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.

There is another reason, I think, that the anti-Hamas demonstrations are gaining momentum, and that is the IDF’s decision to target both Hamas military commanders and members of the civilian government. By picking off the latter, it is undermining Hamas’s ability to govern, and showing that it is serious not just about achieving battlefield successes, but about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. Alas, many in the West still cling to the idea, propagated in the press for decades, that Hamas and similar groups have military and political “wings” that are entirely separate. Khaled Abu Toameh comments:

President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said last week that he does not rule out the possibility that the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas could be politically active in the Gaza Strip after it disarms. . . . This assumption, of course, is untrue and misleading.

There is no difference between a Hamas political leader and a military commander. They all share the same extremist ideology, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and calls for destroying it through jihad.

Put differently, it’s not just the means employed by Hamas (terrorism, mass murder, rape, kidnapping) that are evil, but the ends as well. And that brings us back to why undermining it politically—whether done by the IDF or by Palestinian protesters—is necessary:

Hamas’s political leaders are aware that they will not be able to play any role in the Gaza Strip without the presence of their armed wing. The military wing of Hamas is crucial for the survival of the group’s political leadership. The political leaders need the military wing to control the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, as they have been doing since their violent coup there in 2007.