The Delay of Marriage and the Decline of Church Attendance

W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia has written a must-read article in the “Houses of Worship” column of The Wall Street Journal. Wilcox considers the impact of the expansion of the government sector in American society, concluding that as the “welfare state” expands, the church recedes as the source of needed charity and social services. Thus, as Wilcox notes, the expansion of the state is, in effect, a driving force behind the secularization of the society. On today’s program, Mohler notes that all of this suggests that the extension of adolescence into the twenties (maybe now even the thirties) is highly correlated with the rise of secularism and with lower rates of church attendance.