Simply put, any anti-poverty efforts not aimed at getting kids to complete an education, get married, and stay married are a waste of time. They may ameliorate immediate physical needs, but the very act of ameliorating those needs renders a destructive lifestyle sustainable and viable.

It is past time to admit a very hard truth: America’s poverty problem is also a depravity problem.

It is simply a fact that people who work hard, finish their education, get married, and stay married are rarely — very rarely — poor. There is no other proven formula for lifting Americans out of poverty. None. Food stamps don’t do it. Medicaid doesn’t do it. Soup kitchens don’t do it. Good intentions don’t do it. Hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments have not budged the poverty rate.

Simply put, any anti-poverty efforts not aimed at getting kids to complete an education, get married, and stay married are a waste of time. They may ameliorate immediate physical needs, but the very act of ameliorating those needs renders a destructive lifestyle sustainable and viable.

Walter Russell Mead reminded me of this reality in a must-read post discussing some rather sobering sociological findings. It turns out that poor, less-educated Americans are turning their backs on religion at a far greater rate than more-educated Americans. Here are the key findings:

The study also shows that Americans with higher incomes attend religious services more often, and those who have experienced unemployment at some point over the past 10 years attend less often. In addition, the study finds that those who are married (especially if they have children), those who hold more conservative views toward premarital sex, and those who lost their virginity later than their peers, attend religious services more frequently.

Indeed, the study points out that modern religious institutions tend to promote a family-centered morality that valorizes marriage and parenthood, and they embrace traditional middle-class virtues such as self-control, delayed gratification, and a focus on education.

Over the past 40 years, however, the moderately educated have become less likely to hold familistic beliefs and less likely to get and stay married, compared to college-educated adults.

In other words, vicious and virtuous cycles exist simultaneously. For the least-educated, the less they attend church the less they’re exposed to “middle-class values,” which causes them to engage in behaviors that further alienate them from church. For the educated, the cycle is the reverse. The church reinforces the values that permit them to maintain middle-class standing, which keeps them within the “familistic” culture — and in church.

The result is a set of competing cultures, with social mobility defined primarily by the adoption of the behavioral practices of the opposing cultures.

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