One of the services a church provides is a community. For some religions it’s wielded as a weapon though. Leave, and lose everything. Take a peek at /r/exmormon for a bunch of examples.

What people need is a secular community to replace it, and not all find it. Some of the things listed above are exacerbated by feelings of isolation or lack of purpose.

A lie is best concealed between two truths. Churches know how to organize people. It’s a rare set of people management skills that has nothing specific to do with the Divine. They’ve just had more opportunity to hone those skills.

But as humans we often trust people who show expertise in multiple areas to be telling us the truth about other things as well. There are plenty of good things that happen at churches, but they don’t have to happen at a church. And the more they happen in the secular world, the more people figure out they can pick and chose things that make them feel like decent human beings without signing up for the others. That’s either a terrifying or comforting statement, depending on which way you are coming from.

To take your point further, gangs also provide community, in a very negative way to the rest of society.

So do volunteer organizations and other secular institutions and groups like book clubs, fitness groups, tabletop game players, Pokemon Go players, etc.

Back to my own speculation, I'd surmise that a lot of people who go to church may go for the community or personal connections, and may not even believe in the dogma. Many times I've been to church enough times to have listened to frequent sermons about maintaining faith, and those sermons always puzzle me - why do these churchgoers have such difficulty maintaining faith to the point where the preacher has to bring it up regularly?

I absolutely agree. America really needs some mandatory citizen participation program. Force everyone to work 5 hours a month towards some project while increasing social cohesion.

It doesn’t need to be mandatory if someone makes them fashionable. We have plenty of other colors besides Pink and (RED), for instance.

Christianity had their issue and politicized Christianity had done enormous damage to our society trough bigotry, segregation and straight up wars, but it got better in the recent decades and meanwhile it's by no means perfect we're throwing away the only western moral framework with no replacement in sight. this will do a number on society coesion and it's already visibile in certain aspects.

You’re being unfair to gscott. He didn’t make a causation claim.

It's implied considering how irrelevant those statistics are to this conversation.

I think it’s ok to bring up anecdotes as long as you don’t outright say they’re causal.

Just a heavy implication.