What It Means to Flourish: New Study Maps the Mystery of Humanity

What does it mean to live well—to truly flourish? Around the world, scholars and communities alike are asking this question with new urgency. The Global Flourishing Study, a groundbreaking five-year collaboration between Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, seeks to find the answer.

Co-directed by Dr. Byron R. Johnson of Baylor and Dr. Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard, the study represents an unprecedented effort to understand the factors that drive human flourishing.

“No one has ever done a study like this," Johnson said at a conference this past week hosted by the Christian Alliance for Orphans.

Funded with $60 million and encompassing 200,000 participants across 22 countries, the project is designed to map the conditions of human well-being on a global scale—tracking not only how people live but what allows them to thrive.

Unlike previous studies that have focused on limited regions or small population samples—often just 5,000 to 10,000 participants—the Global Flourishing Study spans every continent, including nations such as Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and the US.

Participants are surveyed annually over five years, allowing researchers to follow the same individuals and measure changes over time. Each year’s survey includes 109 questions exploring well-being across multiple dimensions—health, happiness, purpose, character, relationships, and financial stability.

In Johnson’s words, this initiative is “mapping the mystery of humanity,” much like the Human Genome Project once mapped DNA. “What does the life well lived look like?” he asks.

For nearly a decade, global conversations about well-being have been dominated by the World Happiness Report, which famously ranks Finland as the world’s “happiest” nation year after year based on a single question: “How do you evaluate your life on a scale of 1 to 10?”

But according to Johnson, the Global Flourishing Study is finding something much more complex. “In every single country, life satisfaction is a much better predictor of flourishing than life evaluation,” he explained. “Life evaluation, when you do follow-up interviews with people, is related to financial security.”

In other words, money matters—but it doesn’t tell the full story. “We have financial security as a society,” Johnson said, “but we’ve missed something along the way.”

One of the most striking findings so far is the powerful link between religious service attendance and flourishing. “The church attendance thing is really so powerful,” Johnson noted. He says that when it comes to things like anxiety and depression, “Church attendance is not an inoculator, but it is a protective factor.”

The data show that individuals who attend church regularly are significantly less likely to experience depression, anxiety, or poor health outcomes—and even live longer. Studies indicate that for African Americans, regular church attendance adds an average of 14 years to life expectancy; for Caucasians, about seven years.

This emphasis on connection echoes what Jedd Medefind, President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, shared in a recent conversation with Johnson: “All the dimensions of a human being are intertwined and directly affect one another...Relationships are so huge in the Global Flourishing Study.”

That insight lies at the heart of the research. The Global Flourishing Study reveals a simple but profound truth: human well-being is inherently relational, moral, and communal. As Johnson observed, “More than half the social capital in the United States is found in churches.” Flourishing, he explained, cannot be separated from the well-being of others.

“It’s a communal thing,” Johnson said. “If my neighbor isn’t flourishing, how can I be flourishing?”

While Western narratives often assume religion is declining globally, the data tell a different story. “Globally, 95% of people believe in God,” Johnson said. “For over 70 years, atheism has remained flat at 4%. The world is more religious today than it has ever been in history based on data.”

He added that many faith communities aren’t even counted in official statistics: “There are approximately 30–40% of total churches that are not included in the census. There are so many diverse ethnic groups that fly under the radar and are not registered.”

The study is also examining the economic and social impact of houses of worship. Faith-based organizations are often first responders to natural disasters, addiction, and homelessness, offering vital forms of community care. “It is an organic whole,” Johnson said. “It is the whole package that brings healing.”

The Global Flourishing Study is also making history in another way—its commitment to complete transparency. Every dataset will be open access, meaning “everyone gets the data the day the internal team gets the data,” Johnson explained.

This transparency is particularly significant in a scientific landscape shaken by data manipulation scandals. In 2023 alone, over 10,000 studies were retracted due to falsified results. Johnson emphasized, “This is an open access project with complete data transparency. You cannot do anything but find what we are finding."

What sets this research apart is not only its scale but its vision. It does not begin with what’s broken—it begins with what’s thriving. Medefind described it as “distinct from the field of medicine and psychology,” where the fundamental question often is, ‘What is wrong with this person?’ Instead, this study asks, “What is right with the people who are doing well?”

As the data continue to unfold, researchers hope the longitudinal findings will shape global policies and community practices for decades to come. By mapping the many dimensions of well-being—health, relationships, purpose, character, faith, and resilience—the study aims to illuminate what it truly means to live a flourishing life.

“I believe this is one of the most significant studies of our lifetime,” Johnson said. “The data actually do lead you to Jesus.”