It may take a miracle to find parking at church this week. Alongside devout church ladies and families that come most every Sunday will be an army of Easter Christians.
While some regulars roll their eyes at these Johnny-come-annually congregants, most Christians welcome them, and hope they come back. Even if you’re not a Christian, you should hope the fresh faces return to church next week, and the week after, too, for the sake of the country.
Here’s how the country benefits. Social science consistently finds that people who go to church do better in life and become better citizens.
“Americans who regularly attend services at a church, synagogue, temple or mosque are less likely to cheat on their partners; less likely to abuse them; more likely to enjoy happier marriages; and less likely to have been divorced.”
W. Bradford Wilcox’s study controlled for income and education, suggesting church attendance probably helps cause these good outcomes.
“Churchgoing kids,” Robert Putnam wrote in his 2015 book, Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis, “have better relations with their parents and other adults, have more friendships with high-performing peers, are more involved in sports and other extracurricular activities, are less prone to substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, and smoking), risky behavior … and delinquency … ”
Putnam and Notre Dame’s David Campbell also found that regular attendees are more likely to give to charity, including nonreligious charities, and to volunteer their time, including for nonreligious causes.
While Easter reminds Christians of the eternal reward that awaits them after death, social science data also make clear that church attendance tends to postpone that reward. Baby boomers who attend church regularly were 40 percent less likely to die in their 50s, a recent study found.
This isn’t just a Christian thing. One study of Pakistani Muslims found that those who go on the Hajj, the massive annual pilgrimage to Mecca, develop more positive attitudes toward foreigners, including toward America and the West.
The key factor in these and dozens of similar studies about religion’s positive effects isn’t devoutness of belief but regularity of attendance at religious services.
The bad news is that churchgoing has been declining consistently since the late 1960s. The old white mainline churches that once defined the elite classes and populated the Ivy Leagues have withered away. White evangelical churches peaked in the 1990s and have declined since. More and more evangelicals now don’t go to church. The Catholic Church is stable, mostly because of an increasing number of immigrants in the congregation, while native-born Americans fall away from their faith or simply stop attending mass.
The fall is continuing. In 2007, 40 percent of adults said they attend church at least monthly. By 2014, that rate had fallen to 36 percent.
Emptying pews are part of a bigger retreat from civil society that Putnam first charted in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. But because church is the most accessible institution for the working class, the retreat from church is particularly harmful.
Some liberals think this secularization is a good development. They believe that religious conservatives constitute a repressive force in our culture and an evil force in our politics. The joke’s on them. President Trump, the bete noire to the Left, won the Republican primary on the back of the religiously disengaged. The less a GOP primary voter went to church, the more likely he was to vote for Trump, rather than for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., or Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
America is a religious country. In a healthier America, more Americans would set aside the Sabbath, whether it be Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, for worship, particularly worship with a community of believers.
So if you’re a regular churchgoing Christian, this Sunday turn to the new faces at church and invite them back next weekend. And if you are one of the new faces, please block off an hour next Sunday, and the next, and keep coming.
The country is depending on it.
