whereas only a minority of young Democrats are married.”
Republicans were also more likely to say they were “very happy” with their marriages than Democrats (65% to 54%). The gap is more pronounced among those without a college education.
Their conclusions dovetail with a host of other surveys tying lifetime satisfaction, personal thriving, and deep-seated happiness to marriage, children, and faith.
Young married adults were more likely to be “thriving” than unmarried adults, according to a Gallup poll released last March. “From 2009 to 2023, married adults aged 25 to 50 were more likely to be thriving—by double-digit margins—than adults who have never married. The 16-percentage-point gap between married adults (61%) and those who have never married (45%) in 2023 is within the range of 10 to 24 points recorded since 2009,” found Gallup. Marriage’s emotional bonus held true “for men and women across all major racial/ethnic groups” and “is not explained by other demographic characteristics—such as age, race/ethnicity or education.”
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% and 50% less likely to get divorced, compared to Americans who are unchurched,” wrote Wilcox and Wang last February.
- Christians who consistently read the Bible scored higher on the Human Flourishing Index than non-practicing Christians or Nones [those who have no religious affiliation and don’t attend church], especially on finding a “meaning and purpose” to their lives, an American Bible Society study reported in June 2023.
- The researchers who compiled the “Handbook of Religion and Health” reviewed “326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of ‘religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction,’ finding that 79% of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1% reported that they were less happy (the rest found no or mixed findings),” reported Stephen Cranney of Baylor University and The Catholic University of America.
- Numerous studies also bear out biblical commandments on sex and marriage, showing that couples who wait until marriage to have sex never have sex with anyone other than their spouse, and those who attend church together report the highest level of sexual satisfaction.
This article originally appeared in The Washington Stand