Empirical studies strongly suggest that people who attend church or who participate in community institutions have better lives and are more productive citizens. The result is less crime, less broken families, less teenage parents, higher household income, more educational achievement. All of these positive consequences have a significant impact upon the health of our communities and therefore, in aggregate, the Country. It will also increase civic knowledge, community participation and hastens assimilation for the new Americans among us.
So what is that worth? And is there a reasonable Return on Investment to encourage it?
We know that there is a positive economic benefit to participate in community institutions, but religious and civic participation is in steep secular decline. Today, many progressives consider institutional community participation as quaint and old-fashioned, or “people clinging to their Bibles…” Thus, the paucity of institutional community participation has enabled the metastasis of a number social ills. In Coming Apart, Charles Murray asserts:
“Religion’s role as a source of social capital is [substantial]. ‘As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows that nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. Religious worshipers — and people who say religion is very important to them — are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; social fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups and other miscellaneous groups.’
Apart from augmenting social capital, churches serve specifically as a resource for sustaining a democratic citizenry. Various studies have found that active involvement in church serves as a […] training center for […] civic skills. All of these relationships hold true even after controlling for demographic and socio-economic variables.
[…]Over the last few decades, social scientists […] have been building a rigorous literature on these issues. […] People who attend church regularly and report that religion is an important part of their lives have longer life expectancies, less disability in old age, and more stable marriages. […] There is a strong evidence for the relationship of religiosity to happiness and satisfaction with life, self-esteem, less depression, and less substance abuse. The list goes on, including many positive outcomes for children raised by religious parents.”
Given the somewhat obvious social impact for good, from which all of society benefits, why not encourage it? This author proposes that we provide certain recompense to the average citizen to participate. Let us pay them for it.
Technology makes this possible. We all already carry tracking devices that register our location round the clock, our mobile phones. Applications such as Facebook, Google Plus, Foursquare etc., can easily register attendance automatically. (This author finds it disturbing that a Google Search for a local store will show how many times one has visited the store and the actual dates of each occurrence!). We could compensate for each attendance to a community organization -- approved in advance by our local community State or local governments — by tax credits. One would not receive cash, but each attendance could yield, say, twenty dollars of deductible tax credits, or one thousand dollars on the year (capped).
Of course these numbers are arbitrary, but the presumed return on investment would be enormous. How can we put a value on increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, less crime, less family dysfunction, more happiness? The economic and spiritual windfall would redound immediately to the citizenry.
Church, by the way is a euphemism for community engagement. Civic attendance could include the Mosque, the Synagogue, the Masons, the Greek Fraternities, the Atheists, the Anti-Theists or all manner of human engagement and social philanthropy. (In this author’s opinion Atheism and anti-theism are ‘religions’ based upon euclidean logic). I proffer to those who would not believe in God to go to church anyway. Attend service with a collection of people who just want to find ways to be a little bit better, a little taller, if not every day, then every week. For those who do not believe, it would help, that in any mention of God, or Prayer, in sentence or in service, one substitutes the word ‘Love’ for the word ‘God;’ and ‘Hope’ for ‘Prayer.’ In that case there would be fewer, if any, non-believers.