By W. Bradford Wilcox


America’s churches are in trouble, and they are in trouble in communities that arguably need them the most.

One of the tragic tales told by Harvard scholar Robert Putnam in his important new book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” is that America’s churches have grown weakest in some of the communities that need them most: poor and working-class communities across the country. The way he puts it, our nation’s churches, synagogues and mosques give children a sense of meaning, belonging and purpose — in a word, hope — that allows them to steer clear of trouble, from drugs to delinquency, and toward a bright and better future, warmer family relationships and significantly higher odds of attending college.

The tragedy is that even though religious involvement “makes a bigger difference in the lives of poor kids than rich kids,” Putnam writes, involvement is dropping off fastest among children from the least privileged background, as the figure below indicates.

The picture of religion painted by Putnam, a political scientist and the foremost scholar of American civic life, is part of a broader canvass in his book showing that kid-friendly institutions — not just churches, but also strong families and strong schools — are withering, but almost entirely in less-affluent communities. American children from better-educated and more affluent homes enjoy decent access to churches, families and schools, which lifts their odds of realizing the American Dream, even as kids from less-privileged homes are increasingly disconnected from these key institutions, making the American Dream that much more difficult for them to pursue.

Why is it that the country is witnessing not only a religious decline, but one that is concentrated among its most vulnerable men, women and children? Four factors stand out in understanding the emptying out of the pews in working-class and poor communities across the United States: money, TV, sex and divorce.

Money matters

In “Our Kids,” Putnam assigns much of the blame for the unraveling of America’s religious, communal and familial fabric to shift from an industrial to an information economy. The 1970s saw declines in employment for less-educated men, divergent incomes for college-educated and less-educated men, and a “breathtaking increase in inequality” — all of which left college-educated families and their communities with more financial resources, and poor and working-class communities with fewer resources. The figure below, taken from Nicholas Eberstadt’s essay on men’s employment, shows that work dropped precipitously for men in the 1970s.

A key reason that working-class men are now less likely to attend church is that they cannot access the kind of stable, good-paying jobs that sustain a “decent” lifestyle and stable, married family life — two key ingredients associated with churchgoing in America.

But the retreat from religion stems from much more than money, my research (with colleagues) suggests. Consider, as the figure below shows, that dramatic declines in religious attendance began in the 1960s,well before the economic factors stressed by Putnam kicked in a decade later.

The timing of religious declines — paralleled and reinforced by the retreatfrom marriage that also began in the 1960s, leaving more and more kids in single-parent homes — suggests that America’s religious and familial capital was suffering well before the economic shocks of the 1970s.

The rise of television

Ironically, one of the best guides to the non-economic factors driving the nation’s retreat from religion is none other than… Robert Putnam. In his 2000 blockbuster, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” he pointed to the growing popularity of TV over the past five decades as a major “ringleader” behind declining rates of civic engagement, including religious attendance. Television and the pop culture encouraged “lethargy and passivity” and “materialist values,” which are both in tension with a vibrant religious life.

What Putnam largely overlooked in the “Bowling Alone” discussion of TV, however, was the class angle: Television viewing was (and is) dramatically higher among working-class and poor Americans. The growing presence and power of TV, then, could have taken a large toll on churches serving less-affluent Americans.

Sex, culture wars and divorce

In another book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” Putnam and David Campbell chronicled the immediate and long-term religious fallout connected to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s — from the sexual revolution to the divorce revolution.

In the immediate wake of the sexual revolution, many young adults steered clear of churchgoing, sensing a tension between their own experiences with “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” and traditional religious life. In more recent years, the culture wars that emerged from the 1960s — over sex, abortion and gay marriage — have left many young adults viewing religion as an intolerant force they want nothing to do with: In Putnam and Campbell’s words, many “[young] Americans came to view religion… as judgmental, hypocritical, and too political.”

But, again, Putnam and Campbell miss the class angle. The divorce revolution has had a particularly devastating toll on lower-income family life and relationships. Not only was divorce higher among working-class and poor families in the wake of the divorce revolution, but the children of divorce have proven less likely to attend church than their peers from intact families.

The tumult in families during the past four decades helps account for the growing detachment of working-class Americans from churches, my research suggests. The legacy of the divorce revolution has fueled a pervasive “crisis of trust” in working-class relationships, as David and Amber Lapp have noted, that corrodes young adults’ faith in people, marriage and other institutions — including the church. The family fallout, then, of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s seems to have significantly damaged the vitality of religious life in poor and working-class communities across America.

The fragility of contemporary religious life in working-class and poor communities in America is rooted not only in the “economic hammer blows” dealt to communities by the new economy, but also in the technological and cultural changes that have undercut the virtues, values and institutions that sustain churches, synagogues and mosques — including strong and stable marriages and families.

Efforts to revive religious life in our nation’s most vulnerable communities must not only address the declining economic prospects of working-class and poor young adults, but also seek ways to revive the relational climates in these communities. Holistic approaches are the best way to bridge the religious divide now separating “our kids” when it comes to connecting them to the social and spiritual goods associated with religious life in America.



W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, is the co-author of Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Twentysomething Marriage. Wilcox also serves as a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.

Dean Hess, Preacher and Fighter Pilot, Dies at 97


By SAM ROBERTS

MARCH 7, 2015


Dean Hess, a flying preacher who unwittingly bombed a German orphanage during World War II and six years later helped rescue hundreds of Korean foundlings endangered by Communist troops converging on Seoul, died on Monday at his home in Huber Heights, Ohio, near Dayton. He was 97.

His death, after a short illness, was confirmed by his son Lawrence.

As a young minister of the Disciples of Christ Church, Mr. Hess preached his first sermon at 16 and flew a Piper Cub as he hopscotched from parish to parish in the Midwest. But after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he decided to enlist in the Aviation Cadet Program.

The church elders were incredulous. But he recalled telling them: “If we believe our cause is just and necessary, how in all conscience can I ask others to protect it — and me — while I keep clean of the gory mess of war?”

His wartime exploits — he flew more than 300 combat missions over Europe and Korea and retired as a lieutenant colonel — were immortalized in an autobiography, “Battle Hymn,” and a movie of the same name. (“Wing and a Prayer” was taken.) He was played by Rock Hudson.

Photo
In World War II, Col. Hess unwittingly bombed an orphanage. CreditU.S. Air ForceHe was also a consultant to the film and, for the airborne scenes, flew the plane at the center of the story: an F-51 bearing the number 18 and, on the engine cowling, Korean characters that translated as “By faith I fly.”

After enlisting, he was sent to France in 1944 and flew 63 combat missions there for the Army Air Forces. On one, he wrote in “Battle Hymn,” he was strafing railroad yards at Kaiserslautern, Germany, when a 1,000-pound bomb he had dropped overshot its target and struck a brick apartment building. Dozens were killed.

“A little hole appeared in the wall from the penetration of the bomb casing, and a moment later the insides of the building spilled out,” he wrote.

Sometime later, driving a jeep through Kaiserslautern, he learned that the blackened shell of the building that his bomb had destroyed had been an orphanage and a school for hundreds of children of local war workers. He tried not to look.

“But it seemed to stare at me like some malevolent eye,” he wrote. “I wondered if beneath the piles of bricks a few small bodies still lay, as yet undiscovered.”

After the war, he earned a master’s degree in European history at Ohio University and was working on his doctorate at Ohio State in 1948 when the military recalled him. (By then the Army Air Forces had become the Air Force, a separate branch.)

He was deployed to Korea, ostensibly to train the fledgling South Korean Air Force, but there was no keeping him out of combat — or from intervening to provide relief for starving and homeless children orphaned by the war.

According to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, Colonel Hess; Lt. Col. Russell L. Blaisdell, a command chaplain; Staff Sgt. Merle Strang; and other Fifth Air Force airmen and Korean social workers started what they called Operation Kiddy Car.

They rounded up orphans in Seoul, found them shelter and medical care, and collected contributions of food, clothing and cash. After commandeering 16 C-54 transports, they evacuated the children from Incheon to Jeju, an island off the southern Korean coast where Colonel Hess helped establish an orphanage.

President Syngman Rhee of South Korea awarded him a medal in 1951. Colonel Hess later donated the proceeds from the book and film to support a second orphanage near Seoul and adopted a 5-year-old Korean girl in 1960.

A reporter for The Air Force Times once conjectured that Operation Kiddy Car represented atonement of sorts for the accidental bombing in Germany.

“I do not know,” Colonel Hess said. Of course, anyone would be sympathetic to the plight of children, he said, but added, “At the time of the bombing, it seemed like just another mission, accomplished with a degree of success because at least one bomb had found its intended target in the railroad yard.”

As he flew back to France from Kaiserslautern, he recalled, he wondered whether he had killed anyone, but was more concerned about whether he had fulfilled his mission. “If I was suffering,” he wrote, “it was in some remote and subconscious part of my mind; for when I became a combatant, it was with the full knowledge that I had to accept killing in behalf of the way of life I had sworn to protect.”

Dean Elmer Hess was born on Dec. 6, 1917, in Marietta, Ohio. His father, Lemuel, was the city government’s electrician. His mother, the former Florence Miller, was a homemaker. Mr. Hess was a graduate of Marietta College.

After returning from Korea, Colonel Hess served in recruiting and public affairs roles until he retired from the Air Force in 1969. He later taught high school economics, history and psychology in Ohio. He never returned to the ministry. Besides his son Lawrence, he is survived by two other sons, Edward and Ronald; a daughter, Marilyn Hess; seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife, the former Mary Lorentz, died in 1996.

Lawrence Hess said his father had grown up wanting to be a pastor. According to an article in Life magazine in 1957, when the film “Battle Hymn” was released, Colonel Hess once said his life so far — it was not even half over — had been a confluence of flying and faith.

“Flight brought me many times closer to God,” he said.

By RACHEL FEINTZEIG

 

Feb. 24, 2015 7:39 p.m. ET

Travelzoo Inc. ’s 438 employees spend their days trying to find customers a good deal on flight and hotel packages. To hear managers describe their work in meetings, however, booking a customer on a cheap trip to the Caribbean can serve a higher purpose: helping someone get over the death of a loved one or meet a future spouse.

“If we all traveled, there would be significantly more peace on Earth,” Travelzoo Chief Executive Chris Loughlin said he has told employees.

Can a job just be a job? Not anymore.

Faced with a cadre of young workers who say they want to make a difference in addition to a paycheck, employers are trying to inject meaning into the daily grind, connecting profit-driven endeavors to grand consequences for mankind.

In part, professionals are demanding more meaning from their careers because work simply takes up more of life than before, thanks to longer hours, competitive pressures and technological tethers of the modern job. Meanwhile, traditional sources of meaning and purpose, such as religion, have receded in many corners of the country.

Companies have long cited lofty mission statements as proof they have concerns beyond the bottom line, and in the past decade tech firms like Google Inc. attracted some of the economy’s brightest workers by inviting recruits to come and change the world by writing lines of code or managing projects.

Now, nearly every product or service from motorcycles to Big Macs seems capable of transforming humanity, at least according to some corporations. The words “mission,” “higher purpose,” “change the world” or “changing the world” were mentioned on earnings calls, in investor meetings and industry conferences 3,243 times in 2014, up from 2,318 five years ago, according to a Factiva search.

A Kohl’s Corp. executive said at an investor conference last year that if the retailer’s associates “can truly relate their work to some higher purpose,” they will sell more sweaters and handbags.

And at a Harley-Davidson Motor Co. investor event in 2013, the company’s marketing chief said “there is a higher purpose to the Harley-Davidson brand that is more than motorcycles.”

Meaning and purpose is a “fallow asset” that firms can tap to boost staff loyalty and engagement, said Bruce Pfau, who oversees consulting giant KPMG’s human-resources department in the U.S.

That firm is trying to imbue accounting with world-changing sweep, launching a campaign to boost employee retention and outside recruiting that highlights the broader purpose of number-crunching for major corporations.

The initiative kicked off with a video featuring company leaders that boasts of the firm’s hand in the election of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa, the launch of NASA’s first space station and the release of Iranian hostages in 1981.

“We can see ourselves as bricklayers or cathedral builders,” said Global Chairman John Veihmeyer in the video. The company held a contest for U.S. employees to share stories and design digital posters touting the bigger impact of their jobs, and it netted 42,000 submissions.

In an interview, Mr. Veihmeyer said it can be tougher to convince an auditor of his or her higher purpose—“helping to sustain confidence in the capital markets”—compared with, say, the meaning a doctor feels when caring for patients.

Siobhan Kiernan, a KPMG manager, acknowledged that she’s not a brain surgeon or a scientist. But she is helping some of those people do their taxes.

“I can take the worry of doing their tax returns off their mind,” she said, explaining a poster she made for the contest that reads “I support advancements in medicine.”

Plenty of employees are fine with being a cog rather than a cathedral builder. About one-third of individuals feel their work is a calling, according to Amy Wrzesniewski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management.

Those who can connect their work to a higher purpose—whether they are a janitor or a banker—tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, put in longer hours and rack up fewer absences, according to Ms. Wrzesniewski’s research.

But for the two-thirds who view their job as a paycheck or a necessary rung on the corporate ladder, campaigns around meaning can highlight the fact that those workers don’t derive deep meaning from work, Ms. Wrzesniewski said.

“It’s trying to put lipstick on the pig,” she added.

One KPMG tax employee based in Philadelphia, speaking anonymously to avoid offending his bosses, described the video as “over the top,” and said it got him thinking about the lack of meaning in his day job. The campaign and poster contest prompted questions like, “If I want to really make a change, why would I sit here?” he said, adding that it reinforced his hunch that he would have to leave the company to really do good in the world.

An October survey by the company found that employees whose managers talked about KPMG’s impact on society were 42.4% more likely to describe the firm as a great place to work. Of those with managers who talked up meaning, 68% indicated they rarely think about looking for a new job outside KPMG; that share fell to 38% for employees whose managers didn’t discuss meaning.

Juniper Networks Inc. has spent much of the past year cutting costs, laying off workers and fending off activist shareholders. Two days after announcing a fourth-quarter loss, managers at the technology company gathered hundreds of employees in a massive tent it calls the “aspiration dome.”

“Certainly, we build awesome routers and switches,” CEO Rami Rahim said at the Jan. 29 meeting, according to transcript excerpts provided by the company. “But what we are doing really is enabling researchers to find cures for deadly diseases. We are enabling scientists to bring clean tech energies that make this planet a better place. We are bringing education to Third World countries.”

The company has asked 500 of its most connected employees—workers identified by peers as being trusted helpers and confidantes—to meet with groups of 20 to 25 colleagues about the company’s mission. Afterward, the “connectors” share tidbits of the conversations on Juniper’s internal social network, said Chris Ernst, a company executive.

“When you have 9,000 people who are committed to something much bigger than themselves, they’re going to get through lots of ups and downs,” Mr. Ernst said.

A shared sense of purpose motivates and unites the employees scattered at Travelzoo’s offices around the world, according to Mr. Loughlin, who said its deals have brought joy to an ill customer and preserved hospitality industry jobs during the economic crash. Employees recently produced a video in which workers’ testimonials about being part of something greater than themselves are set over swells of electronic music.

Still, Mr. Loughlin said a top employee recently told him that she doesn’t come to work to have fun.

“For her, it’s a job,” he said. “Not everyone wants to change the world.”

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at [email protected]