Noting the quickening decline of religious faith and practice in the U.S., Karl Zinsmeister warns of dire social consequences and urges creative philanthropic solutions:

Even the non-religious should worry about this shift, because society benefits from religiously inspired humanitarian behavior. Those with a religious affiliation give several times as much money to charity as other Americans. The ratio of Americans doing volunteer work in a typical week is 45 percent among weekly churchgoers and 27 percent among non-churchgoers. Decades of research have shown that a greater proportion of religious people get involved in community groups. They have stronger links with their neighbors and are more engaged with their families. . . .

Religious participation also has salutary effects on personal behavior. One classic study found that black males living in inner-city poverty tracts were far less likely to engage in crime and drug use if they attended church and likelier to succeed in school and the workforce. The religious are less poor and less suicidal; they have stronger families. . . .

Concerned citizens should take some cues from the charter-school movement. [For instance, donors could make] investments to beef up the best seminaries, plus fresh approaches like night classes and video instruction that can reach unconventional candidates for the ministry—such as those with job and family responsibilities. . . .

And just as with charters, American civil-society leaders could boost religious behavior by making investments in facilities. Many of the grand, visually inspiring cathedrals and synagogues in the cores of U.S. cities are now occupied by vestigial congregations. . . . Private efforts offering purchase or renovation funds to enable a reallocation of [such houses of worship] from waning religious communities to growing ones would be a boost to social well-being in cities.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.