Research has found that Christians have "higher levels of life satisfaction"

Ok, I have to be nasty about this one. I had a girlfriend many years ago who was a nurse who worked with the severly severly retarded and she told me that they were the happiest people on earth.

So if one were to extrapolite from that, and I know I'm being really evil here, could it mean that people of faith are happy because they are just too dumb not to be?

I also am not surprised by the results of such a study. On the other hand, I don't think that Christianity needs to look to be "proven" by such studies. That may not be the intention of this article, but so often statistics and polls are used to support the validity of all sorts of things. Suppose that the studies somehow were showing that Christians were not better adjusted or happier than those who are not Christians? Would that prove Christianity false?

In the USA, those who identify themselves as "born-again" Christians are apparently 42% of the population (according to Barna Research Group studies). Yet the incidence of divorce among "born-agains" is just as high as those who are not.

Ron Sider writes, referring to "evangelicals",

"Only 9 percent of evangelicals tithe. Of 12,000 teenagers who took the pledge to wait for marriage, 80% had sex outside marriage in the next 7 years. Twenty-six percent of traditional evangelicals do not think premarital sex is wrong. White evangelicals are more likely than Catholics and mainline Protestants to object to having black neighbors."

John Piper says about the above, "In other words, the evangelical church as a whole in America is apparently not very unlike the world. It goes to church on Sunday and has a veneer of religion, but its religion is basically an add-on to the same way of life the world lives, not a radically transforming power."

Yet Mr. Piper also goes on to point out that such surveys and studies are flawed in that they define "born-again" according to certain beliefs that people profess, rather than by looking at the "fruit" in the lives of those who call them selves Christian. It seems obvious that while many in the USA profess to be "born again" or Christians" or "evangelical", their lives do not line up with what the Bible would say a Christian looks like. Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit." Matthew 7:17-17

Mr. Piper argues that the New Testament does not begin with an assumption that just because someone professes to be "born again" that they necessarily are. Piper writes:

"Instead of moving from a profession of faith, to the label “born again,” to the worldliness of these so-called born again people, to the conclusion that the new birth does not radically change people, the New Testament moves the other direction. It moves from the absolute certainty that the new birth radically changes people, to the observation that many professing Christians are indeed (as the Barna Group says) not radically changed, to the conclusion that they are not born again. The New Testament, unlike the Barna Group, does not defile the new birth with the worldliness of unregenerate, professing American Christians."

Christianity isn't a religion of polls and surveys, vying along with other options to convince us we ought to follow it. Christianity is God's revelation of Himself through Jesus Christ, and it calls sinners who know that there is a God (because it is self-evident) to repent and follow Him, for the kingdom of God has arrived.

Well, I certainly wasn't using it to validate Christianity, I was doing the opposite. I was explaining the results of the poll.

that people of faith are happy because they are just too dumb not to be?

My atheist husband is way smarter than me ... and way happier ... so perhaps happiness occupies folks at both ends of the IQ spectrum!

Ignosce mihi, Pater ...