Religion Dispatches
…ies of self-congratulation and spiritual uplift among the rich. But middle-class congregations were the norm, and middle-class congregations are having a horrendous time coming to terms with the new reality of congregants who can no longer support the institution financially and who may even start disappearing—literally—because of the intense status-loss shame they have experienced. Please say that you heard it here first: those congregations that…
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…figures such as the “bobos” (in his 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There) in order to make a broader, socially analytical point. It seems as though Brooks wants to give Harold and Erica some spark, some spunk, some redeeming qualities. But, in the end, they seem nothing more than strange satires of Brooks himself. Harold (the white American man who grows up in a comfortable middle-class family), is Brooksian in the o…
Read More…and beyond. Social theorists often talk about “intersectionality” of race, class, gender, and religion. It would be very revealing, I think, to see data that focuses on the intersection of religion, class, age, and gender. It might even shed some light on the Newt Gingrich “tough guy” dynamic Sarah Posner wrote about here. I’ve often noted that Romney doesn’t code traditional “tough-guy” masculine, which I believe is attributable to Mormon culture…
Read More…adwinner.” Schlafly, unimpressed by the Perry campaign’s insistence that the plan protects the middle class, responds with my favorite line: “Regardless of income, you can’t be middle class without respecting middle-class values, the most important of which is marriage.” So, I guess by definition, gays can’t be middle class….
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…. It should go without saying that he doesn’t look like most of the middle class North American young people this conversation is really about. It’s easy to leave church looking for, or to create, a community in which Jesus does look like us, though. That is the age old human problem from one generation to the next. We are always creating God in our own image, when it is supposed to be the other way around. We try to shape the church around our ge…
Read More…st as “feel good” about the religion as the original founders. I asked the class after the presentations why they all chose to eschew the idea of hell. “Religion today is so … judgmental,” one student offered. “Yeah,” another agreed. “We don’t need some church telling us what to do when they don’t practice what they preach.” Here they were utterly consistent with an oft-cited poll of a few years ago, in which many millennials said they found the c…
Read More…y Shane Harper) resists, rhetorically humiliating Radisson in front of his class, and inspires non-Christian classmates to convert. The film, an over-the-top piece of anti-intellectualism, portrays educators as modern-day Pharisees who promote ideology rather than critical thinking. So it’s hardly surprising that some Christian students began performing this script in the first week of classes. By equating educators with the villains of the New Te…
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…he notion of queering and how it connects to theology? I actually taught a class in a church, a queer theology class, and a student asked, “Queer and theology, do those two go together?” And as we walked through the class over the course of the semester, she got to understand why they do. Now the word “queer” has a history behind it, some painful history behind it, for those within the LGBTQ community. That history has to do with lesbians and gay…
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…arge enough supply of working class men with stable jobs to entice working class women to marry them. Many working class women correctly calculate that it’s better to be a single mom than to support both a child and an unemployed or sporadically employed husband. The fact that there’s no crisis of family formation among the college educated proves it’s not a matter of cultural influence—or even religiosity. In the end, it’s not a matter of morals,…
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…on to Robert Mercer, not Steven Bannon. Get a clue about the white working class rather than consigning all non-elite whites to a “deplorables” basket. Joan Williams’ brilliant short book, White Working Class, would be a good place to start. And here’s why: we will never realize King’s “revolution of values” in this country without overthrowing the rule of wealth—the corporate state—that lies at the heart of all social violence (not to mention apo…
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