But as religious conservatives have climbed the educational ladder, American churches seem to be having trouble reaching the people left behind. This is bad news for both Christianity and the country. The reinforcing bonds of strong families and strong religious communities have been crucial to working-class prosperity in America. Yet today, no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the “moderately educated middle” (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class.
As a result, the long-running culture war arguments about how to structure family life (Should marriage be reserved for heterosexuals? Is abstinence or “safe sex” the most responsible way to navigate the premarital landscape?) look increasingly irrelevant further down the educational ladder, where sex and child-rearing often take place in the absence of any social structures at all.
This, in turn, may be remembered as the great tragedy of the culture war: While college-educated Americans battle over what marriage should mean, much of the country may be abandoning the institution entirely.
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Add to this picture, the fact that the Anglican churches in North America (the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, the Anglican Church of Canada, and more recent Anglican bodies) historically have for a variety of reasons not done well in rural areas and small towns and among the lower classes, have focused their efforts upon the more affluent, more educated, and more urban upper middle classes, and consider the implications. Is the formation of 1000 new Anglican churches over a period of 5 years for which ACNA Archbishop Bob Duncan has called going to play a stabilizing role in the lives of the working class and other less educated segments of the North American population? Or will it have no effect upon these population groups at all?
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