Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion's impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.Interest in subjective well-being has a long tradition in philosophy and psychology, but only recently have scholars across many disciplines begun to explore the question of happiness and life satisfaction. This emerging body of interdisciplinary literature embraces subjective perceptions of well-being as important indicators of quality of life. A main contribution of this literature is an improvement in the reliability and validity of measures of subjective well-being, such as self-rating questions about happiness and life satisfaction (e.g., Diener et al. 1999;Kahneman and Krueger 2006). These studies suggest that subjective aspects of quality of life can be quantified and systematically analyzed.A wide range of factors can influence subjective well-being (Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers 1976). For example, numerous studies find religion to be closely related to life satisfaction and happiness (e.g., Ferriss 2002;Greeley and Hout 2006;Hadaway 1978;Inglehart 2010). However, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes individuals' well-being. Some studies emphasize social networks that people find in religious organizations as the major source of well-being (e.g., Krause 2008), others examine private and subjective aspects of religion (e.g., Greeley and Hout 2006). While both approaches are plausible, it remains unclear which aspect of religion plays a more significant role and how these dimensions might interact to shape subjective well-being.

This study examines the stability of religious preference among people who claim no religious preference in national surveys (i.e., religious nones). Using data from the Faith Matters Study, General Social Survey, and American National Election Study, we show that about 30 percent of religious nones in the first wave of the survey claim an affiliation with a religious group a year later. The percentage of religious nones remained stable in the two waves because a similar number of respondents moved in the opposite direction. Using various measures of religiosity, we show that most of these unstable nones report no significant change in religious belief or practice. We call them liminal nones as they stand halfway in and halfway out of a religious identity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings on the controversies surrounding the rise of religious nones in recent years.

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This paper examines how the 2008-9 recession has affected volunteering behaviours in the UK. Using a large survey dataset, we assess the recession effects on both formal volunteering and informal helping behaviours. Whilst both formal volunteering and informal helping have been in decline in the UK since 2008, the size of the decline is significantly larger for informal helping than for formal volunteering. The decline is more salient in regions that experienced a higher level of unemployment during the recession and also in socially and economically disadvantaged communities. However, we find that a growing number of people who personally experienced financial insecurity and hardship do not explain the decline. We argue that the decline has more to do with community-level factors such as civic organizational infrastructure and cultural norms of trust and engagement than personal experiences of economic hardship.