-How do strengthened church-state relations impact religiosity and social values? To examine, we exploit the staggered introduction of the faith-based initiatives across US states. Introduced by conservative Protestants in the 1990s, these policies aimed to improve conditions for faith-based groups and to increase their numbers. Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that the initiatives managed to increase the number of faith-based nonprofits and to strengthen religiosity and conservative-religious social views — such as attitudes against LGBTQ+ and abortion. Effects were only felt by Protestants. Notably, 9% of Americans who were not regular churchgoers started attending monthly or more. Of the 10,274 new faith-based organizations during the period, 15% may have opened due to the faith-based initiatives. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that these organizations may potentially have reached 8.2% of American Protestants. Effects are plausibly causal; we find no systematic differences prior to implementation, evidence is robust to using novel staggered-rollout designs, restricting comparison to _contiguous_ counties, and to estimation based on triple differences exploiting religious group heterogeneity. Our results contribute to explaining US polarization and highlight consequences of tightened church-state relations.
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