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Late last year you may have seen the disconcerting report of marriage’s decline in America’s moderately educated middle class. It is no hyperbole to conclude that marriage is disappearing in Middle America. We already knew that the disintegrating nuclear family has resulted in a social crisis among the poor. But this news applies to a much larger swath of America: the 58 percent of adults who earned high-school diplomas but did not attend or finish college. During the 1970s, 73 percent of this group was married to their first spouse. During the 2000s, however, only 45 percent could say the same.

One other troubling statistic stood out: In 1982, 13 percent of children were born out-of-wedlock to moderately educated parents. That number has spiked during the last three decades to 44 percent, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and Chuck Donovan, senior research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.

As much as I don’t want to believe the grim truth, this dramatic change corresponds to anecdotal observation. The divorce epidemic among my parents’ generation devalued marriage among Generations X and Y. Social stigmas against cohabitation have largely disappeared. The two-parent family appears anachronistic to much of the American middle class.

There is one bright spot in the study, however. Wilcox and Donovan report that “marriage indicators are either stable or improving” for Americans who have graduated from four-year colleges. They connect both developments, positive and negative, to shifting patterns in religious observance.

“Since the 1970s, moderately educated Americans show the largest decline—fully 30 percent—in weekly attendance of religious services,” Wilcox and Donovan write. “The edge they once enjoyed in this regard has disappeared; Americans with four-year college degrees now attend church more regularly.”

Culture warriors have long contrasted the moral decadence and spiritual laxity of prosperous Americans with the simple but durable piety of the moderately educated middle class. That narrative no longer stands up to scrutiny as declining church attendance corresponds to devalued marriage. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat attributes some of the change to the crumbling influence of the Roman Catholic Church, once a pillar for immigrant working class families and communities through the early 20th century.

The same could be now said for the Protestant Midwest and South, two areas flush with moderately educated Americans whose ancestors claimed closer connections to the church and one another in mutually enriching ways. I reached out to several pastors working in the rural Midwest and asked them whether the marriage report accords with their experience. The results came as no surprise to these pastors.

“The fabric of the family is unraveling at an alarming rate,” said Chris Brauns, pastor of the Congregational Christian Church in Stillman Valley, Illinois. “Divorce is such a problem in the churches where I have served that if I so chose, I could have more than a full-time job working with couples in the midst of marital crises. Or I could have another full-time position working with children from divorced homes.”

Logistical problems compound churches’ ability to help couples struggling to deal with marital conflict, according to Jeff Higbie, pastor of Faith Evangelical Church in Underwood, North Dakota.

“In rural areas there isn’t the access to marital counseling that you have in larger areas,” Higbie said. “Our closest licensed counselor is 50 miles away, and the churches themselves tend to be less equipped to serve people in that way (i.e. solo pastors instead of a pastoral team with counseling experience).”

Blind Spot in Our Witness

The marriage report exposes much more than a social crisis in America. It reveals a blind spot in our evangelical witness. The sudden erosion of church attendance in rural and other middle-class areas has been easy to overlook, especially when compared to the need to reinvigorate churches in New England and accommodate migration patterns by planting new ones in the West. Evangelicals have wisely observed and acted on the need to plant churches in growing, prosperous suburbs. The same can be said for underserved cities that boast outsized cultural influence due to congregation of the so-called creative class. Christian colleges proliferate, and student ministries thrive everywhere from the largest state schools to the most exclusive private universities. Pastors plan during seminary studies to exercise their teaching gifts among highly educated congregations that can appreciate theological sophistication. Evangelicals have worked hard to shed our reputation as “poor, ignorant, and easily led.” We are “now one of America’s best-educated demographics,” according to Douthat.

With limited resources, church leaders must make hard decisions about where to devote their time and energy. A “successful” church in rural Illinois or North Dakota won’t grab much outside attention, because smaller populations guarantee they won’t grow very large. So wealthier suburbs and cities attract more resources, both financial and human. This challenge isn’t unique to the church. The same areas that now struggle to attract pastors also scramble to fill teaching positions and hospital rotations. Governments working to ensure their communities will survive have offered such professionals financial incentives, particularly educational debt forgiveness, if they will settle down and serve. Scarce funds make such programs difficult for churches to replicate.

Before we can plot a recovery, we must first acknowledge the problem. I’m afraid we’re still in denial. I talked to one Midwestern pastor about a nearby town of 20,000 people that he said is “churched out.” True enough, churches seemingly proliferate in this college town. Yet according another pastor serving in the community, surveys reveal only 25 percent of residents attend church weekly. Recognizing this need, church planters have attempted to start as many as ten different congregations in recent years. Not one has survived. Long-established churches, even with evangelical leadership, depend on cash reserves to survive year-to-year. Don’t be fooled by the number or apparent size of churches into thinking your community has been reached for the gospel.

No strategy can guarantee spiritual breakthrough in the unexpectedly rocky, depleted soil of America’s heartland. But we shouldn’t be surprised if this is where God chooses to unleash a powerful revival. Not many of the first Christian churches claimed even a middle class pedigree. Not many of the Corinthians “were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth,” according to the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 1:26). As we evangelicals try to show ourselves wise in the world’s eyes, let us not forget that God uses the foolish to shame the wise and the weak to shame the strong (1 Cor. 1:27).

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