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Saturday, July 25, 2026
Harvard's Global Flourishing Study
Harvard just released the latest results from its Global Flourishing Study, a survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries measuring happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial stability. When researchers sorted the U.S. data by religious affiliation, Latter-day Saints landed near the top on nearly every measure that matters.
The findings line up closely with decades of independent research from Princeton, Notre Dame, Pew, and elsewhere.
Harvard finding: Latter-day Saints reported the highest rates of feeling loved by their parents.
Earlier research backs this up. Princeton researcher Kenda Creasy Dean, who is not a Latter-day Saint, found Latter-day Saint teens report stronger relationships with their parents than peers in any other tradition. Roughly 80% of Latter-day Saint parents pray or read scripture with their children, exceeding any other Christian group. Latter-day Saint teens are nearly twice as likely as peers to practice their faith at home, outside of religious services.
Harvard finding: Latter-day Saints were among the highest for being "highly happy."
Pew data tells the same story. Latter-day Saint women have the highest rate of being "very happy" of any religious group surveyed. Latter-day Saint women and mothers also rated their family lives as excellent at the highest rate of any group. Richard Reeves, drawing on Sutherland Institute data, found the share of men who say they understand their purpose in life is ten percentage points higher in Utah than in the country as a whole, a gap he attributed to the state's unusually high rates of religiosity and marriage.
Harvard finding: Latter-day Saints were among the highest for finding strength and comfort from their faith.
The most striking corroboration comes from Notre Dame's Souls in Transition. Most religious groups see a meaningful drop-off in feeling close to God as teens enter young adulthood. Latter-day Saints were the only group to report an increase. The most recent Pew Research Religious Landscape Study found Latter-day Saints are the Americans most likely to report regularly feeling a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being. They also engaged in prayer, scripture study, worship attendance, and Sabbath observance at the highest rate of any group studied, and held those habits steady while every other tradition declined.
Harvard finding: Latter-day Saints had one of the lowest rates of depression.
A large youth study aligns with this finding. A large randomly-sampled study of Latter-day Saint youth found temple attendance linked to less depression at ages 12, 14, 16, and 18, and lower anxiety at 18. Research by Justin Dyer found Latter-day Saint youth had suicide attempt rates less than half that of most other groups studied. Even LGBQ Latter-day Saint youth showed lower rates of depression than LGBQ peers from every other religious group in Dyer's data.
Harvard finding: Latter-day Saints had the highest rate of weekly religious service attendance.
Other surveys confirm the pattern. Weekly Latter-day Saint attendance sits above two-thirds, the highest of any major U.S. Christian group. Roughly three-fourths report praying daily. Latter-day Saints rank first among major Christian groups in Bible knowledge. One Pew survey, for example, found Latter-day Saints were the most likely of any Christian group to correctly identify Jesus as the one who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
The family picture is consistent across studies.
Latter-day Saints have the highest fertility rate among major U.S. Christian traditions, the highest share of children living with their married mother and father, and the lowest divorce rates of any major U.S. Christian group. Among those who attend worship services regularly, Latter-day Saints also have the highest retention rate of any major Christian denomination.
Why the pattern holds
These outcomes are what a coherent system produces. James Clear's line in Atomic Habits is that people do not rise to the level of their goals, they fall to the level of their systems. The Latter-day Saint life is built like a system designed to help people love God and love their neighbor. Worship, prayer, scripture, service, and family routines repeat on predictable rhythms and reinforce each other. Boys and girls grow up surrounded by adult mentors who model what they teach. The home does the heavy lifting, not the chapel. Covenants tie all of it to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that gets renewed weekly and lived daily. The result is what shows up in Harvard's numbers: when belief, behavior, and belonging are this tightly integrated, outcomes compound.
What it adds up to
Princeton's Kenda Dean wrote that it is difficult to read the data on Latter-day Saint teenagers without feeling a hint of awe. The latest Harvard data extends that picture into adulthood. Across happiness, family, faith, mental health, and the relationships that anchor a life, the Latter-day Saint community keeps showing up at or near the top.
Individual experiences vary, as they do in any community. But broadly, those who follow the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to be happier, in strong loving families centered on Jesus Christ.
What Harvard exposed is what researchers at Princeton, Notre Dame, and Pew have been finding for years. The Latter-day Saint community keeps producing outcomes the rest of the country is still trying to figure out.
Friday, July 24, 2026
explains the Universe logically
One perspective...
The great thing about the LDS church,
it’s the only church that explains the Universe logically,
astronomers are just now catching up to the LDS vast knowledge of Space that was announced back in 1830.
The UNIVERSE has no End !
Why ? because it never had a beginning
And neither Did we!
Progression is eternally
It does not have a beginning nor an end!
Jesus is the God of our World
Elohim our only earthly Father is in charge of all space in the Universe
Elohim has endless inhabited worlds with the same thing going on as here,
This plan of building an earth and putting people on it and giving them free agency to choose Exaltation or A Celestial , Terrestrial or Telestial kingdom has been going on for infinity,
And it will continue forever!
God has allowed us to progress, close to his level, that we also can continue to produce children with our spouse forever,
our family’s can be huge and as big as 100 billion offspring, just like our eternal heavenly Patents produced on this little earth!
The enormous children of our Heavenly parents is far more vast than just the 100 billion of this earth.
Multiply that by infinity, that’s how many kids they have!
We are the only Church on this planet that believes this, in fact we know it.
We know it because we receive and recognize Revelation, from Our Father his Son and the Holy Ghost,
our leaders Prophets and Apostles also know this because of Revelation,
Join us in recognizing and receiving Revelation so you to can bask in the glory of true Joy, Joy of the knowledge of your destiny, and your Families Destiny,
There’s more to it than just this brief time on this world ,
We’ve Got An Exciting adventure ahead of us!
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Apart from ignoring Eastern Orthodox interpretations, this is a good application of the FAITH model. _____ Matthew Watkins @ATrueMillennial ...
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Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman If you cannot be corrected without being offended, then you’ll never truly grow in life.
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This post from Nov 2023 generated a wide-ranging discussion that represents many alternative interpretations you can see at the link. https:...
