Study: Faith-Based Friendships Create More Engaged Citizens
May 22nd, 2009USA, May 13, 2009: A study has shown that people who form friendships through their religion are three to four times more likely than others to be better citizens — in terms of secular participation in the community and the government.
Harvard University professor Robert Putnam and University of Notre Dame scholar David Campbell discussed their study at a recent conference hosted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. They believe the link between religion and civic activism is causal, since they observed that people who hadn’t attended church became more engaged after they did.
This is because of the relationships people make in their churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that draw them into community activism. “Being asked to do something by a member of your congregation is different from being asked to do something by a member of your bowling league,” Putnam said.
But Putnam says young Americans are “vastly more secular” than their elders, because they’re turned off by how political American religion has become. Religion in America–particularly evangelicalism–began to drop off in the 1990s after the political ascendance of the religious right, according to Putnam and Campbell.
