Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
More churches, more flourishing: The secret to success in middle America
More churches, more flourishing: The secret to success in middle America
Mar 16, 2025 1:23 PM

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of new social crises across America’s middle and working classes, from the opioid epidemicto declines in marriage and family stability to the dilution of social capital. In response, many have been quick to point their fingers at the economic disruption caused by trade and technology.

Yet according to Tim Carney, author of the new book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, the data tell a different story about the transformative effects of munities (or a lack thereof). (Carney will be offering a lecture on his book at Acton’s ing “On Tap” event on April 3 in Grand Rapids, MI.)

Before and beyond any economic forces or factors, Carney argues, individual behavior appears to be closely tied to participation in munities—or a lack thereof. And in an age when church attendance is rapidly declining, few are paying attention to the social and economic ripple effects.

“In middle-class and working-class America, the more religious counties do better, and the least religious counties do worse,” Carney writes in The New York Post. “There are piles of data on this…As politicians and social leaders try to pinpoint the root cause of American woe, they should start by looking at the closing churches — and the ones that are bustling.”

Carney uses Sioux County, Iowa, as one example. With the state’s highest levels of both evangelicals and mainline Protestants, the county also happens to boast “the second-lowest portion of residents on disability in Iowa and the lowest drug-overdose rate in the state.” Meanwhile, “counties at the bottom of ARDA’s religiosity rankings in Iowa…have (per capita) the most overdoses, the most violent crimes, and the most disability claims,” Carney explains.

This is not unique to Iowa, of course—or the Midwest, or the Rust Belt, or anywhere else. We see these same trends and connections across the country, spanning the full range of challenges we are bound to encounter in social life:

Men who go to church regularly are, according to various studies, more likely to get married, andless likely to cheat on their wivesor girlfriends, toabusethem, or to getdivorced. It’s the same for kids. Churchgoing kids abuse drugs less and have better relationships with their parents, according to Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

Families that attend church, synagogue or mosque every week are more likely to eat dinner together every day and go on regular family outings,according to the American Family Surveyconducted by the Deseret News and BYU. The General Social Survey finds that 50 percent of Americans who go to church more than once a week call themselves “very happy.” That number drops as church attendance drops, down to only 25 percent for those who go once a year or less.

As Carney makes clear, it is not necessarily religious belief, but rather consistent participation in munities that appears to be the key. It goes beyond head-knowledge and heart-transformation; it’s about how the embodied change is applied and takes shape through human relationships and the emergence of munities.

“Belonging to a church is a crucial element of living a good, happy, healthy life,” Carney explains. “And this phenomenon ripples out from the individuals into munity. Places like Sioux Center, or like Salt Lake City, with full vibrant churches, are places with more upward mobility, more marriage, and more family formation.”

In a statement before the Joint Economic Committee, Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart, recently affirmed this same reality. Though a self-described agnostic, Murray recognizes that munities of faith” are essential for equipping and empowering individuals for the rest of life. They are particularly important, he argues, when moments of relational or economic crises hit:

With regard to religion, I am making an assertion about a resource that can lead people, adolescents and adults alike, to do the right thing even when the enticements to do the wrong thing are strong: a belief that mands them to do the right thing,” Murray explains. “For its active members, a church is far more than a place that they go to worship once a week. It is a form munity that socializes the children growing up in it in all sorts of informal ways, just as a family socializes children.

Unfortunately, while there are distinct clusters like Sioux County or Salt Lake City that have thriving religious subcultures, the vast majority of American cities munities are experiencing a decline in church participation. “Just from 2007 to 2014, the portion of people attending every week dropped from 40 percent to 36 percent, according to the Pew Research Center,” carney writes. “Going back further, to the mid-1950s, the number of Americans attending a house of worship was as high as 49 percent,Gallup reported.”

The void is apparent, and yet the solution is not prone to quick-and-fast policy grabs or coercive social engineering. To revive munities, it will require a renewed focus on what truly matters, as well as corresponding renewal and bottom-up cultural witness across all spheres of society, but especially in our munities.

Image: Country Church in North Central Iowa, PaulAdamsPhotography (CC BY 2.0)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Beyond vocational hierarchies: Evangelism, social justice, and Christian mission
Throughout my conservative evangelical upbringing, I was routinely encouraged to follow the call of the “five-fold ministry,” whether from the pulpit in weekly church services or the prayer altars of summer youth camps. The implications were clear: entering so-called “vocational ministry” was a higher calling than, well, everything else. Later, in my college years at a leftist Christian university, I witnessed a lopsidedness of a different sort. Instead of being prodded into global missions, I was now encouraged to “make...
This board game reveals the horrible truth about socialism
John Elliott and his friends at Diogenes Games created Socialism: The Game as a free-market lampoon of the board game Monopoly. The rules of the interminable Parker Brothers/Hasbro favorite teach children a distorted version of the free market (and its length gives adults a foretaste of Purgatory). Diogenes’ “unofficial expansion set” turns the game on its head: its object is for all players to attain equal poverty. In this thoughtful reimagining, the banker is replaced by the Federal Directorate of...
‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and the danger of idolatrous ideology
Warning: This article contains a major spoiler about the plot of‘Avengers: Infinity War.’ If you haven’t seen the movie yetand don’t want it to know what happens then PLEASE STOP READING NOW. Since I was a boy I’ve loved Marvel Comics, and over the past decade I’ve loved almost everything about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). But I don’t love the latest the edition of the MCU,Avengers: Infinity War. I should love the film because it’s packed with everything I...
Letter from Rome: Alfie’s political lessons
Readers in Italy, the UK and the US are probably already familiar with the case ofAlfie Evans, the 23-month-old baby boy suffering from an undiagnosed degenerative neurological condition. I’m writing on April 30, two days after Alfie died and one week after he was taken off life support at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, where he had been a patient since December 2016. The case made international headlines because it pitted Alfie’s young parents, who wanted to continue treatment,...
Unemployment as economic-spiritual indicator — April 2018 report
Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...
Urban revival in the Midwest: What does it mean for freedom?
We’ve long heard about the incessant flow of America’s best and brainiest to the country’s largest urban centers. As such cities continue to rise in population and prominence—from Los Angeles and San Francisco to New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C.—fears continue to loom about the power of “coastal elites” and the future of America’s “middle.” Those concerns have merit, of course. For although we see plenty of benefits from a density of smarts, skills, and capital, we also see...
Radio Free Acton: RFA Reports on Direct Primary Care part II; Upstream on ‘Avengers: Infinity War’
On this episode of Radio Free Acton, we feature the second installment of RFA Reports. Guest Anne Marie Schieber-Dykstra, an award-winning reporter and former anchor with WOODTV Grand Rapids, talks with experts and patients on ways in which Direct Primary Care centers are providing better medical care for affordable prices. Then, on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker talks about the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: “Avengers: Infinity War” with Micah Watson, professor of political science at Calvin...
5 Facts about Karl Marx
This Saturday is the 200thanniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the most destructively influential writer on economics in world history. Here are five facts should know about the German philosopher and co-author of The Communist Manifesto: 1. As a student at the University of Bonn, Marx was introduced to the philosophy of the late Berlin professor G.W.F. Hegel and joined the Young Hegelians, a group that held radical views on religion and society. At the time Marx was still...
Growth miracles and growth disasters
Note: This is post #76 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Because of differences in national growth rates there can be large disparities in economic wealth among different countries. A poor country can not only grow, but it can do so quickly. It can catch up with developed countries at an astonishing rate. That’s the good news, says Alex Tabarrok in this video by Marginal Revolution University. The bad news is, while growth can skyrocket in some countries,...
Emmanuel Macron and the problem with ‘European values’
Last weekFrench President Emmanuel Macron came to the United States for a two-day summit with President Trump and an address before Congress. As Acton senior editor Rev. Ben Johnson notes at The American Spectator, Macron’s speech before Congress reveals a deep fissure within the West about its most fundamental values—a fracture es as the West faces powerful challenges from outside its borders: Macron’s speech to Congress represents one set of values: the statist orientation of the bureaucratic EU elite. Leaving...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved