Who is going to church in the US?

According to new research, college educated white Americans are more likely to practice religion than the working class.

While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for less educated, lower and lower-middle class whites compared to more educated and presumably more affluent whites.

The study suggests that college educated Americans are more conventional in their lifestyle than middle Americans.

The study, titled “No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class” was recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Las Vegas.

The study was conducted by sociologists Brad Wilcox, of the University of Virginia and Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University.

The figures represented those aged 25-44 and were gathered from two national surveys, the General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center, and the National Survey of Family Growth, which is conducted by the U.S. government’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The new study focused on white Americans because black and Latino religious worship is less divided by education and income, the researchers said.

Most whites who report a religious affiliation are Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainstream Protestant, Mormon or Jewish.

The study found that in the last four decades, monthly (or more) participation in religious services:

• Dropped from 50 percent to 37 percent of moderately educated (high school and perhaps some college) whites.
• Dropped from 38 percent to 23 percent of the least educated (high school dropouts).
• Barely dipped from 50 percent to 46 percent of higher-income whites with at least a bachelor’s degree

Cherlin and Wilcox attribute the falloff to two things:

• the deteriorating labor market position of the moderately educated,
• and cultural changes that have made non-marital family forms more acceptable.

The two researchers have differing world views.

Wilcox, who is affiliated with the Institute for American Values founded by David Blankenhorn, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, argues that the loosening of sexual and marital norms, and less restrictive divorce laws, have had disastrous effects on society — such as higher divorce rates, and extramarital sex — and have lessened religion’s influence on the average American.

Wilcox thinks part of the church-going falloff may be due to the reluctance of divorced people to join congregations where most people are married.

Cherlin tends to emphasize the impact of unemployment and wage struggle as a social disrupter. People who have been unemployment at some point over the last 10 years go to religious service less often, the researchers found.

Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, thinks there has been a general and widespread loss of faith, not just in religion, but in many institutions.