This paper deals with happiness in India and its main determinants, among which the effects of religion are the focus. The literature on happiness has explored a wide range of variables which help to explain individual happiness. Among them religion plays an important role. Attendance to religious services, religious practices and membership to religious associations are in general positively related with happiness. In this paper I explore a missing part of the study of the connections between religion and happiness. Here the research focuses on the effect of being raised religiously on happiness. Notice that receiving a religious education from parents means to be taught the principles of a religion, but does not imply to follow these principles. However the few existing literature on this topic shows that generally the individual remembers values learnt during his/her life, independently of being religious or not at the time of the interview.

I study the connection between religious education and happiness in India. This country has several advantages for the study of happiness, as it displays a large number of religious denominations, a wide scale of incomes (i.e. a large inequality in income distribution), a large variety of ethnicities and cultures. The results obtained over a so mixed sample are particularly robust, as they overcome cultural and ethnic differences and are thus of general meaning.  In addition India is a democratic country and therefore happiness is not affected  by lack of freedom, and respondents to the survey are not constrained in their answers.

 I use data from the World Value Survey in order to analyze the topic. This survey allows for the inclusion of a nember of individual characteristics (gender, age, marital status, income, etc.). In addition it is possible also to account for the evolution of trust during about a decade, exploiting all the waves of the survey. This allows for getting results which are even more robust, as the effect of events during time can be isolated.Data are analysed by econometric tools.

My results support the usual findings of the extant literature about the effects of health, income, education and gender. In addition this paper provides support to the positive effects of receiving religious education from parents. This result is strong and does not depend on the religious denomination of the responder (the parents’ denomination is unfortunately unknown), nor on his geographical location (federated State). I find thet people living in some federated states are happier than people living in others. This can be linked to different security conditions in the different countries, as controlling for income should rule out the income differential effect. However, even after controlling for geographical location, the effect of being raised religiously is strong and highly significant.

A further finding that emerges from this analysis is that religious education received from parents has a stronger and more significant impact on happiness than “being a religious person” has. In turn the willingness of giving own children a religious education depends on both “being raised religiously” and “being a religious person”, but the effect of the latter variable is stronger and more significant. This implies that parents can increase their children happiness by raising them religiously; moreover religious parents tend to be more prone to give their offspring a religious education, but this willingness contributes little to increase parents’ happiness.

Eventuallly I also introduce the size of the town the interviewee lives in as a control. Analyzing india this is a very important control, as conditions of people in towns and cities are generally very different than in the countryside. Living in a town allows for better jobs, better access to education and hence higher income, but Indian towns are also populated by large amounts of extremely poor people and the income inequality in towns and cities tends to be much more evident than in the countryside. However the size of the town correlates with income positively and strongly. As a consequence the overall effect of living in bigger towns is positive and highly significant.

This paper highlights two important results. The first one is that the contribution of religion to the individual happiness comes from the religious education received from parents more than from the development of any religious (or anti-religious) faith during life. Secondly although “being raised religiously” affects individual happiness positively and more than “being a religious person”, this latter attitude is the main motivation behind the willingness of giving the children a religious education. This means that people receive potential happiness from an attitude of their parents, but this attitude does not contribute very much to the happiness of the parents themselves. In this these parents can be considered altruistic and forward-looking for their children’s happiness.