Church attendance is the most important predictor of marital stability and happiness.
Regular church attendance is particularly instrumental in helping young people to escape poverty, drugs, crime, welfare dependency and unwed pregnancy. Further, states with more religious populations tend to have fewer homicides and suicides. Even among the 13 percent who call themselves agnostics or atheists, some 20 percent pray daily. The Christian notion of charity is frequently confused with the redistribution of income and wealth that occurs in the modern welfare state. The latter, suggests Jennifer Roback Morse, is morally and spiritually corrupting not only to recipients, but to the rest of society by reducing compassion for the less fortunate.