Data and Code for: Divine Policy: The Impact of Religion in Government

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 increase their numbers. Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that the initiatives increased the number of faith-based nonprofits and strengthened religiosity and conservative-religious social views - such as attitudes against LGBTQ+ and abortion. 9% of Americans who were not regular churchgoers started attending monthly or more. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the faith-based organizations established as a result of the initiatives may have reached 4.9 million followers yearly. Effects are plausibly causal; we find no systematic differences prior to implementation, evidence is robust to using novel staggered roll-out designs, restricting comparison to contiguous counties, and to estimation based on triple differences exploiting religious group heterogeneity. Effects were only felt by Protestants, while the rest continued to secularize and modernize. Our results contribute to explaining US polarization and highlight consequences of tightened church-state relations.