I wrote an article about how the christian welfare state stuff influences politics in the rust belt ("What's the Matter with Ohio", in MR). In retrospect, the more I come to know about contemporary christian faith, I believe I overstated the matter. Someone who goes straight to a church for help help with rent on their doublewide is not necessarily very likely to become an active participant in that church, much less part of its political infantry. On the other hand, the existence of those benefits enmeshes the lives on the faithful in their church and its charity and polity more and more, at the expense of valuation of the traditional welfare state. I think more important are social links and networks that come out of church, like the singles groups, and the way its extremely common for christians to get job opportunities from co-congregants.
But all this social stuff is chicken and the egg. Like minded people are gathering in large, explicitly welcoming numbers to worship--- stands to reason they would meet spouses, get jobs, and even find mutual aid support in those ranks. On the other hand, secularist sociological types who are looking at bible-believing christianity vastly underestimate the answers the faithful give for their own worship, and also tend to overlook how incredibly individualistic and personalized bible-believing protestantism is. It is a profoundly personal thing. It all derives from a singular, private moment of conversion in one's life, the moment one is saved. If stands in stark contrast to catholicism, which was the religion of american social democracy and was very concerned with helping establish functional state structures, its own social institutions, etc. Catholicism is on the whole theologically fundamentally social and communal compared to the individualism of protestantism.
Of course catholicism is by now incredibly influenced by this cultural leaning of protestantism, to the point where many catholic churches/figures/etc are much more 'evangelical' than catholic. This is an example of why the numbers and impact of the evangelicals are really understated and undercounted in sociologists surveys. They have exerted something approaching hegemony over the life of non-secular honkie america. Secular america has no idea of this, but discovers it and is appalled on road trips and other accidental forays into non-college town flyover states. The sooner leftos have these troubling realizations the better. We're the most marginal thing in america today, smaller than most hobbies, smaller than networks of afficionados of particular video games, smaller than many different varieties of extremist right politics and getting smaller all the time. Bible believing christianity, on the other hand, is the primary social behemoth. the direction to go from that is up for debate, but I'd weigh in myself that prosletizing atheism doug and chuck advocate is unlikely to help in any sense, reinforces bad dynamics already underway, and the product of secular bubbles trying to make themselves smaller all the time.
Debz and I were talking about evangelicals. So, in order to know something
> like that, they'd have to break it out a lot more specifically than
> non-catholic christians v catholic christians since non-catholic
> christians
> contain baptists of the more conventional variety, presbyterians,
> mainliners, etc. Of non-catholic christians, the evangelicals comprise
> only
> about 20% if I'm remembering some of the studies Chip Berlet has pointed
> to. (Catholics comprises, last I knew, about 25% of the population, so
> possibly, what?, 30% of the christian population? Too lazy to look it up
> but I'm sure a resourceful list member will. :)
>
> Moreoever, you'd have to do some in-depth qualitative interviews since
> survey responses are limited -- and effected by things like the "socially
> acceptable" response phenom. and religion can be especially sensitive
> topic
> in the US.
>
> We were also talking about things such as what Ehrenreich mentioned to me,
> don't know if it's the book, about churches becoming alternative social
> service agencies. Someone might go to their career transition offerings
> when they run out of cash to afford the private agencies and then become a
> regular member "for spiritual reasons" -- when the fact was, they got
> involved in the first place for rather practical reasons. Another thing
> they're doing, and I think Deb has mentioned that mainline churches _in
> the
> south_ are emulating this, is becoming these massive entertainment
> complexes. They spend mega amounts of money to have a theater, huge gyms,
> ball courts, ball fields, hold fairs on their huge grounds, hire christian
> rock groups to hold concerts, have friday night singles/dance parties,
> special festivities for children on family nights, etc. When I was a kid,
> I
> went to a bible thumping Baptist church with a friend nearly every night
> where we played in the gym -- nothing like they have in the
> praise-a-plexes
> these days -- and then sat in the pews where the youth group leader would
> call out a quote from the good book and the kids who knew the bible (I
> didn't, I just watched) would frantically flip thru pages to locate the
> quote and name the passage.
>
>
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