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Welcome to the Eric Mataxas show with your host Eric Mataxas.

Hey there folks. You may have already heard today marks 25 days until the launch of my book is atheism dead.

You're instructed to go to my website EricMataxas.com. Please pre-order the book at one of the extremely low prices there.

Speaking of books in my hands, I hold the book. We've been talking about this. The title is End Game, the church's strategic move to save faith and family in America.

The author, JP DeGans, he's the founder and president of Communio and he designed and oversaw.

You ready for this? The largest privately funded community marriage project in US history, which lowered the divorce rate in an entire US city by 24% in just three years.

JP DeGans, first of all, congratulations on the book and tell us this story. This is so great.

Thank you so much Eric. Yeah, we got started on a big, trying to answer a big question, can churches act as cultural change agents in a big way at a citywide scale and knowing and recognizing that marriage is the central piece for society and really for the faith.

I get into it in the book. We were able to work with more than 50 churches moving 58,912 folks through four hour or longer relationship education and lowered the divorce rate in Jacksonville, Florida by 24% and had independent evaluation of our work by scholars out of the University of Virginia in Florida state.

Confirm there is no demographic explanation for that decline other than our intervention and then the churches themselves grew in the process of a group of 33 churches who baseline their attendance in giving saw attendance grow by 23% and giving grow by by 28%.

So even if you're doing this for utterly selfish reasons, you want to grow your church, you don't care about marriages. This will grow your church.

On the other hand, if you care about marriages, I mean, honestly, the fact that you did this in such a buttoned up way and you had people from the outside come in to say yes, in fact, and again, we're not talking about a little town. This is Jacksonville, Florida. This is a big city.

And you're telling me that citywide divorces went down by 24% over the course of three years.

I guess the idea is that the book end game will help folks do this in their churches.

That's exactly right. Really, when we talk to pastors that the church, the book is written for Christian leaders of all sorts.

The reality is, as so many folks right now are concerned about the faith crisis and the collapse or the perceived collapse of faith in the country, the rise of the so-called religious nuns.

The issue in the book is unpack the data that shows that the collapse of the religious nuns, really the collapse of faith in the West and in the United States in particular, can be entirely explained through the drop in intact marriages.

A millennial and a baby boomer goes to church at almost the exact same rate every single week if I know one thing about both people. And that is, if they grew up in a constantly married home, there's almost no statistical difference in how frequently they go to church.

This came from a large data set that we co-sponsored run by Dr. Mark Regner and that data was run, that survey was run in 2014 and again in 2018.

The book impacts the why in terms of the social science, why this is the case, why the collapse of marriage leads to the collapse of faith. And what we unpack psychologically is an unmarried dad, we know from the data is generally an uninvolved dad. Now there's many good single dads out there.

And I'm not talking about anyone in particular, but in a general sense, we know an unmarried father is an unengaged father. And this psychological science has shown that a failure to attach to a dad is one of the largest psychological impediments to belief in God.

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