Must read analysis by Charles Murray of the American culture shift

This lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray of AEI provides a great analysis of what’s been happening since the 1960s.  Here’s one point he identifies that flies in the face of an often taught and held social belief.

Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown [the generalized working class he uses to represent the statistics he’s analyzed] has become much more secular than Belmont [the representative upper class]. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

For example, suppose we define "de facto secular" as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29% of Belmont and 38% of Fishtown fell into that category. Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont, from 29% in the 1970s to 40% in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010. But it grew even more in Fishtown, from 38% to 59%.

Wow, that’s an 11% increase in secularization compared to a 21% increase in secularization.  And, the working class is identified as a group 50% larger than the upper class or a group having a one-third larger share of the population than the upper class identified in the study.