Years ago I knew a devout Catholic woman that was very active in her church. It was a decent sized and youngish congregation so they could maintain a grammar school and youth programs. The way it worked, if I recall, is the regular parishioners got a discount on tuition while everyone else paid full retail for their kids. Jews often send their kids to Christian schools, for example, even though they obviously do not participate in the life of the Church so they paid retail.

At some point, the neighborhood started to change. The local Jewish population began to leave and was replaced with blacks. In the Baltimore area this is a common phenomenon. Jews in America have always been the most generous to blacks, preferring to hire them over whites and now immigrants. This is a custom that dates to a century ago, which is why it is ironic that famous blacks like Barak Obama and Al Sharpton hate Jews so much.

As is often the case when neighborhoods change, people worried about home values so there was a cascading effect. In Baltimore they used to call it “block busting.” Realtors would get one family on the block to sell to a black family and immediately everyone else on the block was in a selling mood. It was a good way for realtors to churn a stable neighborhood.

Anyway, as the neighborhood turned, the church started to get blacker too. The new members who would show up once a month or less, demanded access to all of the parish resources for regular members. Because modern Americans would rather see their church collapse than be thought anything other than enthusiastic for the swirl, a classic cycle ensued where costs went up and contributions declined.

All of the new “members” wanted their kids in the parish school at a discount, but they were not kicking in time and money to help support the church. The old members grew resentful of what was happening and started to leave the church. Of course, many simply sold their home and moved away. The result was predictable. The finances of the parish declined and services had to be cut. That drove away more paying members and, if memory serves, the school eventually closed.

People living around large cities in America are familiar with this pattern. Europeans will soon become familiar with it as they are overrun by Muslims. Moving away is not a solution as the troublesome population soon follows. For the same reason bank robbers rob banks troublesome minority populations seek out stable majority neighborhoods. It’s why diversity is a toxic poison in the West. It generates social instability.

The more mixed the Sunday morning pews are, the fewer people are likely to be in them. That’s the primary finding of a new study from Baylor University published in the current Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Researchers studied the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, where racial diversity doubled from 1993 to 2012, and found that, at the same time, churches with the greatest diversity growth also had the steepest declines in attendance. Kevin Dougherty, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor and lead author on the study, said the findings should not be taken as a stab at racial diversity in churches. Rather, he said, it shows congregations that are not originally started — “planted,” in church parlance — as diverse will have a tough time becoming so after their planting. “That change in the fundamental character of a congregation is an extremely daunting task,” Dougherty said. “Congregations intentionally planted as diverse from the beginning have the greatest potential to sustain that change while those that are trying to change their diversity will have a bumpy road ahead.”

It’s the fundamental defect of all egalitarian ideologies. The diversity advocates assume that all people are the same, when they are clearly not the same. Thousands of generations of evolution have hard wired humans to seek out those who are most like them. Trust is highest with our kin. Social structure like churches, and civic communities are built on trust. Throw a bunch of strangers from different tribes together and they are not going to build a community.

That does not mean people have live in isolation from one another. It’s just that stable, productive communities maintain their stability by working to limit diversity as much as possible. In the bad old days when covenants prevented home owners from selling to weirdos outside the group, the community remained stable. Those who moved away sought out places where their kind was welcome. Those who moved in did so knowing they would fit in with their neighbors.

One half of this still happens. The example I described at the start of this post is a good example. The people who fled the diversity moved to places that were pretty much like their old neighborhood. They were just far away from public transportation and had no apartments that could be conjured into ghettos by the miracle of Section 8 vouchers. The people moving into the old neighborhood did so because their tribe was moving there.

The fact is, for most people, diversity sucks.

Edit: The nice church lady I mentioned at the start eventually moved away. Her new church has many of the same people from her old church, who moved away for the same reasons. The new church is a growing concern while the old church has fallen into deep decline.