religions Article Exploratory Analysis of the Relationship between Happiness and Religious Participation within China Tianyuan Liu 1, Lin Wu 1,*, Yang Yang 1,* and Yu Jia 2 1 School of Sociology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China;
[email protected] 2 School of Journalism and Communication, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] (L.W.);
[email protected] (Y.Y.) Received: 11 May 2020; Accepted: 27 July 2020; Published: 8 August 2020 Abstract: Although the positive relationship between religion and happiness has aroused heated debate, empirical studies on this are limited in the Chinese cultural context. Furthermore, there is a lack of heterogeneity analysis concerning this influence. This paper aims to address this gap in the existing literature. Using the Chinese General Social Survey data from 2015 for empirical analysis, the results show that people with religious beliefs have an increased probability of feeling very happy. This positive association does not exist in urban and eastern groups, but it still holds up in other remaining sub-samples (i.e., rural group). This study further finds that the effect of religiosity on happiness varies by different religious identification. Muslims are more likely to feel very happy compared with non-Muslims, but people of the Christian faith do not rate themselves higher on the happiness scale than non-Christians. Moreover, the results also reveal that religious involvement is significantly and positively related to happiness. Specifically, vulnerable groups are more likely to perceive themselves to be happier from continuous religious participation, whereas advantaged groups do not.