>It's especially pronounced among professionals of our generation, the first
>to experience post-secondary education on a mass scale.
As Deb Rogers and I have noted, however, we've observed somewhat different patterns in our respective states, TexASS and the Giant Wang.
Also, Nancy Ammerman, studying fundamentalists in Connecticut during the early 80s, noted that the members of these churches were among the professional managerial strata.
Here, membership in many of the "just christian" churches is important part of social status. In my son's high school, the wealthiest school in the county where the median income is 92k (compared to 30-40k in the middling areas), everyone who is anyone belongs to a church --and we're not talking liberal churches.
There's a wealthy eye surgeon who also invested in real estate, who builds huge gated communities which are an expression of his faith. (more on that for those interested.) While they aren't _for_ the membership only, they certainly influence people's perception that, to be a 'just christian' or fundie or whathaveyou is acceptable and probably a good thing to do if you're a striver.
From what I could tell of the Bball booster club, these weren't liberal churches. Bball games three nights a week and I worked different shifts at the snack counter. EVery conversation was something about church. "Hey Connie, I see your church is adding on?" "Oh yes Bob, isn't it exciting? We're going to have to add Wednesday services." "Yes, we're so proud of Jimmy. He's going on Mission next semester, after the season's over."
I can't tell you, as a New Yorker, even a hick from the sticks NYer, how utterly weird it was to be among people who talked so much about their churchly activities. Like Carrol, none of this stuff bothers me. I've grown up around too many religious people and worked with so many of them in antiwar, labor, abortion rights, etc. activities. Nonetheless, it's jarring to move from a blue state culture to a red and especially funny since coasters seem to think they are more blue state minded than red. :)
Deb has worked in law firms for years. She has been noticing that it's more and more acceptable for lawyers to express their faith in public. Budge (posts rarely) has noted that it's not uncommon at his engineering firm for people to plaster all kinds of stuff around their desks indicating fundamentalist Christian views or to shoot e-mail out to the whole company regarding some Christian fundraising event or whathaveyou.
In each of the suburbs in the county considered the wealthiest, there are mammoth "just christian" praise-a-plexes. There are services on Wednesday evenings that are so large, they need to have cops on duty to direct traffic when it's done. Sat. services run twice, with a bigger showing, and Sunday services run four times, with even bigger attendance.
Not sure what my point is, but I'd be careful about making generalizations about how people naturally move toward this or that end of the spectrum. What I think is happening is a polarization.
t 08:42 AM 6/15/2005, John Adams wrote:
>Probably the most well-known former proponent of social credit was the sf
>writer Robert Heinlein. His early left-wing history didn't really come out
>until after his death, but the signs were there all along in the early
>writing. You can read a sf treatment of social credit (which, although a
>crank scheme, at least was a crank variant of socialism) in his early
>novel _Beyond This Horizon_, which is quite different in many ways (and
>yet very much the same in others) from his later novels.
>
>The wikipedia entry on Heinlein is very interesting--better than the
>libertarian socialist entry, that's for sure!
>
> John A
>
>Thanks,
You're welcome!
There was a thread on another list (techs/geeks/hackers) recently, someone asking, "What's good sf?" The basic gist of the replies was that everything up to _Number of the Beast_ is great, everything after that sucks b/c he started weaving 'social politics' into his work. Plus, a few of the respondents said that he got really bad after he moved to Malta and revealed a tolerant attitude toward gays.
"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
-- rwmartin