AT CHRISTMAS, many people do things they would never dream of the rest of the year, from giving presents to getting drunk. Some even go to church. Attendance soars, as millions of once-a-year worshippers fill the pews. In Britain, where most weeks fewer than one person in ten goes to church, attendance more than triples. Even in America, where two-fifths of the people say they go frequently, the share climbs in December.
Some of the occasional churchgoers must wonder whether they might benefit from turning up more often. If they did so, they could gain more than spiritual nourishment. Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims that regular religious participation leads to better education, higher income and a lower chance of divorce. His results* (based on data covering non-Hispanic white Americans of several Christian denominations, other faiths and none) imply that doubling church attendance raises someone's income by almost 10%.
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Other economists, though they think Mr Gruber's approach is clever, are not sure that he has established a causal link between religious attendance and wealth. So how might churchgoing make you richer? Mr Gruber offers several possibilities. One plausible idea is that going to church yields ?social capital?, a web of relationships that fosters trust. Economists think such ties can be valuable, because they make business dealings smoother and transactions cheaper. Churchgoing may simply be an efficient way of creating them.
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