For a better life, make friends at church

The never-ending quest to understand why some people are more easily able than others to achieve the American Dream has a new, intriguing wrinkle.

It’s not just where you attend school, where you live or your family structure (although, the last of those matters tremendously) that determines whether and how upwardly economically mobile you will become.

Your friendships matter, too, specifically if they cut across socioeconomic lines; that is, if you develop relationships with people who are richer than you.

That’s one of the major takeaways of new research from a group of academics, including Harvard University economist Raj Chetty.

Chetty and his colleagues examined the social networks of 72.2 million Facebook users ages 25 to 44 and made some interesting observations about how personal connections foster mobility.

They found that children raised in environments with a higher rate of friendships between people of low and high socioeconomic status have much higher rates of upward mobility. That means, as Chetty explained in The New York Times, they have a much better shot of rising out of poverty.

Forging those friendships, however, isn’t always easy — and not always because people are reticent to make friends across socioeconomic lines.

The researchers found, for example, that people of lower socioeconomic status tend to develop most of the relationships within their neighborhoods, where there is less socioeconomic diversity.

Wealthier people tend to make lasting friendships in college, where the same is often true.

That’s what the researchers call an “exposure” issue.

What’s interesting, however, is that when poorer people attend college and therefore increase their exposure to people of higher socioeconomic status, they are still less likely to form friendships with their wealthier peers, a phenomenon the researchers call “friending bias.”

It turns out that friending bias is high not only in neighborhoods but also in some recreational activities, such as sports, which tend to reinforce socioeconomic segregation.

But friending bias isn’t present everywhere, because institutional structure appears to play a role in how friendships are formed.

Where is friending bias the lowest? Religious institutions.

The researchers found friending bias to be negative in religious groups “because religious-group friendships do not exhibit substantial homophily (the tendency to form strong social bonds with people who share one’s defining characteristics) by socioeconomic status.”

In fact, poorer people are about 20 percent more likely to befriend a wealthier person in their religious groups than in their neighborhoods.

That shouldn’t be a novel finding for anyone who is part of a community of faith.

Shared faith supersedes the temporal, making it easier, even natural, to form meaningful connections based on things other than socioeconomic status.

Or as Brad Wilcox, a sociologist and director of the National Marriage Project, noted on Twitter, cross-class relationships are more easily forged when “a common ethos/end/telos undergirds such friendships.”

God is a stronger bond than where you live, go to school or play baseball.

That suggests, at the very least, that churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious institutions have something crucial to teach us about relationships.

Of course, breaking through socioeconomic barriers is not as simple as just befriending the people with whom you regularly attend religious services.

As the study authors (and plenty of other data) point out, religious institutions are often, but not always, relatively homogeneous in terms of the socioeconomic status of their members.

That makes some sense, as many churches draw from the neighborhoods that surround them.

But there are plenty of churches, like my own, which (for doctrinal and other reasons) draw people from far afield.

These “commuter” churches naturally engender substantial socioeconomic diversity. So, they increase economic connection and foster integration — circumstances that the researchers found increase upward mobility.

While there is already copious evidence of the value religious institutions bring to society, this latest research provides one more. It may help increase upward mobility (your own and that of those around you), in addition to saving your soul.

Sounds like a win to me.