I've yet to see any study of social classes of believers in the Rapture. Perhaps, none exists.
If Rapture believers are a subset of the Christian Right, they may be more posh than trash. Chip Berlet says that "[a] number of studies have found that people with above average income, education, and social status populate the organizations of the Christian Right in the United States. Many are managers and small business owners" ("The Christian Right and Theocracy," <http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/cr_intro.html>).
"Born-again" and evangelical Christians, who don't necessarily believe in the Rapture, are on the average slightly poorer than other Americans, but much of the difference is accounted for by other factors: "Using the PEW studies, we find that there is only about a $6000 dollar average difference between the family incomes of born-again respondents and those of all other respondents. More that half of this difference can be accounted for by demographic differences such as region, age, gender, and education (Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, _Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches_, Chapter 3 "Income Polarization and the Electorate," <http://www.cbrss.harvard.edu/events/encounters/papers/MPRchapter3.pdf>, p. 24).
The most important thing to remember is that the pocketbook weighs much heavier than the Bible even among "born-again" and evangelical whites:
<blockquote>Another reason that "voting against economic interest" story is not compelling is that income is an extraordinarily good predictor of partisanship among conservative Christians. Figure 7 shows the percentage of born-again white PEW respondents who call themselves Republicans by income. For born-agains and evangelicals, the percentage Republican increases steeply with income. This income gradient is even larger than for non-born again whites. The difference across groups is small for low-incomes, about 8.5 percentage points, but grows to a 20 percentage point difference. This bivariate finding holds up well in our econometric model. If we estimate equation 1 just on white "born-again" Christians, the estimated income effect is .199, 30% higher than the overall effect.
These results suggest that low-income conservative Christians do not completely ignore their economic interests. Certainly, they feel cross-pressures between their Bible and their pocket book and do support the Republicans more than other low income voters. However, their support for Republicans is just about the same of that of the entire electorate and climbs sharply as when the Bible and pocket book point in the same direction (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, p. 25)</blockquote>
That means that leftists should work harder to bring a left-wing economic agenda to working-class conservative Christian whites' attention, without thinking that their religious belief would lead them to block out any appeal to the pocketbook. The point is that we can't advance such a left-wing economic agenda through the Democratic Party. "The median income of delegates to the Democratic Convention in 1992 was $92,000 (which was higher than at the Republican love-fest in Houston)" (Daniel Cantor, "New Party Time: New Progressive Political Party," The Progressive, <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_n1_v59/ai_16038817/print>, January 1995). The more leftists embrace the Democratic Party's economic agenda, the more out of touch they will be with working-class conservative Christian whites, who correctly see that the difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties' economic agendas is smaller than the difference between the two parties' stances on the Bible. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>