Conversions to Catholicism have been increasing, and the wider culture is taking notice. When choosing an example of the trend, both The Washington Post and The Atlantic landed on the same parish: St. Joseph’s of New York City, a vibrant, booming community of upwardly mobile, white-collar young people in the hip and wealthy Greenwich Village neighborhood.

But while it is certainly encouraging that the Church is growing in big cities, major universities, and elite circles, what about working-class, blue-collar folks? Are they also experiencing an uptick in conversions and Mass attendance?

The answer, according to both researchers and those serving these communities, is No.

Contrary to common assumptions, the general trend in America is that the less education a person has, the less likely they are to attend church weekly. As a whole, those in the working-class demographic are less engaged in faith and more susceptible to the trend of institutional religious disaffiliation.

Ryan Burge, a Baptist pastor and political scientist who focuses on religion in America, has studied the phenomenon extensively and says news stories on religious renewal are missing the bigger picture. 

“This is a bougie revival; it’s very much an elite discourse revival,” he told the Register. “People who are most likely to go to church this Sunday will be people with graduate degrees. And least likely are those who didn’t finish high school.”

And Burge says there’s no indication this dynamic is going away.

Jacob Imam, the founder and president of the College of St. Joseph the Worker Catholic trades school in Steubenville, Ohio, sees it too. 

“[The revival] is absolutely not happening in the skilled trades right now,” Imam told the Register, adding that many of St. Joseph’s students — often Catholics with some blue-collar work experience — “felt like unicorns in an otherwise spiritual wasteland, and their motivation for relocating here is that they wanted to find people who may be receptive to the truths of the Gospel.”

Father Sean O’Brien is the pastor of a small-town parish cluster in largely-working-class eastern Oklahoma. His diocese, the Diocese of Tulsa, saw one of the highest increases in the number of people entering the Church between 2025 and 2026. 

But Father O’Brien says that the energy the diocese is experiencing is happening primarily in the Tulsa metro area (population 1.06 million), not the more rural and economically struggling areas. A similar trend may be playing out in other dioceses with large working-class and rural populations, where overall conversion rates went up this year but not necessarily among the blue-collar demographic.

Blue-Collar Barriers

Social struggles correlated with lower socioeconomic status play a major role in the absence of a working-class revival. In Father O’Brien’s experience, irregular marriage status is the most common reason people drop out midway through Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA). Compared to middle and upper classes, the working class has the lower rates of marriage and higher rates of cohabitation.

Weaker community and social networks also take a toll. Burge explains that the religious decline among the working class is not primarily a decline in belief, but rather a decline in participation in church.

“Educated people have a higher level of interpersonal trust, institutional trust. Churchgoing, being part of a denomination is really about trust,” he said. 

And that applies especially to a church as institutional as the Catholic Church. “It’s not necessarily about income or education,” he said. “It’s about trust, which drives people to have more education, or at least higher incomes, but also leads to higher levels of church attendance at the same time.”

Substance abuse can be another barrier to interior conversion.

Joseph Hardy, a student at the College of St. Joseph the Worker, has seen in his blue-collar work experience how the prospect of conversion can be very daunting for those who have developed addictions.

“[Many] guys feel as if they cannot go on without these things,” said Hardy. He senses that while there is a great hunger for virtue and a curiosity about Catholicism among blue-collar guys, the Church has a problem earning their credibility and relating to them.

Part of that, he said, might be because working-class people associate the Church with “white-collar culture,” which they mistrust for “selling them out” by sending jobs overseas and destroying local communities.

Imam agrees, noting that it’s not helpful that the Church is thought of by some working-class people as belonging to a cultural stratum that “disdains blue-collar workers.”

“There’s not the respect for the man who works with his hands,” he said, in some circles — though the Church has a long history of supporting the laborer.

Evangelizing the Working Class

Robert Bordelon-Pearson knows what it feels like to struggle to relate to the prevailing culture in the Church. A former Protestant pastor and recent Catholic convert, he runs “The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar” blog and has written a book aimed at helping the Church evangelize the estimated 93 million adult Americans without a college degree. 

The problem became apparent to him while listening to Christian radio on his early-morning drives to work.

“The communication was very white-collar,” Bordelon-Pearson says. “Everybody writing these books, everybody writing the articles, went to college and then work in offices.”

He acknowledges that part of it is selection bias: The sorts of people with the interests and skill sets to become priests, parish leaders and influencers are more likely to come from an academic or white-collar background. 

But the Church could be doing more, he argues, to reach out to the working class. He says that small changes could have meaningful impacts: speaking positively about manual labor in homilies, offering Masses at hours that accommodate odd working schedules, and including more blue-collar themes in Christian media.

Bordelon-Pearson draws a parallel to missionary activity. Just as it is essential for mission communities to mature to the point that they can produce their own leaders, it is also essential for the working class to have voices and leaders from among their own ranks. Fostering leadership that can relate to the working class and speak their language is a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to ministering to and evangelizing this demographic.

Jim Ennis, executive director of Catholic Rural Life, argues that it is important to recognize that the Gospel at its core is simple. This approach has been very successful in the organization’s catechetical programs, which present basic yet profound truths of the faith. The Church’s treasury of wisdom is accessible to all, he emphasizes, not just those with a college education. 

Imam agrees, and he says that contributing to a working-class revival is a big part of “what gets me out of the bed in the morning.”

Imam’s goal at the College of St. Joseph the Worker is to raise up a generation that can “evangelize the very people that Christ and St. Joseph would have themselves been first evangelizing, namely, the tradesmen

A Gospel Imperative

 It makes sense that the Church’s growth in elite spaces is garnering the most attention. In an age in which Christianity’s declining influence is taken for granted, the increase in elite interest in the Church is a head-turning development. And as Father O’Brien notes, growth in peripheral communities can’t be understood apart from growth in cultural hubs.

“I think of St. Paul: He was going to the hubs. He wasn’t starting out in rural areas,” he said. “We don’t have the geographical challenge that used to exist for St. Paul with travel time. Now when the hubs are strong, the rural communities can get stronger quicker too,” through YouTube and catechetical platforms. 

But while the growth among cultural elites is promising, ignoring the working class could have serious consequences.

For one, losing the working class means losing out on many men — who, studies show, tend to be more influential than women on the religious practices of their children — and many young people, the future of the Church.

There is also a danger of the Church losing sight of its mission. 

“Christianity is not supposed to be primarily a faith for educated strivers,” wrote Catholic commentator Ross Douthat in The New York Times. “Any revival that doesn’t give the drifting or disaffected a surer reason for belief, that doesn’t lift up the lowly or reach the poor in spirit, would be a revival unworthy of the name.”

And as Imam points out, to ignore the working class is to betray the very origins of our faith.

“Christianity was founded by a carpenter; it was founded by a blue-collar worker,” he said. “We will always lose sight in some aspect of the splendor of Christianity if we are not recognizing the humble origins of Our Lord.”