Dr Brad Wilcox of Virginia University, (he spoke at an Iona Institute event last year), and Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin have a thought provoking column in the Wall Street Journal.

The column draws attention to the widening marriage and religion gap between the American working and middle classes and the hugely harmful effect of this on the working class.

While most people recognise that globalization has led to traditional industrial jobs being moved overseas, Wilcox and Cherlin point out that blue collar workers “are losing not only jobs but also their connections to basic social institutions such as marriage and religion”.

The working class, they point out, are “becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college-educated middle class”.

One metric they cite is the manner in which children in this demographic cohort are raised: “According to surveys by the National Center for Health Statistics, much of the recent rise in childbearing outside of marriage reflects a rise in births to cohabiting couples rather than to women living alone.

“The percentage of working-class women of all races who were cohabiting when they gave birth rose from 10% in the early 1990s to 27% in the mid-2000s—the largest increase of any educational group.

“These working-class couples still value marriage highly. But they don’t think they have what it takes to make a marriage work. Across all social classes, in fact, Americans now believe that a couple isn’t ready to marry until they can count on a steady income.

The problem with this, as they point out “is that cohabiting relationships don’t go the distance”.

“In fact, children who are born to cohabiting parents are more than twice as likely as children born to married parents to see their parents break up by age five. These break-ups are especially troubling because they are often followed by a relationship-go-round, where children are exposed to a bewildering array of parents’ partners and stepparents entering and exiting their home in succession,” Wilcox and Cherlin write.

By contrast, they point out college-educated Americans “are now living more traditional family and religious lives than their working-class peers”. The fact that more than 90 per cent of college-educated women are married when they give birth is just one indication of this.

The data also shows that the working class are losing their religion. According to figures from General Social Survey, conducted biennially by the US National Opinion Research Center, 35 per cent of working-class whites aged 25-45 attended religious services nearly every week in the 1970s, the same percentage as college-educated whites in that age group.

Today, the college-educated are the only group who attend services almost as frequently as they did in the 1970s.

Wilcox and Cherlin conclude by asking: “What happens, then, when the job-market conditions that once allowed most high-school-educated Americans to connect to the rest of society through hard work, marriage and religious participation no longer exist? Will working-class young adults begin to devalue marriage and religion, or will they fiercely hold onto these ideals because their values are all that they have left?

“Will their social disengagement leave them vulnerable to political appeals based on anger and fear? Will their multiple cohabiting unions and marriages prevent their children from developing a sense of attachment to others?”