Going to church won’t protect you from hurricanes or other disasters, but it sure will help you out afterward. And even if you’re not religious, the best insurance plan might be to live in a churchy community.

That’s not a matter of faith — it’s the finding of economics.

Three economists recently published a paper in The Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society, finding that more religious counties recovered more quickly from natural disasters.

The hurricane season of 2005 was disastrous for the American South. A record 15 hurricanes formed in the Atlantic that season. Katrina was the most infamous, but Emily, Rita, and Wilma also hit land as Category 5 storms.

These storms, among other harms, massively disrupted businesses, driving down productivity in the severely affected places (like New Orleans) compared to the less affected places.

In some hard-hit places, businesses got back on their feet faster and more fully than in others that were just as walloped. It turns out that the more resilient counties were the ones with more church attendance and religious adherence. Controlling for wealth, population, and social capital, the researchers found “that establishments in counties with high religious intensity are less affected by hurricanes’ adverse impacts.”

How exactly does religious adherence accelerate economic recovery? The authors explored that puzzle in the South, but across America, you can see the positive effects of religion on economic recovery.

Take Michigan, where both the Detroit area and the Holland-Grand Rapids area were hit hard by the auto industry’s struggles in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. West Michigan rebounded much faster and much more robustly.

The locals credit the Protestant work ethic in Holland and Grand Rapids, where the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America are headquartered. “You’ve got a conscientious workforce,” retired factory worker Gary Gunnink argued from a McDonald’s in Holland. “The old Dutch work ethic,” his buddy Bill Stehouwer added.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe religion makes people more resilient, more hopeful, and harder working. Surely this operates not simply through belief, but through belonging and connection within religious institutions.

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The economists also cited the increased ties to one’s ancestors among the religious compared to the nonreligious. If you think of the pre-disaster economy as something you inherited, you might be more attached to keeping it alive.

Whatever the mechanism, it’s another reason to worry that the secularization of America is a bad thing — and another reason to pray for a 21st-century Great Awakening.

Former President Donald Trump’s strongest base of support in the general election, if you divide voters up by age, appears to be Generation X.

Trump leads President Joe Biden by 19 points among those ages 45 to 65, roughly Gen X, while the race is within the margin of error for boomers, millennials, and Generation Z.

The extraordinary generation gap has spurred endless speculation and recrimination among very online millennial pundits.

One simple explanation is that Gen X isn’t all that Trumpy but that it has very good real-world reasons to support the Republican Party over Biden’s Democratic Party.

Gen Xers got jobs, paid off student loans, got married in their 20s, and had children. This isn’t just a story. It’s the facts. The average age at first marriage in the early 2000s was about 25 for women and a bit higher for men — meaning the average Gen Xer was married with a job within a decade of leaving school.

The birth rate was higher in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when Gen X was the bulk of the baby-makers. Once the millennials entered their mid- to late 20s, the birthrate fell and kept plummeting. Births have fallen almost every year since 2007 and are now down more than 16%.

So the people who became grown-ups in a normal way are Republicans now. Trump expanded our child tax credit, and under him, the economy was really good, with nearly no inflation.

Millennials, to their discredit, have always cared more about national politics — they care more about other people’s business, families, and communities than they ought to and are less interested in forming families or being involved in their neighborhood than they ought to be.

“I guess Donald Trump as the end point of Gen X nihilism makes sense,” very online millennial liberal pundit Matt Yglesias concluded.

If you think life is about what happens on NPR and CNN and in Congress, then yes, folks who care mostly about their family and neighborhood look like nihilists.

Sure, Trump made politics crazy, but under him, the economy was more normal. If you wanted to mind your family and your job, the Trump era was better than the Biden era. The worst part of the Trump era was the nonsense forced on us by Biden’s party and defended by Biden to this day: the lockdowns and school closures.

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Biden’s party took over school boards, closed schools for a year, and abandoned regular curricula in exchange for preaching racial determinism and transgenderism.

So maybe it’s that simple: If you want a normal life of family, community, and work, you are more likely to be Republican, and the folks most likely to be parents are the most likely to desire normality.