The Suburbanization of Catholicism
Crabgrass Catholicism, gambling degeneracy, smoking deaths, and more in this week's digest.
I’m in the midst of the most intense travel period I’ve had since leaving the consulting industry. I’m planning to continue posting, but be aware that I might have some disruptions from travel over the next few weeks.
Mass at the Drive-In Theater
My debut article for the Hedgehog Review is now online in their Spring issue. It’s a review of the book Crabgrass Catholicism (buy the book) about the suburbanization of Catholics on Long Island.
Before the war, American Catholics were largely concentrated in cities. Arriving through Ellis Island in the waves of immigration that reached its climax between 1890 and 1920, they formed strongly ethnic communities, whether in traditional territorial parishes or specifically national ones—Polish, Italian, Irish. Catholicism was thus deeply intertwined with ethnicity. Koeth writes, “In an era of rapid urbanization Catholic immigrants built American city life by fusing the neighborhood with the ethnic parish which was dominated by its priests and religious sisters, centered on its church and school, and bound together by its communal worship and devotions.”
In the suburbs, that old order could no longer hold. Suburban residential patterns were organized more on socioeconomic rather than ethnic lines, against a backdrop of racial exclusion of blacks. “Postwar suburbanization helped complete the amalgamation of various ethnically inflected forms of Catholicism into one religiously identified body of American Catholicism,” Koeth explains. This meant an end to the variegated forms of Catholicism that were ethnic specific in favor of adopting the Irish style of Church. It also meant a shift from thick networks of extended family in the ethnic city neighborhoods to a nuclear-family orientation in the suburbs. According to Koeth, “The suburbs were also comprised of single-family houses in which, especially in the earliest days of suburban development, a single generation of young veterans lived with their wives and children cut off from the extended family networks that long held the ethnic parish together.”
Click over to read the whole thing.
You may recall my podcast with Chris Briem, author of the economic history of Pittsburgh Beyond Steel. I also have a column taking a look at that book over at Governing.
A Year as a Degenerate Gambler
The Atlantic gave one of its writers $10,000 to gamble on sports sites. The result was a fantastic cover story on sports betting (gift link).
Laws varied by state and century, but the practice always came with a healthy social stigma, one rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom. To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.” As a result, gambling was largely contained to certain disreputable corners of society, such as riverboats, red‑light districts, and Nevada. For a time, it was the near‑exclusive province of leg‑breaking bookies and pin-striped criminals.
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Virtually every sports-media outlet in America, from CBS Sports to your favorite niche football podcaster, takes sponsorship money from gambling companies. ESPN now recaps the day’s games by covering which teams beat the spread; gambling talk pervades pregame studio panels. Every major TV network now seems to employ a data whiz with glasses and rolled-up sleeves who can break down the betting angles for viewers at home.
The leagues, initially so opposed to legalized sports betting, embraced it to help reverse sliding TV ratings and lure back the younger fans who were drifting away. Before long, they found themselves beholden to the industry they’d helped create. Now the NFL, the NBA, and MLB all have large equity stakes in the data companies that power the sportsbooks. They license broadcast rights directly to sportsbook-operated streaming services, and hurry to defend their partners whenever a game-fixing scandal breaks. “Gambling touches everything,” the former ESPN reporter Joon Lee recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “The betting apps are in charge now, and everyone knows it. The leagues are hostage to the forces they unleashed.”
In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion—and once you’re hooked, the list of sporting events you can gamble on is seemingly endless.
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Now, with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket, gambling options are no longer limited to sports. Live-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election coverage. In 2026, you can gamble on how warm it will get in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the winner of the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and how much money Avatar: Fire and Ash will gross, and the date of Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life being discovered, and how many people will be deported from the United States, and the prospect of Iranian regime change, and the chances that Donald Trump declares martial law before his term ends, and whether Jesus Christ will return to Earth this year.
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In truth, I was beginning to wonder about what Annie had said to me at church. I had always told people that I didn’t have an addictive personality, believing that to be so. Now I had to consider a different possibility: Maybe I had simply constructed a life with strong enough guardrails that I’d never had to test the premise.
What would happen to me, I wondered, if those guardrails were removed?
Click over to read the whole thing.
The Great Smoking Divide
There’s an interesting article in the Harvard Gazette on how smoking divides America. Apparently smoking is a big predictor in the life expectancy gap between places.
Working with colleagues from Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Ellen Meara of the Harvard Chan School sought to shed light on the gap in mortality among Americans 25 to 64, which widened from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019. The work included close scrutiny of several potential drivers, including “deaths of despair,” the changing composition of college graduates, and globalization. The variable that best fits the evidence, the researchers say, is tobacco use: “Smoking emerges as an exceptionally powerful predictor of mortality trends.”
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“Deaths of despair” — largely understood as mortality linked to suicide and alcohol and drug abuse — is another hypothesis that you say doesn’t answer this question. Why not?
Deaths of despair are clearly an important cause of death at ages 25 to 64, but not as important in this “place” story. Even removing “deaths of despair,” the growing mortality divide by education and place remains large. In many high-income places, like here in New England, rising drug-related death offsets dramatic declines in deaths from other causes. Although deaths of despair contribute to premature deaths, these trends are swamped by trends in mortality due to causes like cancer or cardiovascular disease, especially among people older than 50. And since the vast majority of midlife deaths occur after 50, deaths of despair do not explain the growing mortality inequality across places.
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We are very interested in rural-urban differences. Historically, rural areas were always healthier. This is part of the tragedy. We took the healthiest parts of the country — in a country as rich as ours — and not only are they not enjoying the same gains in longevity, but they’re seeing shorter lives. Smoking is a very effective marker for where places are struggling, that’s why we’re trying to understand the underlying factors that may explain strong links between smoking and deaths in those areas. There are likely underlying factors, alone or in combination, that trigger both persistent smoking and, in other ways we do not yet understand, lead to premature deaths among these populations.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Best of the Web
I was delighted to see Redeemed Zoomer featured in this Washington Post piece on the rise of Christian online influencers.
The Atlantic: Americans Should Stop Using the Term “Christian Nationalism” (gift link) - Now that the perfectly progressive Christian nationalist James Talarico is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, the press is changing its tune on Christianity informing public policy.
Rob Henderson: The Class Wars Come for Fertility (gift link) - “Antinatalism increasingly looks like a luxury belief—an idea that confers status on the people who hold it while imposing costs on those further down the socioeconomic ladder. If childbearing is a status competition, the logical move for those at the top is to succeed at it while persuading others to opt out.”
If you didn’t see, the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks planned to do a themed night celebrating a famous local strip club called Magic City. The league cancelled the event, though the club stood by their desire to do it. Pro sports teams partnering with strip clubs is another good example of the cultural changes unleashed by the advent of the Negative World.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was a guest on the ReFOCUS podcast with Jim Daley, president of Focus on the Family.
I got mentions from SCOTUSblog, American Reformer, and Tim Challies.
New this week:
My podcast was with Dean Ball on how AI skeptics are about to be left behind.
How I’m Using AI - A piece on how I personally am using AI in my work
How Hollywood Ruined Men for Dating - The death of the lovable loser hero and the rise of untouchable icons have men convinced rejection is inevitable — unless they’re perfect - a guest post by Joseph Holmes
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Re: Historically, rural areas were always healthier.
That was true when cities were more prone to "crowd plagues" and when urban sanitation was defective in ghastly ways. Rural sanitation was no better but fewer people lived crowded together so it was less likely that deadly epidemics of typhoid and the like would spread far and wide in the countryside. In the course of the late 1800s and through the 20th centuries antibiotics and vaccines greatly reduced the incidence of deadly contagious disease, and modern day sanitation has eliminated the spread of water-borne illness. In the later 20th century anti-pollution measures even cleaned up urban airspaces.
Re: Antinatalism increasingly looks like a luxury belief—an idea that confers status on the people who hold it while imposing costs on those further down the socioeconomic ladder
What is being said in the above?
Childbearing and rearing is increasingly a privilege of the rich or at least the well-off and prosperous-- The people who can afford good pre-natal care (and insurance), whose jobs allow them generous parental leave, and who can afford the myriad expenses that our modern world insists are vital for proper child rearing.
America will have to learn the hard way that vices are costly to society, then (after decades of experience) the lessons learned will lead to new laws and regulations. How much suffering will occur in the meantime because of libertarian ideology?