Religious community as civic resilience

Updated: 2026.09.22 1H ago 2 sources
Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study finds Latter‑day Saints report very high rates of volunteering, formal congregation roles and interpersonal support assignments, concentrated in the Mountain West and among more educated members. These organized, routinized communal ties correlate with higher social trust and could substitute for or complement local public services. — If faith communities supply durable civic capacity, they change how we should think about local service delivery, political mobilization, and resilience to social shocks.

Sources

Latter-day Saints have strong communal ties and high social trust
Beshay Sakla 2026.09.22 100% relevant
Religious Landscape Study (2023–24) finding that 72% of Latter‑day Saints volunteered in the past 12 months and that volunteering is 91% among those with a bachelor’s degree or more.
Latter-day Saints: Happy in their family lives, traditional in gender roles
Beshay Sakla 2026.09.22 70% relevant
Pew reports strong communal ties and high social trust among Latter‑day Saints, concrete markers of civic resilience (family practices, weekly family nights, higher rates of child religious engagement); these social‑capital signals map directly onto the idea that dense religious communities buttress local civic capacity and trust.
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