Can government lead a religious revival?

As recently as 2005, nones were just 5% of the population, compared to Protestants at 58%, Catholics at 25%, and others at 9%. Now they outnumber Catholics and are just 20 points behind Protestants.

The nones are not a uniform bloc, with most actually believing in God, while those who are unsure or do not are smaller minorities. According to the separate General Social Survey, only about 17% of nones are atheists, another 17% agnostic, while the remaining two-thirds believe in God but do not identify themselves as belonging to any particular religion (Pew has the numbers closer to 17% atheist, 20% agnostic, and 63% “nothing in particular”).

In a nation where religious freedom is written into our founding document, the fact that a growing percentage of Americans believe in God but do not belong to a particular religion is not a problem within itself. It is our right to do so. And in the interest of transparency, I am a none.

Unfortunately, however, nones tend to exhibit other behaviors that are at least a little troubling for a functioning democracy. They are less likely to vote, less likely to volunteer, less satisfied with the communities they live in, less satisfied with their own social lives, less educated, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and, crucially, less likely to be married.

The rise of the nones also happens to coincide with a decline in births in the United States. While birth rates declined for most of the 20th century, they only recently ducked below replacement levels, first in the 1970s, before bouncing back in the 80s and 90s, and then falling again after the financial crisis in 2008. The total fertility rate stood at 2.1 births per woman in 2007, right at replacement level fertility, and it has since fallen to 1.6. Unless something changes soon, the U.S. will start to lose population like Russia, South Korea, and Japan already are.

Voices from both the Right and Left will tell you that nothing can be done about our declining fertility, except maybe increasing immigration, which does nothing to address the underlying problem and, in all likelihood, makes it worse. Politics is downstream of culture, these critics tell us, and there is nothing the government can do to change culture. If people don’t want to get married and have children anymore, then that is their choice, and there is nothing we can do about it.

But is politics necessarily always downstream of culture? Maybe causation flows both ways. What if the decline in marriage in the U.S. preceded the rise of the nones, indicating that the decline in religion is, in fact, at least partially driven by the decline in marriage? And what if the federal government has made a number of policy decisions since the 1960s that make marriage much less likely, starting with spending over $1 trillion every year on safety net programs that actively punish marriage, while also implementing policies that drive down male wages, a key ingredient for strong marriage rates?

The evidence for all of these claims is surprisingly strong.

Before examining the timing of the decline of marriage and the rise of the nones, it is worth exploring the life cycle of religious behavior. People tend to attend church with their parents when they are children, then drift away when they leave the home, then come back when they get married. When Americans got married young, the gap between attending as a child and attending as a married adult was small, often just three or four years. But now that the average age of marriage is 31 for men and 29 for women, young people often spend a decade away from the church before they get married, and the longer that time lasts, the fewer that come back.

One’s church attendance as an adult also greatly depends on one’s church attendance as a child. According to one recent study, while less than half of young adults today had continuously married parents through childhood, 80% of all churchgoers today had continuously married parents through childhood. Children raised in households without fathers are simply far less likely to attend church as adults, and the same goes for children who suffered through a divorce.

With the percentage of babies born to unwed mothers rising from 10% in 1970 to 18% in 1980, 28% in 1990, 33% in 2000, and then peaking at 41% in 2007, and with divorce rising right along with it, we shouldn’t be surprised that declining church attendance followed in the wake of family dissolution. 

“What we have found overwhelmingly is that people who go to church grew up in basically the same family structure — 80% of everybody sitting in the pews on Sunday morning grew up in a home where a dad was present when he or she was a child, and the parents were married,” J.P. De Gance, founder of the nonprofit ministry Communio, recently said.

“When you plot it out in our study, the Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, we actually overlay these phenomena, and you see that the religious nonaffiliation grows in parallel at almost the same trajectory as the decline of the family grows. It’s just at about a 25-year time lag, which is what you would expect to see if family structure, and particularly the role of the dad, is so important,” De Gance continued.

But even if one concedes that the decline of marriage is the driving force behind the decline in religious belief, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the government caused the decline of marriage, instead of cultural changes, unless you can point to specific policy changes that drove the decline in marriage. And I think you can.

Between Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit, the Affordable Care Act, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and other programs, the federal government and the states spend over $1 trillion a year on means-tested welfare programs that actively punish marriage by cutting off or reducing benefits for mothers who want to get married.

In her otherwise anti-marriage book, All the Single Ladies, feminist Rebecca Traister recounts talking to a single mother named Emmalee who participated in the food stamps, Medicaid, and WIC programs.

“I’m able to survive. I get a little help from the government without being married,” Emmalee told Traister. “If I was married, I probably wouldn’t get that extra help from them.” Asked if the possibility of losing government benefits was “wholly” behind her decision not to marry, Emmalee responded, “Not my end result, but kind of yeah.”

There are millions of Emmalees out there who would probably otherwise be married but for social safety net marriage penalties.

And then there are the myriad other government policies that make it more difficult for young men and women to get and stay married. Male wages have always been a key to high marriage rates, and between 1979 and today, the median real wage for men actually fell 3%, with the real wage for those in the bottom 10% of earners falling by 8%. Some of this decline was caused by technology, but some of it was also caused by trade policies and lax immigration enforcement. Overregulation of the housing and energy sectors has also played a role.  

REPUBLICAN PROSECUTORS SAVE LIVES

Government cannot command belief, and no president can lead a religious revival. But government can stop undermining the institutions that make faith, marriage, and family more likely to flourish. It can remove marriage penalties from welfare, raise male wages through better trade and immigration policy, and lower the cost of building homes and starting families. 

Culture is not shaped by policy alone, but policy helps shape the conditions under which culture survives. If Washington wants a more connected and involved citizenry, one that is happier and has more children, it should enable a religious revival by making it easier for Americans to marry, stay married, and raise children in stable homes.