Wow, are you still in Mississippi? Did you read my post? My def of middle class did not include the poor revivalists, but the very 3 bedroom 2 car "protestants" you refer to. Perhaps the South (and a many of the flyover states) have changed from your experience, because I'm talking about white middle to upper middle class 3, 4, 5, 6 and beyond bedroom home folks driving SUVs, Lexus and BMWs crowding into the evangelical super-churches in urban/suburuban metroplexes like Houston, Atlanta, DFW and beyond.
We have "evangelical" Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcolpalians and Catholics in these communities, and they are *not* underground or in hiding. They are out in the open, large and growing. Honest, I do believe the large "evangelical Presbyterian" church sprung up overnight. These things go up faster than cheap strip centers ... oh wait...they spring up in strip centers, too! In fact, the bedroom community of Stafford outside of H-town has so many tax-exempt churches within it's jurisdiction, that the city council was considering limiting the growth via zoning laws that spurned additional church development. The city couldn't generate enough revenue to function because of all of the tax exempt properties!
And as I've stated in the past - as has Kelly and others - these churches are attracting doctors, lawyers and upper level management who want to commune with the politicized GOP office holders in these red states. And whether or not they personally believe, hook, line and sinker, the whole mythic horror show, they certainly choose to sustain it, support it and, in all likelihood, profit from it.
The Southern Baptist church I was forced to attend in the 60's and 70's as a child wasn't evangelical, and the Rapture crap was only used for the annual revival scare 'em straight fundraiser. But the undercurrent of the evangelical movement as it began it's morph into the "boring" protestant churches was well underway.
Quite a bit has changed and changed rapidly, fueled in large part by the economic and political benefit some are getting out of their evangelical associations at both local and state levels.
I know I'm not the only person out there seeing this, and it's not something particular to Houston (as Kelly has pointed out re her observations in LimpDick), but why it is so difficult for people to recognize in other parts of the country baffles me.
- Deborah