The Money That Buys Happiness

About the time that this year's Presidential Campaign reaches its peak intensity, many Finance Committees will be launching their churches' Stewardship Campaigns for the purpose of underwriting 2009 budgets. In megachurches at least, the slickness of the latter is likely to match and even exceed the flimflamness of the former. Hopefully, in spite of all the political and theological hype to come, we will also get exposed to some really good ideas both about rebuilding America and about what God wants us to do with money.

With respect to the second kind of green stuff, it will be hard to find anything better than John Wesley's never tiresome sermon on the subject. For Americans at least, Wesley's political judgments are best forgotten, but his three points about the uses of money (gain and save all you can, in order to give all you can) are worthy of everyone's remembering. And it will be a truly great season of fundraising if there is not even a passing reference to the idea that prosperity is a sign of God's special blessing on those who give a bunch. Getting one's name on a piece of church property or on a program in the line item budget should be reward enough. In religion, even if not in politics, access to Power and Favor should not have to be bought.

Contrary to what most of us were taught growing up, though, there may be a sense in which money can buy at least a measure of happiness in this life, even if it cannot ensure salvation in the next. Recently, a group of researchers from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School teamed up on three small studies designed to see if there might be some measureable relationship between spending habits and happiness. In one study, participants rated their general happiness and then gave information on how much of their earnings they spent on themselves and on others each year. Not surprisingly, the higher earners in this study were happier. But: so were those who spent higher percentages of their earnings on others, whether the earnings themselves were large or small. Now we may be getting somewhere.

A second study had to do with the relationship between happiness and how bonus money was spent. No matter what the size of their bonuses, participants in this particular study who gave higher percentages of them to others after receiving them seemed happier than those who kept more of the money for themselves. Finally, and to me more than a little reminiscent of Jesus' parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), the researchers gave another group of participants different quantities of money which had to be spent by the end of the day. At random, half were assigned the task of buying something for themselves with it, and the other half of either buying something for others or donating the money to charity. People in the second group reported feeling happier than did people in the first. Whether they had been given a larger or a smaller amount of money in the first place made no difference in their respective reactions.

Most social science research that depends on participants' unverifiable self-reporting are open to questions and other interpretations. For example, it is always difficult to get a true before-and-after measure of the differences that specific actions do and do not make to people's feelings and affective states. And with respect to these three studies in particular, it is not clear to me whether the researchers really have "happiness" right or not. They seem to have in mind something like a pleasureable experience related to very specific actions in the here and now, whereas true happiness, whether defined by Aristotle or Jesus, has more to do with a general sense of well-being across large chunks of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I like these little studies and I am glad I came across them.

They have served to remind me of two important things about Christian living. The first is that what we are doing with our money can be a very powerful symbol of what we are and are not doing with our lives. As Wesley put it, God wants all and not just a portion of us, and because that is so, we have to find ways of making all of our money matters matter to the expression of our love for God. The second thing is that it is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves, in the embrace of a self-emptying God. And in losing ourselves for the sake of others, we find true happiness. Scientific method may not get us all the way to this understanding of things. But life in the Spirit can, and does.