Religion and the Promise of Happiness

The concepts of "religion" and "happiness" are deceptively simple—domesticated products of the modern liberal order—but probing their connections can be illuminating. Seeing religions as means to a generic kind of happiness blinds us to the promise and danger of religious difference. Seeing religion as compensation for the absence or unjust distribution of happiness reinforces unexamined worldly conceptions of happiness. To learn to think about religion and happiness beyond modern consumerist pieties, examination of prosperity religion, the metaphysics of William James's "religion of healthy-mindedness" and the prosperity of the Biblical Job helps more than a survey of views of human fulfillment and joy in the "world religions."