Married adults with religion are happier
The Modern "Happiness Crash": Why Faith & Marriage Are the Missing Solution." Are people happier today with all of our modern conveniences? Recent studies show the exact opposite. We are currently witnessing a dramatic "happiness crash," particularly among young adults. In this episode of the Bible News Prophecy Program, host Steve Dupuie and Dr. Bob Thiel, Ph.D., explore the root causes of modern loneliness, the impact of digital distraction, and what scientific research and the Bible reveal about achieving true, lasting joy. The Bible and secular research point to those who are married and involved in religion are happier than their secular and married counterparts.
In This Video, You’ll Discover:
The "Happiness Crash": Why reports of unhappiness have more than doubled among adults aged 20–35 since the year 2000.
The Cost of Digital Isolation: How smartphones, social media, and virtual interactions have crowded out face-to-face relationships and increased health risks.
The Two Shields Against Loneliness: Why statistical data shows that strong marriages and regular religious practice offer the highest levels of personal satisfaction and emotional well-being.
The Myth of Career & Wealth: What the world’s longest scientific study on happiness reveals about the limits of money, self-focused careers, and modern cultural trends.
What the Bible Says About Joy: Key biblical principles from Genesis, Proverbs, and Psalms on marriage, community, wisdom, and keeping God’s ways for a truly abundant life.
Married Adults With Religion Are Happier: Escaping the Digital Happiness Crash with Dr. Bob Thiel
Dr. Bob Thiel joins announcer Steve Dupuis to examine a new happiness crash gripping young adults and explains, through secular research and scripture, why married and religious Americans are escaping it.
A New Happiness Crash Emerges
Steve Dupuis opens the Bible News Prophecy program by asking Dr. Bob Thiel whether people are actually happier today given modern conveniences. Thiel answers that despite technology, many are not, pointing to an Institute for Family Studies article titled The Happiness Crash: As Young Adult Happiness Drops, Two Groups Are Thriving. He cites Brigham Young University psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad's findings that social isolation raises the risk of early death by twenty-nine percent, loneliness by twenty-six percent, and living alone by thirty-two percent. When Dupuis asks how she arrived at those figures, Thiel explains that researchers describe young adults who grew up amid smartphones, social media, gaming, pornography, and AI chatbots as unwitting subjects in a vast social experiment, one that has crowded out the face-to-face conversation, socializing, and community earlier generations took for granted, despite science being clear about isolation's devastating toll.
Screens Replace Real Relationships
Thiel continues detailing the Institute for Family Studies findings, noting that socializing among young men and women has fallen more than fifty percent, from twelve hours to five hours per week, while they now spend an average of three hours a day on social media instead. He stresses that posting selfies and commenting on strangers' posts does not satisfy the deep human need for real relationships, and researchers have documented that it genuinely fails to substitute for in-person connection. The fruits of this shift, Thiel says, include rising anxiety, depression, and antisocial behavior, especially among young people, producing what one scholar calls a happiness crash hitting young adults hardest of all. He notes that reports of unhappiness among men and women aged twenty to thirty-five have more than doubled since the year two thousand. Dupuis asks how some young adults manage to escape this crash, setting up Thiel's answer about the two protective communities researchers identified.
Marriage And Faith Prove Protective
Thiel explains that the Institute for Family Studies report identifies two forms of community that shield people from the isolating currents of modern life: strong marriages and regular religious practice. He reads the report's description of both institutions as signal sources of social solidarity that safeguard physical and emotional well-being by connecting people to real relationships, calling faith and family especially valuable now that society has grown more technologically distracted. Citing the General Social Survey, Thiel reports that fifty percent of married, religious Americans aged twenty to thirty-five call themselves very happy, compared to just sixteen percent of unmarried, secular peers, while thirty-seven percent of married secular young adults report the same, showing marriage alone matters greatly even though faith and family together prove most powerful. Thiel adds that other studies link aspects of feminism and liberal parenting to decreased happiness, and that staying married, rather than divorcing, also tends to increase happiness overall.
Scripture's Case For Marriage
Asked what the Bible says about marriage and happiness, Thiel turns to Genesis 2:18, where God says it is not good for a man to be alone and promises to make him a helper comparable to him, meaning a wife. He reads Proverbs 18:22, which says he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord, and Ecclesiastes 9:9, which instructs readers to live joyfully with the wife they love all the days of their fleeting life. Thiel concludes that marriage is clearly something God advocates for the happiness of many people, though he notes the New Testament teaches that for some individuals it is better not to marry. Dupuis then asks what other studies have found about happiness more broadly, moving the discussion from scripture back to secular research on the longest-running study of human well-being.
Careers, Relationships, And Meg Whitman
Thiel turns to The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, which argues that humans are often bad at knowing what is good for them and that short-term indulgences lead to long-term misery. He relays the study's finding that more money brings little additional happiness past a certain point, and that modern culture wrongly expects careers to supply all the fulfillment that friends and family once provided while treating essential work like caregiving or coal mining as a burden to avoid. Making money and landing a dream job are not predictors of happiness, Thiel says, quoting the authors, but relationships are. He then describes a women's conference where Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay and Hewlett-Packard, silenced the room by declaring that the most important career decision anyone makes is who they marry, a statement Thiel affirms while adding that following God and His priorities matters even more than that choice.
True Happiness Found In God
Thiel closes by tracing what the Bible says about genuine happiness, quoting Jesus in Matthew 6 to seek first the kingdom of God, John 10:10's promise of abundant life, and 3 John 2's wish that the soul prosper. Asked who the Bible says is truly happy, Thiel reads Psalm 146:5 and Psalm 144:15, declaring happy those whose help and hope rest in the Lord, then Proverbs 3:13, which ties happiness to finding wisdom. Asked how to gain that wisdom, Thiel answers that obeying God's law, which Paul calls holy, just, and good in Romans 7:12, would eliminate war, divorce, crime, and fear. He reads Psalm 37 on trusting and delighting in the Lord, Proverbs 3 on trusting God rather than one's own understanding, and Psalm 34 on seeking peace and departing from evil, concluding that God's ways lead to true happiness through religion and, for many, through marriage. Dupuis thanks Thiel and directs listeners to biblenewsprophecy.net.
