Faith Beyond Social Marginalization/ Steve Hamilton

This past week at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting, research was presented claiming that church attendance is dropping dramatically among Americans without a college degree.  This trend and the research overall has puzzled some sociologists and popular secularists who tend to believe that the more educated a person is the less religious they will be.  In fact, University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist Philip Schwadel found that this isn't true at all, "It all falls down to what you consider to be religious.  If it's simply attending religious services, then no, highly educated people are not less religious; in fact, they're more religious."  Was that another East Coast earthquake or did something just move unexpectedly?
 
W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, who was lead researcher on the project, reported that 37% of moderately educated whites - those with high school degrees but who lack degrees from four-year colleges - attend religious services at least monthly, down from 50% in the 1970s.  Interestingly enough, the study focuses on white Americans because church attendance among Black and Hispanic populations are less divided by education and income.  Yes, income and education seem to matter vis-a-vis church attendance, but equally interesting is that the study theorizes that lower church attendance among the less educated may stem from a disconnect between them and modern church values.  The researchers claim that religious institutions tend to promote traditional middle-class, suburban family values like education, marriage and parenthood, while less educated whites are less likely to get or stay married and may feel ostracized by their religious peers.  “This development reinforces the social marginalization of less educated Americans who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work,” said Andrew Cherlin, co-author of the study and a professor of sociology and public policy at the Johns Hopkins University.

So, I'm wondering what hits you about this new research?  What does this community think about the social marginalization of the less educated and the religiosity of the educated?  There have been sporadic conversations here about diversity - mostly along racial or ethnic lines, but two areas where diversity seems to be missing from this conversation - in my opinion - are education and income, i.e. are the poor with us in our churches?  What about those with less education?  As we've mentioned previously, we probably have some diversity in terms of Stage theory and what stage people are inhabiting in our churches (although maybe not), because I think that Stage 4 churches make room for people at multiple stages to belong.  Beyond just diversity, what do we think is going on here with this trend?  And how would a centered-set revival move us beyond this social marginalization?