Whether it was Charles Murray’s Coming Apart or John Edwards’s Two Americas, the story of our increasing class segregation has been told repeatedly and persuasively for 20 years.
College-educated men marry college-educated women, they live next door to other college-educated couples, and they all send their children to college. The great sorting machine that is college means increased “assortive mating” (elites marrying elites) and skyrocketing geographic segregation by class — which, of course, perpetuates the whole coming apart of our two Americas.
New research dives far deeper into this bad trend, though, and tells us something that might surprise the average sociologist but that our grandmothers could have told us: The answer to our societal problems may be more church.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty has pioneered research into social capital and the American dream, showing that intact families and strong communities are the most important factors in helping poor children do better than their parents had.
Chetty’s latest studies get granular, using Facebook data to understand who is friends with whom, how they met, what their parents’ jobs are, and whom they went to school with but never became friends with.
His findings: Class segregation has two roots.
First, there’s “exposure.” Children in private schools or public schools in wealthy neighborhoods are mostly the children of elites who know only other children of elites. The children of working-class parents, likewise, mostly only have the chance to befriend other children of working-class parents.
Equally as important is what Chetty called “friendship bias” — rich children befriend their rich classmates, teammates, and neighbors more than they befriend their classmates, teammates, and neighbors from families whose income and education are below average.
Here’s the most interesting finding: “Friendship bias” is lowest in churches. To be sure, churches remain pretty segregated along class lines, but churches are the only places in America where a working-class child is just as likely to befriend a rich child — or, as Chetty and his colleagues put it, “Religious-group friendships do not exhibit substantial homophily by SES.”
The psalmist in Psalm 49 began: “Hear this, all you peoples; listen, all who live in this world, both low and high, rich and poor alike.” He warned that “people who have wealth but lack understanding are like the beasts that perish.”
Having understanding requires knowing and loving others. It turns out that loving one’s neighbor happens most in the houses of God.
