It seems like there is a bit of a chicken or egg problem here. Is it that churches have become enclaves for the respectable and comfortable- or is it that church attendance helps to create the conditions for people to attain those things?
In my family of churches we have a very strong campus ministry program, and many of our churches pay campus ministers.
We do NOT have a ministry for evangelizing the trailer parks or projects. We don't pay ministers to do that. We don't have special conferences for blue collar workers like we do for campus ministries.
So for us, we're buying the chickens and nurturing the eggs.
One of the issues that I don’t hear talked about enough is the issue of class and culture. I’m someone who comes from a middle class, educated family, but I have relatives who are much poorer and less educated, and have worked in environments where I was often interacting with people of different classes (higher and lower).
There is always a common humanity that can be accessed, but there is also a real challenge because you often don’t have the same points of reference that make bonding easy. Your experiences of life, the media you consume, and the way you think about the world is often very different. Overcoming that presents a real cognitive challenge and consumes our body’s energy. So realistically, most people are only going to have so much bandwidth for doing that. Even if your church wanted to do outreach to working class communities, they probably wouldn’t be very successful, unless it was purely charitable in nature.
On the other hand, choosing to support someone in starting or growing a church rooted in the trailer parks and projects, and finding intentional ways to build bridges between communities might be more practical and effective.
You could probably take surveys and look for signs of socioeconomic mobility among frequent-attenders and see how it compares to the background rate in the general population.
E.g., questions that compare your education/income level to your parents.
The principles taught in the Bible lead to economic prosperity. Being faithful to your spouse, not having children outside of marriage, not getting into debt, don't overuse alcohol, be a good friend, etc. It's a guidebook to leading a good life.
Yes, that aligns with a concept called the “success sequence”, but that’s not really contrary to secular upper-middle-class values. It IS contrary now to working class values. So it remains an open question if Christian teaching is actually helping lift the working class up or if the working class is just ignoring it or not being reached and we’re just preaching to the choir, so to speak.
In my congregation we offer free financial coaching to anyone that wants it. My wife and I have participated as coaches for over 15 years now and we see people of limited means come in, make big changes to their habits and strategies, and live very fulfilled lives. We even got to watch a single lady who made less than $30k a year pay off her small house by the time she was 27.
I'd be curious to see how this phenomenon looks across denominations and faiths when disaggregated. Is this something that bears out only in one or two large branches (e.g. Evangelicals and Catholics) that are skewing the numbers for everyone, or is this the same pattern for everyone, everywhere, not matter if they're Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindi, or something else? I could see solutions/ramifications being different if it's the former rather than the latter.
I agree that churches should welcome the poor and downtrodden, but I'm not sure your data shows that they don't. It's important to remember that association is not the same as causality. You argue that that religions aren't reaching people who are less fortunate, but maybe it's the other way around. Maybe when poor, unmarried people attend church, their life improves. Maybe they learn how to have healthier relationships and get (and stay) married more often. Then they have kids who grow up and get a good education (because they come from stable, supportive homes). They feel a greater purpose in life and learn principles of integrity and hard work, so they do well in their careers and make more money. Data from my church over many generations show that generally it's poor, less educated people who join the church, but within a generation or two these same families become educated and successful.
This feels like you are making (perhaps unintentionally) a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” argument. Poor people don’t necessarily have unhealthy relationships, live without purpose, or lack principles of integrity/hard work.
If this was the case, why are we not seeing an increase in poor individuals going to church to get help? You’d think that if those individuals you described had such a massive improvement from their experience they would share that with others from the communities they grew up in wouldn’t you?
I think the explanations in other comments make more sense - low wage employees don’t have the same amount of free time or flexibility in their schedules, they don’t have extra money to give to church, and the church needs money so they are likely to at the very least consider the fact that outreach to white collar workers is a more financially viable option.
I don’t think it’s either/or. There are merits to both arguments. It seems likely to me that being part of a church community offers real benefits when it comes to cultivating hope, positive habits, better relationships, and access to a social network , and that these things can have a real and positive effect on your material circumstances.
And it’s also true that there are larger systemic issues that can create barriers to accessing or benefiting from that kind of community.
Bootstraps and helping hands don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
For sure - there is certainly nuance to the situation. Being part of a church community (or any community, for that matter) can provide benefits that lead to better economic outcomes. I’m just not sure that is what is happening, in part because I’m not convinced that organized religion provides a net benefit. I personally believe that I’m better off without religion, and I know there are plenty of other people who feel the same.
“Religious participation may promote health by enhancing social integration, regulating health behaviours, fostering a sense of purpose and strengthening character; however, religion may also degrade health by generating anxiety, guilt and even violence.”
Participation in religious service works for those who are already religious because it fosters a sense of community. That’s great for those who are religious and I’m not denying those positives.
However, for people like me who do not hold religious beliefs, organized religion does not help. It also doesn’t help groups that it specifically marginalizes like the LGBTQ+ community.
That’s fair enough. I have many friends who have decided religion is not for them and I have no need to proselytize. But I’m curious: why are you commenting on a blog about religion if it’s not for you? I don’t generally spend much time debating things I’m not interested in. I don’t mean that to be dismissive, I just find it genuinely perplexing.
One likely reason working class individuals dont attend weekend services is because without a higher education, you are often forced to work over the weekend. Most labor jobs today have no regard for the traditional American weekend. They expect you to work on Shabbos and Sunday.
I am 74 and have completed RCIA and am awaiting annullment of a previous - fifty years ago - marriage. I have attended church without fail for 16 years, Catholic Mass since Dobbs v. Jackson
No Chicken and Egg problem here! Lower income people have less time and are too frazzled to make time for religion and church-going. Highly educated people are far more willing to be skeptical about religion.
A church, temple and marriage all must make demands of time and money from their members...Not really possible in US and Western societies now for lower paid folks. Sleeping in on Sunday may even be more desirable for lower-payed and overworked. Makes perfect sense that more stable middle income marrieds folks are the ones in the pews !!
I'm skeptical of the "overworked" hypothesis. If it were the case, wouldn't you expect to see a negative relationship between having children and church attendance?
Most churches expect financial contributions from regular attendees. For lower-income people, who are also likely to be less-educated, the cost of attending church is a luxury they cannot afford..
Many years ago the Biblical scholar Wayne Meeks wrote a book The First Urban Christians in which he argued the spread of early Christianity was primarily an urban affair among people of means. The notion that Christianity began and spread among the poor and downtrodden is probably a myth.
My hunch as to why the educated middle class are more religious is that economic security also sustains the kinds of social structures necessary for transmitting the faith. Irregular work hours, financial stress, unstable or dysfunctional family environments, and just an absence of leisure time, all undermine participation in religious activity.
1. Yes, this is my understanding about early Christians being urban and middle-class -- importantly, not so much upper-class. Think skilled craftsmen like stonemasons, not senators or owners of the latifundia.
2. I think there is something to this when it comes to church attendance, and to spiritual discipline more broadly. I suppose my inclination is to think that the broad middle class is, in most societies, going to be the most disciplined class. Or at least, the one most accustomed to routine. So it shouldn't be that surprising that it's most likely to show up to church on a Sunday morning.
The upper class (depending precisely on how you define it) is going to have some people who live essentially like the middle class, but others who are workaholics and may be reluctant to spare an hour each week at church, and still others who are undisciplined trust fund baby types.
Meanwhile a member of the underclass struggles to maintain any sort of routine, probably due to both personal factors (if you can't keep to a routine, you're probably going to be poor) and external factors (your dysfunctional environment, and the simple fact that crappy jobs usually have crappy schedules).
Being married and being a responsible parent both also require more commitment to routine than life as a single person. And once again if you can't keep to it, there's a good chance your marriage won't last and you won't show up in that "married with children" stat.
The Roman Empire was full of "client systems". It may well be that the typical local elite made clients of the more average citizens and the literate Christian UMC that kept church households before Constantine had clients made up of more of the downtrodden, or at least didn't shun them.
Yes, having read this book when it came out, I would agree. Early Christianity also had more female aherents and supporters and leaders than many people realize. Even the early Church had trouble connecting with the less educated and lower socio-economic groups. The trend continues today. It takes highly intentional action to address these groups, and many Christian movements seek an easier path.
"pagan" basically means "rural". As in those people out in flyover country that don't understand that Christianity is how you get ahead in the imperial bureaucracy.
Stable marriage with children is also correlated to higher income. I actually believe this is the key issue here. A Pastor friend of mine noted that a good nursery is important because children remind people of eternity. Many start to return to or go to Church because they have children.
In other words, those who get married and have kids are generally more inclined to pursue these things.
There's a Creational order issue at play here. If marriage and family is abandoned then it's a first order Creation issue. That's not to say it cannot be rectified, but it does explain that those who are living for themselves not only are not religious but it shipwrecks other areas of life. It leads to poverty and leads to bad outcomes for children.
Now, that's not to say that the Church should not be pursuing all sinners, but it does explain why those who are in Church are "over-represented" by those who pursuing marriage and children. One ought to expect that, if the Gospel is having an impact, that it will also mean that they are obeying the Lord with respect to being faithful to their spouse and having children as the Lord provides.
Could it be that God blesses those who consistently attend church and give to its mission? That has been the case with me and with many others I know. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen..." Faith rewards the faithful. The more you stray from the precepts of God's Word, the less likely you are to attend church because you don't want to. It's not top on your list of priorities.
Western Protestant, reformed Christianity in the end leads to atheism. As you can attest, western Christianity is based on capitalism (which is good, if controlled) and with wealth prosperity preaching leads to the collapse of anything western reformed. Just look at those statistics.
It’s hard to argue with hard numbers, and yet these data strongly contradict what I see in my own life. I attended a flagship state college, and I met very few religious people there. In fact, it almost seemed like it was slightly embarrassing to admit to being Christian.
I also know many people who are now atheist/agnostic professionals, often vocally so, but who grew up in religious and working class families.
My anecdotal experience is that better educated Christians attend church more often and take religion more seriously than their less educated coreligionists, but that less educated people in general are more likely to identify as Christians and more educated people as non-religious.
I wonder if age could explain this, if the education-religion correlation is different for millennials and Gen Z? Most of the people I’m thinking of are under 35.
1) The early Christian church was probably an UMC phenomenon as well. They had down and out "clients", but it was the people below the level of local elites but still able to support others that were running things.
2) Church is where you go to meet people who want to get married and be monogamous for life. The lower classes are not big on that these days. That's a whole story.
3) It's interesting that church attendance basically peaks amongst BAs and high five figures income, then falls. These are people too rich for welfare and too poor to afford indulgence. They need to stay on the straight and narrow.
4) In my old neighborhood there used to be a bunch of working class churches near the factories. Back when unskilled and semi-skilled labor mattered there was probably a strong incentive for local elites to encourage church going because it made better and more productive workers. Now that their labor is worth less and it's all 100% marginal tax rate welfare state for the lower middle class there is basically no point in doing all that work to improve their behavior. An ODing underclass is worth more in Medicaid then they are asking if you want fries with that.
5) So is all this a bad thing? I did a lot of charity work when I was in a Catholic young adult group and as far as I can tell it was all a waste. Beating your head into a brick wall trying to help people that are going to consume whatever surplus you give them. The only real lasting good it all did was that it paired off middle class people that wanted to get married and have kids rather than everyone trying to find someone else in the secular hookup culture.
6) Before the modern era over 90% of people were desperately poor so "the poor" contained tons of deserving poor that would make something of themselves if given the chance. Nowadays the poor are mostly the deserving (or at least inevitable) poor that are dead ends.
7) Fundamentally, Christianity is a religion for the Malthusian era. In the post Malthusian era it's struggling to figure out what its supposed to be. It's replacements aren't an improvement, but most Christians I talk to seem confused.
#4 -- To the degree you're describing a real thing, I strongly suspect immigration is the key factor. If the native working classes are lazy and unproductive, we can just import more productive poor from farther afield. If that option isn't available, local elites would have more cause to invest in the local labor base.
#5-6 -- Some truth here that's probably hard for some to admit. After a series of social developments that boost economic mobility and vastly shrink the impoverished class, it's practically a tautology to say that the remaining impoverished class is going to have more intractable problems.
But I suppose, as I see things, as a Christian, it doesn't obviate the value of kindness and mercy to say there aren't permanent solutions. In the long run, we're all dead and there is no permanent solution, besides Christ. In the meantime, misery is real, self-inflicted or not.
One of the charity orgs I'm involved in has men get together and do home improvement projects for the poor (in this area, largely old country homes barely fit for human habitation). Patch leaky roofs, build wheelchair ramps for someone newly wheelchair-confined. Honestly also a good chance for men to bond, teach each other skills. Bring our boys out there and try to instill a sense of gratitude in them for what they have. I don't think it's a bad use of a Saturday, now and then, compared to what we would otherwise be doing.
Many of these solutions have a very temporary feel -- we're patching up a problem but at some point, this house truly will be unfit for human habitation, or this occupant will die. But I think we alleviate a little human misery for a time and build character while doing it.
Our church group got together and helped a member restore a delapidated old house. Now he lives in it and has four kids. He can afford that on a relatively low wage because he doesn’t have a mortgage.
But he’s a middle class guy that does all the right things, and he did a lot of the work fixing up the house himself. He’s also probably not really lower class (he has a college degree but doesn’t like office work).
It was charity building that house, but it was charity for someone that has his shit together and it has an important long term impact (his children).
When I would try to help street people or go to a soup kitchen it basically felt like I was just patching up ungrateful addicts and it wasn’t going to lead anywhere.
I kind of feel like there is a lot of stuff that people could do to help their church community. Even if they don’t “need” it as much as the down and out, we could all use it. And if we help each other out that probably means more children and fewer spouses forced to work and less institutional daycare.
Yes, I can generally agree with you about helping your own church (and I believe there's a duty to do so), and our church has some projects like that, but so far they only occur sporadically. Projects like that do help build a sense of tighter community though.
At the beginning of Covid, we also set up a fund for anyone who was struggling financially due to shutdowns, though we didn't count on the scope of government stimulus. I think only one family ended up tapping into it, on the scale of covering their groceries for a few weeks.
When it comes to street people, a number of cities have set up rescue missions, which usually serve bowls of soup but also offer a larger life intervention for those who "enter the program" (those "in the program" also do a lot of the work keeping the place running). I was involved with one at one point when I lived in a bigger city, and I thought it did good work. There were some real success stories. They often involved getting someone off of drugs, possibly onto anti-psychotic meds, and pushing "reset" on their network of friends and acquaintances.
I have a psychotic member of my extended family, and the meds are literally a life-saver, the difference between being just a guy who sometimes says weird things but behaves within the normal range and can hold an easy job, vs. being a rambling madman who lives under a bridge somewhere and frightens people on a daily basis, likely headed towards an eventual violent confrontation that will mean death or injury. But he needs occasional help with life maintenance, which in his case comes from a combination of family and a social worker.
So I'd say there are still people who can be helped, there are still cases where help makes a critical difference. I believe we have a duty to make sure the lifeboats exist, even if most people end up abusing them. There but for the grace of God go we all.
Ryan, have you ever thought about hosting a monthly chat where we can discuss and ask questions about this kind of stuff? Because I’ll bet a lot of us would pay for that.
A great suggestion! I just started this substack about 10 weeks ago and never thought it would grow this quickly.
I am going to put that in the rotation next month. Monthly chat. Paid subscribers only. And I will try my best to reply to as many questions as possible.
Maybe even let folks suggest an idea for a future post.
Back in 1987 after my divorce I went to a church. They wanted to put me in a group. But then the confusion. I was divorced but had no kids. I just didn't fit into one of their boxes. I am an atheist, not because of that, but it certainly didn't help. Also re. your survey I have a four year degree plus additional certification. I didn't need the church because I was on the fringes, or lost, or sick. As it turned out I didn't need the church at all.
It seems like there is a bit of a chicken or egg problem here. Is it that churches have become enclaves for the respectable and comfortable- or is it that church attendance helps to create the conditions for people to attain those things?
In my family of churches we have a very strong campus ministry program, and many of our churches pay campus ministers.
We do NOT have a ministry for evangelizing the trailer parks or projects. We don't pay ministers to do that. We don't have special conferences for blue collar workers like we do for campus ministries.
So for us, we're buying the chickens and nurturing the eggs.
One of the issues that I don’t hear talked about enough is the issue of class and culture. I’m someone who comes from a middle class, educated family, but I have relatives who are much poorer and less educated, and have worked in environments where I was often interacting with people of different classes (higher and lower).
There is always a common humanity that can be accessed, but there is also a real challenge because you often don’t have the same points of reference that make bonding easy. Your experiences of life, the media you consume, and the way you think about the world is often very different. Overcoming that presents a real cognitive challenge and consumes our body’s energy. So realistically, most people are only going to have so much bandwidth for doing that. Even if your church wanted to do outreach to working class communities, they probably wouldn’t be very successful, unless it was purely charitable in nature.
On the other hand, choosing to support someone in starting or growing a church rooted in the trailer parks and projects, and finding intentional ways to build bridges between communities might be more practical and effective.
this is almost exactly what i came to ask too.
how would one study this? to figure out which is the cause and which is the effect? or if it's just correlation?
You could probably take surveys and look for signs of socioeconomic mobility among frequent-attenders and see how it compares to the background rate in the general population.
E.g., questions that compare your education/income level to your parents.
The principles taught in the Bible lead to economic prosperity. Being faithful to your spouse, not having children outside of marriage, not getting into debt, don't overuse alcohol, be a good friend, etc. It's a guidebook to leading a good life.
Enslave your enemies, rape the women and kill the children of the defeated, beat your slaves, bash babies heads against the rocks, got ya
Yes, that aligns with a concept called the “success sequence”, but that’s not really contrary to secular upper-middle-class values. It IS contrary now to working class values. So it remains an open question if Christian teaching is actually helping lift the working class up or if the working class is just ignoring it or not being reached and we’re just preaching to the choir, so to speak.
It's definitely going to depend on the church.
In my congregation we offer free financial coaching to anyone that wants it. My wife and I have participated as coaches for over 15 years now and we see people of limited means come in, make big changes to their habits and strategies, and live very fulfilled lives. We even got to watch a single lady who made less than $30k a year pay off her small house by the time she was 27.
Did you mean “Their” when you said, “There trend is just as unmistakable...”?
Always appreciate the copy edits in the comments! I'm better with graphs than words.
Just made the change.
I'd be curious to see how this phenomenon looks across denominations and faiths when disaggregated. Is this something that bears out only in one or two large branches (e.g. Evangelicals and Catholics) that are skewing the numbers for everyone, or is this the same pattern for everyone, everywhere, not matter if they're Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindi, or something else? I could see solutions/ramifications being different if it's the former rather than the latter.
I agree that churches should welcome the poor and downtrodden, but I'm not sure your data shows that they don't. It's important to remember that association is not the same as causality. You argue that that religions aren't reaching people who are less fortunate, but maybe it's the other way around. Maybe when poor, unmarried people attend church, their life improves. Maybe they learn how to have healthier relationships and get (and stay) married more often. Then they have kids who grow up and get a good education (because they come from stable, supportive homes). They feel a greater purpose in life and learn principles of integrity and hard work, so they do well in their careers and make more money. Data from my church over many generations show that generally it's poor, less educated people who join the church, but within a generation or two these same families become educated and successful.
This feels like you are making (perhaps unintentionally) a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” argument. Poor people don’t necessarily have unhealthy relationships, live without purpose, or lack principles of integrity/hard work.
If this was the case, why are we not seeing an increase in poor individuals going to church to get help? You’d think that if those individuals you described had such a massive improvement from their experience they would share that with others from the communities they grew up in wouldn’t you?
I think the explanations in other comments make more sense - low wage employees don’t have the same amount of free time or flexibility in their schedules, they don’t have extra money to give to church, and the church needs money so they are likely to at the very least consider the fact that outreach to white collar workers is a more financially viable option.
I don’t think it’s either/or. There are merits to both arguments. It seems likely to me that being part of a church community offers real benefits when it comes to cultivating hope, positive habits, better relationships, and access to a social network , and that these things can have a real and positive effect on your material circumstances.
And it’s also true that there are larger systemic issues that can create barriers to accessing or benefiting from that kind of community.
Bootstraps and helping hands don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
For sure - there is certainly nuance to the situation. Being part of a church community (or any community, for that matter) can provide benefits that lead to better economic outcomes. I’m just not sure that is what is happening, in part because I’m not convinced that organized religion provides a net benefit. I personally believe that I’m better off without religion, and I know there are plenty of other people who feel the same.
I used to believe this too. But the data says otherwise. https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/49/6/2030/5892419
From the article you linked:
“Religious participation may promote health by enhancing social integration, regulating health behaviours, fostering a sense of purpose and strengthening character; however, religion may also degrade health by generating anxiety, guilt and even violence.”
Participation in religious service works for those who are already religious because it fosters a sense of community. That’s great for those who are religious and I’m not denying those positives.
However, for people like me who do not hold religious beliefs, organized religion does not help. It also doesn’t help groups that it specifically marginalizes like the LGBTQ+ community.
That’s fair enough. I have many friends who have decided religion is not for them and I have no need to proselytize. But I’m curious: why are you commenting on a blog about religion if it’s not for you? I don’t generally spend much time debating things I’m not interested in. I don’t mean that to be dismissive, I just find it genuinely perplexing.
How do you know that we don't see that?
One likely reason working class individuals dont attend weekend services is because without a higher education, you are often forced to work over the weekend. Most labor jobs today have no regard for the traditional American weekend. They expect you to work on Shabbos and Sunday.
I am 74 and have completed RCIA and am awaiting annullment of a previous - fifty years ago - marriage. I have attended church without fail for 16 years, Catholic Mass since Dobbs v. Jackson
No Chicken and Egg problem here! Lower income people have less time and are too frazzled to make time for religion and church-going. Highly educated people are far more willing to be skeptical about religion.
A church, temple and marriage all must make demands of time and money from their members...Not really possible in US and Western societies now for lower paid folks. Sleeping in on Sunday may even be more desirable for lower-payed and overworked. Makes perfect sense that more stable middle income marrieds folks are the ones in the pews !!
I'm skeptical of the "overworked" hypothesis. If it were the case, wouldn't you expect to see a negative relationship between having children and church attendance?
Most churches expect financial contributions from regular attendees. For lower-income people, who are also likely to be less-educated, the cost of attending church is a luxury they cannot afford..
I don't think that's it.
Many years ago the Biblical scholar Wayne Meeks wrote a book The First Urban Christians in which he argued the spread of early Christianity was primarily an urban affair among people of means. The notion that Christianity began and spread among the poor and downtrodden is probably a myth.
My hunch as to why the educated middle class are more religious is that economic security also sustains the kinds of social structures necessary for transmitting the faith. Irregular work hours, financial stress, unstable or dysfunctional family environments, and just an absence of leisure time, all undermine participation in religious activity.
1. Yes, this is my understanding about early Christians being urban and middle-class -- importantly, not so much upper-class. Think skilled craftsmen like stonemasons, not senators or owners of the latifundia.
2. I think there is something to this when it comes to church attendance, and to spiritual discipline more broadly. I suppose my inclination is to think that the broad middle class is, in most societies, going to be the most disciplined class. Or at least, the one most accustomed to routine. So it shouldn't be that surprising that it's most likely to show up to church on a Sunday morning.
The upper class (depending precisely on how you define it) is going to have some people who live essentially like the middle class, but others who are workaholics and may be reluctant to spare an hour each week at church, and still others who are undisciplined trust fund baby types.
Meanwhile a member of the underclass struggles to maintain any sort of routine, probably due to both personal factors (if you can't keep to a routine, you're probably going to be poor) and external factors (your dysfunctional environment, and the simple fact that crappy jobs usually have crappy schedules).
Being married and being a responsible parent both also require more commitment to routine than life as a single person. And once again if you can't keep to it, there's a good chance your marriage won't last and you won't show up in that "married with children" stat.
Peter Brown has written quite a bit about this too in Through The Eye of a Needle.
+1
Note that this isn't necessarily a contradiction.
The Roman Empire was full of "client systems". It may well be that the typical local elite made clients of the more average citizens and the literate Christian UMC that kept church households before Constantine had clients made up of more of the downtrodden, or at least didn't shun them.
Yes, having read this book when it came out, I would agree. Early Christianity also had more female aherents and supporters and leaders than many people realize. Even the early Church had trouble connecting with the less educated and lower socio-economic groups. The trend continues today. It takes highly intentional action to address these groups, and many Christian movements seek an easier path.
"pagan" basically means "rural". As in those people out in flyover country that don't understand that Christianity is how you get ahead in the imperial bureaucracy.
Stable marriage with children is also correlated to higher income. I actually believe this is the key issue here. A Pastor friend of mine noted that a good nursery is important because children remind people of eternity. Many start to return to or go to Church because they have children.
In other words, those who get married and have kids are generally more inclined to pursue these things.
There's a Creational order issue at play here. If marriage and family is abandoned then it's a first order Creation issue. That's not to say it cannot be rectified, but it does explain that those who are living for themselves not only are not religious but it shipwrecks other areas of life. It leads to poverty and leads to bad outcomes for children.
Now, that's not to say that the Church should not be pursuing all sinners, but it does explain why those who are in Church are "over-represented" by those who pursuing marriage and children. One ought to expect that, if the Gospel is having an impact, that it will also mean that they are obeying the Lord with respect to being faithful to their spouse and having children as the Lord provides.
Could it be that God blesses those who consistently attend church and give to its mission? That has been the case with me and with many others I know. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen..." Faith rewards the faithful. The more you stray from the precepts of God's Word, the less likely you are to attend church because you don't want to. It's not top on your list of priorities.
Western Protestant, reformed Christianity in the end leads to atheism. As you can attest, western Christianity is based on capitalism (which is good, if controlled) and with wealth prosperity preaching leads to the collapse of anything western reformed. Just look at those statistics.
It’s hard to argue with hard numbers, and yet these data strongly contradict what I see in my own life. I attended a flagship state college, and I met very few religious people there. In fact, it almost seemed like it was slightly embarrassing to admit to being Christian.
I also know many people who are now atheist/agnostic professionals, often vocally so, but who grew up in religious and working class families.
My anecdotal experience is that better educated Christians attend church more often and take religion more seriously than their less educated coreligionists, but that less educated people in general are more likely to identify as Christians and more educated people as non-religious.
I wonder if age could explain this, if the education-religion correlation is different for millennials and Gen Z? Most of the people I’m thinking of are under 35.
1) The early Christian church was probably an UMC phenomenon as well. They had down and out "clients", but it was the people below the level of local elites but still able to support others that were running things.
2) Church is where you go to meet people who want to get married and be monogamous for life. The lower classes are not big on that these days. That's a whole story.
3) It's interesting that church attendance basically peaks amongst BAs and high five figures income, then falls. These are people too rich for welfare and too poor to afford indulgence. They need to stay on the straight and narrow.
4) In my old neighborhood there used to be a bunch of working class churches near the factories. Back when unskilled and semi-skilled labor mattered there was probably a strong incentive for local elites to encourage church going because it made better and more productive workers. Now that their labor is worth less and it's all 100% marginal tax rate welfare state for the lower middle class there is basically no point in doing all that work to improve their behavior. An ODing underclass is worth more in Medicaid then they are asking if you want fries with that.
5) So is all this a bad thing? I did a lot of charity work when I was in a Catholic young adult group and as far as I can tell it was all a waste. Beating your head into a brick wall trying to help people that are going to consume whatever surplus you give them. The only real lasting good it all did was that it paired off middle class people that wanted to get married and have kids rather than everyone trying to find someone else in the secular hookup culture.
6) Before the modern era over 90% of people were desperately poor so "the poor" contained tons of deserving poor that would make something of themselves if given the chance. Nowadays the poor are mostly the deserving (or at least inevitable) poor that are dead ends.
7) Fundamentally, Christianity is a religion for the Malthusian era. In the post Malthusian era it's struggling to figure out what its supposed to be. It's replacements aren't an improvement, but most Christians I talk to seem confused.
#4 -- To the degree you're describing a real thing, I strongly suspect immigration is the key factor. If the native working classes are lazy and unproductive, we can just import more productive poor from farther afield. If that option isn't available, local elites would have more cause to invest in the local labor base.
#5-6 -- Some truth here that's probably hard for some to admit. After a series of social developments that boost economic mobility and vastly shrink the impoverished class, it's practically a tautology to say that the remaining impoverished class is going to have more intractable problems.
But I suppose, as I see things, as a Christian, it doesn't obviate the value of kindness and mercy to say there aren't permanent solutions. In the long run, we're all dead and there is no permanent solution, besides Christ. In the meantime, misery is real, self-inflicted or not.
One of the charity orgs I'm involved in has men get together and do home improvement projects for the poor (in this area, largely old country homes barely fit for human habitation). Patch leaky roofs, build wheelchair ramps for someone newly wheelchair-confined. Honestly also a good chance for men to bond, teach each other skills. Bring our boys out there and try to instill a sense of gratitude in them for what they have. I don't think it's a bad use of a Saturday, now and then, compared to what we would otherwise be doing.
Many of these solutions have a very temporary feel -- we're patching up a problem but at some point, this house truly will be unfit for human habitation, or this occupant will die. But I think we alleviate a little human misery for a time and build character while doing it.
Our church group got together and helped a member restore a delapidated old house. Now he lives in it and has four kids. He can afford that on a relatively low wage because he doesn’t have a mortgage.
But he’s a middle class guy that does all the right things, and he did a lot of the work fixing up the house himself. He’s also probably not really lower class (he has a college degree but doesn’t like office work).
It was charity building that house, but it was charity for someone that has his shit together and it has an important long term impact (his children).
When I would try to help street people or go to a soup kitchen it basically felt like I was just patching up ungrateful addicts and it wasn’t going to lead anywhere.
I kind of feel like there is a lot of stuff that people could do to help their church community. Even if they don’t “need” it as much as the down and out, we could all use it. And if we help each other out that probably means more children and fewer spouses forced to work and less institutional daycare.
Yes, I can generally agree with you about helping your own church (and I believe there's a duty to do so), and our church has some projects like that, but so far they only occur sporadically. Projects like that do help build a sense of tighter community though.
At the beginning of Covid, we also set up a fund for anyone who was struggling financially due to shutdowns, though we didn't count on the scope of government stimulus. I think only one family ended up tapping into it, on the scale of covering their groceries for a few weeks.
When it comes to street people, a number of cities have set up rescue missions, which usually serve bowls of soup but also offer a larger life intervention for those who "enter the program" (those "in the program" also do a lot of the work keeping the place running). I was involved with one at one point when I lived in a bigger city, and I thought it did good work. There were some real success stories. They often involved getting someone off of drugs, possibly onto anti-psychotic meds, and pushing "reset" on their network of friends and acquaintances.
I have a psychotic member of my extended family, and the meds are literally a life-saver, the difference between being just a guy who sometimes says weird things but behaves within the normal range and can hold an easy job, vs. being a rambling madman who lives under a bridge somewhere and frightens people on a daily basis, likely headed towards an eventual violent confrontation that will mean death or injury. But he needs occasional help with life maintenance, which in his case comes from a combination of family and a social worker.
So I'd say there are still people who can be helped, there are still cases where help makes a critical difference. I believe we have a duty to make sure the lifeboats exist, even if most people end up abusing them. There but for the grace of God go we all.
Ryan, have you ever thought about hosting a monthly chat where we can discuss and ask questions about this kind of stuff? Because I’ll bet a lot of us would pay for that.
A great suggestion! I just started this substack about 10 weeks ago and never thought it would grow this quickly.
I am going to put that in the rotation next month. Monthly chat. Paid subscribers only. And I will try my best to reply to as many questions as possible.
Maybe even let folks suggest an idea for a future post.
Back in 1987 after my divorce I went to a church. They wanted to put me in a group. But then the confusion. I was divorced but had no kids. I just didn't fit into one of their boxes. I am an atheist, not because of that, but it certainly didn't help. Also re. your survey I have a four year degree plus additional certification. I didn't need the church because I was on the fringes, or lost, or sick. As it turned out I didn't need the church at all.