--- snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com wrote:
Doug H wrote:
> >Certainly not me. But it's important to admit that much of the
> U.S.
> >population believes a lot of retrograde things - from a time long
> >predating Karl Rove - instead of circulating a lot of defensive
> myths
> >(people love the military because it's a little socialist bastion,
> >evangelicals are mostly yuppies...).
Definitely. Gross generalizations are usually wrong, defensive, naive and counterproductive, e.g., "white trash" are evangelical, "yuppies" are evangelical. What I hoped to convey in my original response to Carroll was to shake the stereotypes loose and yell, "hey! a lot of these evangelicals are yuppies, too! and they have money, influence and love the power they perceive that they have!" It's so frustrating to hear voices on the Left continue to harrangue about the perceived lack of intelligence or dismiss the evangelical and social conservative movement as a dying or non-existant force in local, state and national politics. As I've confessed to Kelly, some days I feel like we're yelling at the top of our lungs in a vacuum where no one can hear us when we try to convey the power and pervasiveness of this aspect of current American culture. There is great diversity in the evangelical movement as a whole, but the image of it being the bastion of "white trash" (admittedly, a stereotypical phrase that is limiting and severely debilitating) and undereducated America is choking off the need by Leftists to understand where common ground can be found, e.g., Yoshie's citations regarding similar economic concerns among evangelicals and leftists.
Snitilicious opined:
> i agree. I think good evidence for that is comparative. Why do
> surveys
> reveal that USers are far more likely to believe in angels.
Yes. It has to be comparative, for a host of reasons, ranging from the economic and sociological to just the wide variations of diversity in allegedly like denominations or other subcultures.
> The point at issue, though, was whether we could explain the rise
> of (what
> was then referred to as) fundamentalism and the 'new christian
> right' by
> assuming that people did so because they felt relatively deprived
> and
> turned to religion to compensate. It was a standard thesis in soc
> of
> religion and it usually hinged on the perception that it was mostly
> poor,
> uneducated people who turned to religion because educated, better
> off USers
> didn't believe in that silly stuff.
>
> BUT, even by the late 80s, it had been debunked by growing evidence
> that
> the people turning to conservative religions were not
> stereotypically
> "white trash". They were, instead, more likely to be from the 3 br,
> 2 ba, 3
> cg middle, uhm er, class, and a good number of them from the
> professional-managerial, er -- okay -- strata.
The next sociological aspect of this that I would love to see examined professionally is the draw of the culture of community that these evangelical megachurches to the above described upper middle classes. Is it a compensation for the cultural sterility and isolation of the suburbs? A need to fill a void created by pop American culture at large? Or, is it yet another monster born of capitalism and swift marketing, where businessmen can gather in a new exclusive (and mostly white) social club to exchange handshakes and network with like members and a political club of the local GOP party that has replaced the cigar smoke filled back rooms with noon brown bag Bible studies for businessmen in the cities and weekend strategy sessions in the dining hall at the church to discuss pushing candidates for the school board, city council or Congress?
- Deborah