Opinion | Money Is Up. Patriotism and Religion Are Down.

Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, the founder and president of the Girls’s Institute for Science, Fairness and Race, instructed me that social media is focusing consideration on longstanding gaps in wealth, making individuals extra delicate to points of cash. “Everyone’s life seems fabulous via the social media filters,” she stated.

The simultaneous descent of faith and ascent of cash as values within the Journal survey might depart the impression that faith and capitalism don’t have anything to do with every one other. In truth, faith got here earlier than capitalism and has formed our fascinated by it, Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist, wrote in a 2021 guide, “Faith and the Rise of Capitalism.”

I exchanged emails about The Journal’s survey with Deirdre McCloskey, a scholar on the Cato Institute and emerita professor on the College of Illinois at Chicago who has written books on bourgeois virtues, bourgeois dignity and bourgeois equality. The seven bourgeois virtues, in her telling, are prudence, temperance, justice, braveness, love, religion and hope. (Not greed.) She argued in an electronic mail that former President Donald Trump is no less than considerably chargeable for the decline in People’ attachment to what she referred to as the American thought. “If, as Trump did, you’ll be able to persuade individuals to look with pessimism on the American Thought, it’ll fade,” she wrote.

The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who wrote “Deaths of Despair and the Way forward for Capitalism,” say there’s a rift between the third of the grownup inhabitants who’ve a bachelor’s diploma or extra and the two-thirds who don’t and are faring worse. “Their lives are coming aside,” Deaton instructed me on Tuesday.

The rift seems in some however not the entire questions within the Journal survey, in line with knowledge Zitner gave me. Individuals with and with out bachelor’s levels have roughly comparable views on patriotism, having kids and group involvement. On the similar time, individuals with out bachelor’s levels are seven share factors extra more likely to name faith an important worth and eight share factors extra more likely to say the identical about cash.