Yet at the same time, some of the most religious areas of the country — the Bible Belt, the deepest South — struggle mightily with poverty, poor health, political corruption and social disarray.
Part of this paradox can be resolved by looking at nonreligious variables like race. But part of it reflects an important fact about religion in America: The social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief. And where practice ceases or diminishes, in what you might call America’s “Christian penumbra,” the remaining residue of religion can be socially damaging instead.
Consider, as a case study, the data on divorce. Earlier this year, a pair of demographers released a study showing that regions with heavy populations of conservative Protestants had higher-than-average divorce rates, even when controlling for poverty and race.
Their finding was correct, but incomplete. As the sociologist Charles Stokes pointed out, practicing conservative Protestants have much lower divorce rates, and practicing believers generally divorce less frequently than the secular and unaffiliated.
But the lukewarmly religious are a different matter. What Stokes calls “nominal” conservative Protestants, who attend church less than twice a month, have higher divorce rates even than the nonreligious. And you can find similar patterns with other indicators — out-of-wedlock births, for instance, are rarer among religious-engaged evangelical Christians, but nominal evangelicals are a very different story.
It isn’t hard to see why this might be. In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.
And it isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.
Seeing some of the problems in our culture through this lens might be useful for the religious and secular alike. For nonbelievers inclined to look down on the alleged backwardness of the Bible Belt, it would be helpful to recognize that at least some the problems they see at work reflect traditional religion’s growing weakness rather than its potency.
A Tale of Two Cities
A conservative Southern pastor told me recently, “It’s no wonder that the world won’t listen to us. We don’t give evidence that we believe our own Gospel.”
I thought of that when I read Tom Edsall’s gut-punch of a piece comparing the social breakdown in Muskogee, Okla. — once an icon of normal, jes’-folks America — with that of Baltimore, Md. Edsall’s point is that those on the Right who cite Baltimore as an example of the ruin that accompanies liberal Democratic rule are ignoring similar degrees of social catastrophe in Red America cities like Muskogee. Excerpts:
The high pregnancy and birthrates among white teenagers in states where the Christian right and Tea Party forces are strong reflect the inability of ideological doctrines stressing social conservatism to halt the gradual shift away from traditional family structures.
In fact, the map in the second chart shows that the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the most socially conservative denominations in America, is dominant in every one of the nine states with the highest white teenage pregnancy rates, with the sole exception of West Virginia.
Conservative religions have proved powerless to halt unwed motherhood, cohabitation and other trends that defy traditional morality — in part because these trends reflect the limited authority of the old order in the face of a global phenomenon known among researchers as the “second demographic transition.”
Regions as diverse as Europe, Japan, South America, Canada and the United States are undergoing a profound shift in fertility, reproductive attitudes and behavior. The changes include rejection of premarital virginity, social acceptance of single parenting, and the replacement of values stressing family obligation with values stressing personal autonomy.
More:
While right wing commentators are demonizing the social and cultural values of the distressed citizens of Baltimore and their political leaders, they are oblivious to the vulnerability of their traditional moral agenda during a time of inexorable demographic change.
The problems of majority black Baltimore are extreme, but many of the trends found there are as extreme or more so in majority white Muskogee.
The Baltimore poverty rate is 23.8 percent, 8.4 points above the national rate, but below Muskogee’s 27.7 percent. The median household income in Baltimore is $41,385, $11,661 below the $53,046 national level, but $7,712 above Muskogee’s $33,664.
If conservatives place responsibility on liberal Democrats, feminism and the abandonment of traditional family values for Baltimore’s decay, what role did the 249 churches in and around Muskogee play in that city’s troubles?
The fact is that the poor and working classes of both races were not well equipped to adjust to changes in behavior driven by the sexual revolution and the second demographic transition – a collection of forces that are inexorably changing the family, marriage patterns and child rearing worldwide.
Those who seek to exploit the transformation of reproductive norms for short-term political gain are tearing at the social fabric. The right willfully ignores the benefits, and the left willfully ignores the costs, of what is, for better or worse, a world of radically diminished moral constraint. It may be asking too much of the political process to resolve conflicts like these.
Please read the whole thing. It’s important.
I don’t agree that politicians seeking to “exploit” the sexual decadence that has overtaken our society are “tearing at the social fabric.” The phenomenon to which they are reacting is doing a much more effective job of that. But that’s a quibble. Overall, Edsall makes a necessary and sobering point about how overwhelmingly powerful culture is, so much so that even politics and religion struggle to stand up to its currents. White Republicans who blame Democrats and, well, black people for the social collapse in inner cities are at best whistling past the graveyard. It’s happening to us too.
I don’t think Edsall is blaming Southern Baptists for what is happening in states where they dominate. At least I hope he isn’t. The white teenagers who are getting pregnant outside of wedlock aren’t likely to be Southern Baptist churchgoers. In fact, I would wager that these kids by and large are unchurched. I live in the Deep South, and among whites, churchgoing is primarily a middle-class thing. The poor and the working classes don’t really go to church (see here and here).
I think what Edsall is saying — and I find this impossible to refute — is that the power of religion to shape behavior today is minimal. To the contrary, the power of sexual autonomy and individualism is radically reshaping Christian churches, which is why so many Catholic and Protestant churches and institutions (e.g., colleges, high schools) are abandoning orthodoxy on sexual matters. The god they worship is the Self, and the Self must have its sexual freedom and individual choice. In Germany, the Catholic bishops are even flirting dangerously with schism over this issue.
I wonder, though, along with Edsall: what role did all the churches in Muskogee play in trying to combat the darkness overtaking their city? I’m not snarking here; I’d really like to know. In my own experience living in various regions of the US, and in talking to Christians around the country, most churches are far, far more interested in being the middle class at prayer, and offering Moralistic Therapeutic Deism instead of the Gospel. This has been my experience more often than not.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism does not stand up to the chaos, but baptizes it, sanctifies it, makes it the church’s own. I know well what’s happening: so many right-thinking Christians, clerical and lay, are thinking that if they only hold the right theological opinions, and stay optimistic and confident, get their kids involved in a youth group, and maybe put their kids into a religious school, that they’ll be fine. These problems belong to poor black people in Baltimore, or poor white people at the trailer park.
Well, for one thing, those poor people are our people too, and for another, the only thing keeping us middle class people from suffering their fate is money and the social capital built up by previous generations. At one Christian university where I’ve spoken over the last two years, professors told me their students all come from Christian homes, and are mostly good kids, but they are the products of vapid, MTD catechesis, and the survivors of badly broken homes. One professor told me that he wonders if his students will ever be able to form normal, stable marital bonds, simply because they have had no experience of that in their lives.
These aren’t unchurched kids. These are college kids who came up in the church, and whose parents, or parent, cares enough about faith to pay for them to attend a Christian college. A professor told me, “We have them for four years, but that’s not enough to undo the damage.” The power of our sexually revolutionized culture is just that overwhelming. And as Edsall points out, the middle classes can cope, somehow, but the poor and working classes cannot.
I’ve said it before, and I’m going to say it again: if you are a religious believer in this culture, you and your community are either going to have to embrace the Benedict Option — intentional countercultural Christian living, in community — or your children and their church, if they go to church, will be assimilated by the Revolution. There is no middle ground. These are not normal times. The Republican Party won’t save you, being white and middle class won’t save you, living in Red America won’t save you, and attending a go-along-to-get-along church won’t save you.
Never forget what the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia told me: that families and Christian communities that don’t embrace the Benedict Option aren’t going to make it to the other side of this long night.
UPDATE: Reader Edward Hamilton writes:
A lukewarm approach to Christianity is more useless and unpalatable than a sincere paganism, something recognized as early as in the famous mouth-spewing metaphor from John’s apocalypse. The most devastating thing you can do to your community isn’t to renounce traditional religion and replace it overtly with the postmodern ideological oneupmanship of gaming political correctness as a source of social capital. Such games at least have the virtuous effect of defining cultural roles and promoting cultural cohesion. It’s much worse to pretend to preserve the outward forms of religion while gutting from the inside and leaving only a hollow shell of nominal piety that everyone still perceives as sincere from the outside. That’s the path to an ultimate breakdown of social confidence that lead to Roman paganism being eclipsed by Christianity in the first place, and to more recent structural collapses in Communist ideology in the 20th century.
UPDATE.2: Reader Devinicus:
I read the Edsall column today as well. Three points:
#1 Edsall’s map is a classic instance of the ecological fallacy. You cannot draw any conclusions at all from it. Not a one.
#2 Yes, stupid conservative pundits and politicians have said stupid things about Baltimore of late. Yet Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, much of it dedicated to discussing the maladies of “Fishtown”, i.e. underclass white America, has been out for over three years. Edsall didn’t say anything that Murray didn’t already tell us.
#3 The white underclass does not attend the Baptist church, or the Methodist, or the Seventh Day Adventist, or any church at all. The story of the underclass is one of radical atomization. Every institution which once created social stability and accumulated capital (economic, cultural, social, human, you name it) among the poor is today in ruins. And the destruction is creeping up the class ladder.
UPDATE.3: As several readers have pointed out, Ross Douthat’s 2014 blog entry on Charles Taylor’s “religious penumbra” is helpful here. Excerpt:
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