Research Highlights Article
January 29, 2026
A quiet revolution
The role of faith-based government policies in reshaping Americans’ beliefs and values.
President George W. Bush receives a copy of the "Quiet Revolution" report from Jay Hein, Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
Source: White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
In 1996, President Clinton enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, including a provision known as "Charitable Choice." The Charitable Choice provision expanded access to federal funding for religious organizations to deliver social services by easing legal and administrative barriers rooted in church–state separation concerns. President George W. Bush further expanded this initiative in 2001, dubbing it the "quiet revolution" in a seven-year progress report.
In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, Alessandro Pizzigolotto, and Lena Lindbjerg Sperling show that these policies did more than restructure welfare delivery. They quietly altered Americans' religious beliefs and social attitudes, contributing to the religious polarization that characterizes American society today.
"We're very interested in how religion matters for beliefs and values and how it influences society more broadly through people's behavior," Bentzen told the AEA in an interview. "The United States is such an interesting case to study in this respect."
To identify the causal impact of the faith-based initiatives, the researchers exploited the staggered timing of policy adoption between 1996 and 2009. Some states implemented the initiatives years before others, creating natural comparison groups. Crucially, the policies were implemented from above by a small network of evangelical Protestant lawyers, scholars, and politicians in state and local government rather than emerging as responses to rising religiosity in particular states. This top-down implementation helped the researchers to rule out organic causes.
Implementing initiatives
The chart below shows the spatial distribution of the total number of faith-based initiatives implemented between 1990 and 2009.
Using data from the General Social Survey covering over 44,000 respondents and records on 450,000 nonprofit organizations, the authors examined changes in religious beliefs and behaviors.
The findings demonstrate that the policies achieved their intended effect. The number of faith-based organizations increased substantially in states that implemented the initiatives. But the consequences extended well beyond organizational growth. Church attendance rose significantly, as did the strength of religious affiliation, frequency of prayer, and belief that the Bible is the literal word of God.
These effects were concentrated among Protestants, particularly evangelicals. Catholics and other denominations, including the religiously unaffiliated, showed no comparable shifts.
"It's not that nonbelievers all of a sudden started to believe," Pizzigolotto said. "It's those people that were already religious, that already agreed with the values of the implementers, who agreed even more strongly."
The researchers calculated that approximately 9 percent of Americans began attending church monthly as a result of these policies, a persuasion rate that ranks among the highest documented in the academic literature on attitude change.
This increased religiosity appeared to be driven by greater exposure to religious messaging. With the proliferation of faith-based organizations, Americans encountered efforts to spread religious teachings and shape family structures in contexts ranging from pregnancy counseling to youth mentorship to addiction treatment.
It's not that nonbelievers all of a sudden started to believe. It's those people that were already religious, that already agreed with the values of the implementers, who agreed even more strongly.
Alessandro Pizzigolotto
The study also reveals downstream effects on social attitudes and policy outcomes. Four to seven years after implementation, states that adopted faith-based initiatives showed strengthened opposition to homosexuality and abortion among Protestants, along with increased political conservatism and were more likely to pass constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. Gender gaps in wages and education widened, even as stated attitudes toward women's roles became somewhat more progressive.
Overall, what began as an effort to improve social service delivery became an engine of religious and political change. The results are a reminder that policymakers considering partnerships between government and religious institutions should recognize that such arrangements may reshape cultural values in ways that persist for years.
"Policies can have more impact than we think," Bentzen said. "They're designed to do one thing, to solve one problem, but they might have a big effect on something completely different."
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“Divine Policy: The Impact of Religion in Government” appears in the January 2026 issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.