The “national retreat” from marriage could worsen social divides between the married and unmarried, according to one scholar who says religious groups’ failure to reach the working class bears part of the blame for the plummeting marriage rates. “We have seen that Catholic and mainline Protestant churches have not been successful in reaching poor working class Americans and bringing them into the pews on a regular basis, particularly men,” William Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project said.