Going to church won’t protect you from hurricanes or other disasters, but it sure will help you out afterward. And even if you’re not religious, the best insurance plan might be to live in a churchy community.

That’s not a matter of faith — it’s the finding of economics.

Three economists recently published a paper in The Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society, finding that more religious counties recovered more quickly from natural disasters.

The hurricane season of 2005 was disastrous for the American South. A record 15 hurricanes formed in the Atlantic that season. Katrina was the most infamous, but Emily, Rita, and Wilma also hit land as Category 5 storms.

These storms, among other harms, massively disrupted businesses, driving down productivity in the severely affected places (like New Orleans) compared to the less affected places.

In some hard-hit places, businesses got back on their feet faster and more fully than in others that were just as walloped. It turns out that the more resilient counties were the ones with more church attendance and religious adherence. Controlling for wealth, population, and social capital, the researchers found “that establishments in counties with high religious intensity are less affected by hurricanes’ adverse impacts.”

How exactly does religious adherence accelerate economic recovery? The authors explored that puzzle in the South, but across America, you can see the positive effects of religion on economic recovery.

Take Michigan, where both the Detroit area and the Holland-Grand Rapids area were hit hard by the auto industry’s struggles in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. West Michigan rebounded much faster and much more robustly.

The locals credit the Protestant work ethic in Holland and Grand Rapids, where the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America are headquartered. “You’ve got a conscientious workforce,” retired factory worker Gary Gunnink argued from a McDonald’s in Holland. “The old Dutch work ethic,” his buddy Bill Stehouwer added.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe religion makes people more resilient, more hopeful, and harder working. Surely this operates not simply through belief, but through belonging and connection within religious institutions.

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The economists also cited the increased ties to one’s ancestors among the religious compared to the nonreligious. If you think of the pre-disaster economy as something you inherited, you might be more attached to keeping it alive.

Whatever the mechanism, it’s another reason to worry that the secularization of America is a bad thing — and another reason to pray for a 21st-century Great Awakening.