R20 Working Group 1 explores the integral relationship between religion and human flourishing.

Despite the expectations of many that religion would lose its motivating force in the 21st century, religious belief continues to shape the world’s socio-cultural and geopolitical landscape. This is perhaps inevitable, given that religious believers constitute the single largest demographic within the human family, whose share of the global population is estimated to exceed 80%.

Not only the annals of history, but also contemporary political events, illustrate the enduring power of religion to inspire both positive and negative behavior in virtually every corner of the globe.

The G20 Religion Forum (R20) mobilizes religious authorities to help ensure that religion in the 21st century functions as a genuine and dynamic source of solutions, rather than problems, and thereby contributes to the holistic flourishing of individuals, societies, and civilizations alike.

“In the view of Nahdlatul Ulama, the most appropriate and effective means to promote the wellbeing of Muslims worldwide is to foster the wellbeing of all humanity, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and to acknowledge the brotherhood of all human beings.”

~ Nahdlatul Ulama Centennial Proclamation

Of particular interest and relevance to R20 WG1 are the findings of the Harvard-Baylor Global Flourishing Study (GFS). A landmark, multi-year, longitudinal research collaboration between Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, GFS was funded by a consortium including the John Templeton Foundation.

Launched officially in 2021 with an initial $43.4 million investment, its first major findings were released in April 2025. The study surveys over 200,000 individuals across 22 culturally and geographically diverse countries, collecting annual panel data over five years to comprehensively measure human flourishing across six domains: health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security.

GFS aims to uncover the social, psychological, political, spiritual, and economic determinants of a life well-lived, expanding global understanding of flourishing beyond Western perspectives and informing policies to enhance individual and societal well-being.

The recently published findings of the Harvard-Baylor Human Flourishing Study highlight the significant role of religion in promoting human flourishing across the globe. The study found that attending religious services correlates strongly with higher levels of flourishing, which includes health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security.

Remarkably, Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, ranked highest in human flourishing despite not being economically wealthy. This is attributed to Indonesia’s strong social relationships, community engagement, and the unique cultural-religious synthesis embodied in its official philosophy of Pancasila, which emphasizes belief in God the Great “One” and a pluralistic civil religion.

Indonesia’s form of Islam, known as Islam Nusantara, shaped by its diverse cultural and religious history, supports robust civil society and communal bonds, offering a powerful example of how religion positively influences well-being beyond mere economic indicators.

The Happiest Country in the World Isn’t What You Think

April 30, 2025

By Byron Johnson, Tyler J. VanderWeele and Brendan Case

According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, which was released last month, the happiest country in the world is Finland, trailed closely by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.

This news came as no surprise. The report, released annually since 2012 by a consortium of groups including Gallup, often features these four Nordic nations — all of them stable democracies with prosperous and healthy citizens — at or near the top of its list. At the bottom (out of 147 countries assessed) was Afghanistan, then Sierra Leone, Lebanon and Malawi.

These rankings reinforce a key supposition of our globalized political and economic order: Poor countries are unhappy because they are poor, and wealth is a critical precondition for individual and societal flourishing. The International Monetary Fund encourages trade and economic growth on the theory that happiness increases with material prosperity. Political thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama and Steven Pinker talk about wanting to help poor and turbulent nations “get to Denmark.”

But there are reasons for suspecting that the World Happiness Report rankings — and the model of international development which they are often taken to justify — do not capture the fullness of well-being. Respondents are asked a single question: to imagine an 11-rung ladder whose top and bottom are the best and worst possible lives, and to place their life on one of the rungs. This metric, known as life evaluation, can be a useful piece of information, but happiness is almost certainly a more complex phenomenon. You might be sick but still have a strong sense that life is meaningful, or be financially insecure but still have close relationships with family members and friends.

There is also evidence that when people offer their life evaluation score, the framing of the question can prompt them to fixate on wealth and status over other aspects of well-being. That risks stacking the deck: If life evaluation is, in effect, another way of measuring economic prosperity, it is neither surprising nor illuminating that the rankings of the World Happiness Report loosely correlate with gross domestic product.

The three of us conceive of happiness — or flourishing — more broadly: as a state of affairs in which all aspects of your life are relatively good, including the social environments in which you live. If we were to examine not just life evaluation but also relationships with family members and friends, community and political participation, health, prevailing emotions, a sense of life’s purpose, feelings of financial security and so on, we could better understand what it means to live a good life and how governments and international institutions can help make people happier.

On Wednesday we are publishing a substantial body of research — dozens of academic papers, including a high-level overview of the results in the journal Nature Mental Health — based on the first year of data from our Global Flourishing Study, a five-year project that poses more than 100 questions to more than 200,000 people across 22 countries on six continents. Combining answers to questions regarding several domains of well-being — health, happiness, meaning, character, social relationships and material prosperity — we calculated a composite flourishing score for each country.

Our findings present a different picture of global well-being. As expected, Sweden, for example, had high scores for life evaluation, behind only Israel, another typical standout in the World Happiness Report. When we widened the aperture, however, the picture changed: Sweden had only the 13th-highest composite flourishing score, essentially tied with the United States, and considerably lower than Indonesia, the Philippines and even Nigeria, whose 2023 gross domestic product per capita was just under 2 percent of America’s.

Across the whole sample of 22 countries, the overall national composite flourishing actually decreased slightly as G.D.P. per capita rose. The only high-income countries that ranked in the top half of composite flourishing were Israel and Poland. Most of the developed countries in the study reported less meaning, fewer and less satisfying relationships and communities, and fewer positive emotions than did their poorer counterparts. Most of the countries that reported high overall composite flourishing may not have been rich in economic terms, but they tended to be rich in friendships, marriages and community involvement — especially involvement in religious communities.

Japan, where only 3 percent of the participants reported attending religious services at least weekly, had the lowest reported composite flourishing as well as the lowest scores in many individual facets of flourishing, such as a sense of life’s meaning and social relationships. Indonesia, by contrast, where 75 percent of the participants reported attending religious services at least weekly, had the highest scores both for composite flourishing and for many individual facets of flourishing.

Indonesia is often contrasted unfavorably with Japan in discussions of international development, cited as an example of the so-called middle-income trap, in which economic growth stalls before reaching high-income levels. This is true, so far as it goes, but our study suggests that the focus on economic growth tells only part of the story.

To be clear: Being poor is not desirable, and we should strive to improve material conditions. But our research, though in its early stages, should prompt people to wonder whether prioritizing economic growth and material prosperity above all else has imposed costs on developed nations — and whether doing so is likely to impose these costs on the developing economies that follow the path of Europe and its colonial offshoots.

We need to figure out how to foster economic development without compromising meaning, purpose and relationships [emphasis added].  Israel, a rare wealthy country with a high composite flourishing score (second in our study), is highly religious by developed-world standards, with a third of its citizens saying they attend religious services at least weekly. Might something in the experience of Israel provide a model for how Indonesia could pursue improvements in economic growth and political stability without eroding the close-knit communities from which life there derives so much of its value?

Might it even be possible for Sweden to “get to Indonesia” — in terms of restoring relationships and communities, a sense of meaning in life and a connection to the sacred — without sacrificing its hard-won health, wealth and stability?

There are no simple answers to these questions. But if nothing else, our work offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which much of the developed world may have gone astray and to explore the paths that might lead us back to happier lives.

Byron Johnson is a professor of social science at Baylor University. Tyler J. VanderWeele is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard and the director of its human-flourishing program, where Brendan Case is the associate director for research.

Largest Longitudinal Study of Human Flourishing Ever Shows Religion’s Importance

By Paul Marshall on May 1, 2025

On April 30, Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, along with Gallup and the Center for Open Science, released the first findings of their ongoing worldwide survey of human flourishing. The press usually ignores such studies, but the scale and results of this survey have drawn [widespread] attention, including from the New York Times and Atlantic.

The survey’s delineation of “flourishing” includes health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security, and included interviews with over 200,000 people in 22 countries, chosen for geographic, cultural, and religious diversity. It will re-interview each year for the next five years and may be the widest such survey ever attempted.

Among its findings are that, while countries vary, worldwide men and women report similar results and younger people are now sadly doing worse than their elders.

One finding of particular interest to Providence readers is that those who attend religious services tend to flourish more. Unlike other trends the survey reports, this result does not vary much from country to country, though the effect is strongest in the most secular, usually western, countries. Despite frequent press reports about the negative effects of religion on human life, this is consistent with most serious social science. Of course, there are exceptions, as with ISIS or the Taliban, but this survey reinforces the conclusion that serious religion generally correlates with human wellbeing.

Related to this is the striking result that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) countries do not score highest in human flourishing, in fact often the opposite. Here is one key table:

Table 5. Ordered means of composite flourishing index (without and with financial security), with standard deviations and Gini coefficients

Putting aside financial factors, the top five ranking countries are Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Israel, and Nigeria. With financial factors included the top five are Indonesia, Israel, Philippines, Mexico, and Poland. WEIRD countries score higher on financial security and life evaluation but poorer nations more than make up for this on meaning and purpose, and relationships. Strikingly, in general, meaning in life and composite flourishing is negatively correlated with GDP per capita. Money is not making people flourish more.

On a personal note, when Byron Johnson, the Baylor Co-Director of the study, informally asked people to guess which country would score highest, I think I was the only one who said Indonesia. Remarkably, it turned out that it was the highest of the 22 countries in: Happiness, Life Satisfaction, Freedom, Meaning, Purpose, Relational Contentment, Satisfying Relationships, Promoting Good, Hope, Gratitude, Charitable Giving, Self-Rated Physical Health, Political Voice, and Trust.

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, should draw attention as a case study of why high economic indicators do not necessarily correlate with human flourishing. It still has strong communal village and tribal relations, even among those who have moved to the big cities. Its state doctrine of pancasila emphasizes monotheism, not Islam, and seeks to include all Indonesians in a kind of ‘civil religion.’ The country’s hegemonic form of Islam, “Islam Nusantara,” the “Islam of the Islands,” emphasizes that it is shaped by islands, coasts, ports, trade, and travel over millennia and has learned from Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and many other influences. This has produced a robust civil society.

It is home to the world’s largest Muslim organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, which have perhaps 90 million and 40 million followers respectively. Both reject an Islamic state. Muhammadiyah operates over 170 universities and colleges, more than 5,000 primary and secondary schools, and around 122 hospitals. Its women’s organization ‘Aisyiyah runs 20,000 kindergartens, 568 cooperatives, 87 general hospitals, 105 maternity hospitals, 16 pediatric hospitals. NU has its base in local culture and villages and towns and has 44 universities, 6,830 Islamic boarding schools, extensive work in hospitals and clinics, and vast charitable works.

Some results of this active civil society are:

• According to the Pew Research Center, Indonesian Muslims have tended to be more pious than those in the Middle East.
• Another Pew survey finds that both Muslims and Christians are more likely to view religious diversity as beneficial rather than harmful.  Only 6% say that having a mix of different religions makes Indonesia a worse place to live.
• The Charities Aid Foundation rankings of the top 10 most generous countries, measuring how much people give to charitable causes, ranks Indonesia #1 in the world, a position that it has held for the last 7 years straight. And now it ranks #1 in these initial flourishing study results.

What might this mean for policy with respect to poorer countries ranked high in the survey? In general, that questions of human flourishing are too broad to be left to economists, although the best economists already know and support this.

The benefits of economic growth must be offset by what might be lost in terms of tradition, community relations, gratitude, giving, trust, and religion. To quote the late Anglican theologian and economic historian, R. H. Tawney, “the existing economic order, and too many of the projects advanced for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom.”

We do not need to go full-bore on Trumpian tariffs, but we must consider seriously the effects of free trade on the health of industrial heartland communities, one reason that many trade unions support such tariffs.

We do not need to adhere to Catholic integralism, but we must consider seriously the great need for human beings to be anchored in communities of traditional and transcendent meaning.

Behind each and all these lies the vital importance of recognizing and respecting the continual vital role of religion in human lives across the globe. Any policy that neglects this will be naive and therefore self-destructive.

Paul Marshall is the Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Religious Freedom Institute, and a contributing editor of Providence. His latest book is Called to be Friends: Called to Serve.

“What must be aimed at is complete humanism. And what is that if not the fully-rounded development of the whole man and of all men? A humanism closed in on itself, and not open to the values of the spirit and to God who is their source, could achieve apparent success. True, man can organize the world apart from God, but ‘without God, man can organize it in the end only to man’s detriment.’ An isolated humanism is an inhuman humanism.

“There is no true humanism but that which is open to the Absolute and is conscious of a vocation which gives human life its true meaning. Far from being the ultimate measure of all things, man can only realize himself by reaching beyond himself. As Pascal has said so well, ‘Man infinitely surpasses man.’”

~ Saint Pope Paul VI
Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples, 1967)

George Chernilevsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons