Education Makes White People Dumb

You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray, live on hay,

You'll get pie in the sky when you die

- Joe Hill song

This interesting study of patterns of church-going and attitudes to family values is interesting. It demonstrates that American whites (probably like most people) defy the usual stereotypes. In particular its widely assumed that the poorer you are in America the more conservative, backwards and religious that you are. I have a distinct memory from watching Religulous, the Bill Maher doc that attacks religion, of Maher talking to some truckers who had a little evangelical church behind a truck stop. Maher, first of all, represents everything that is wrong with American (or Canadian) liberals - he is a smug, self-important snob, and a windbag to boot. The guy just never shuts the hell up to let anyone else talk. His only analysis is a smirk and condescension.

Besides the fact that Maher was a prick to the truckers, it is also inaccurate to portray truckers and rural workers as the base of evangelical religion. In fact, the higher up the income ladder you go, the study found, and the higher the education level achieved, the more likely were the people to attend church services.

Relying on nationally representative data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth, the study finds that moderately educated whites—those who have a high school degree but who did not graduate from a 4-year college—attended religious services in the 1970s at about the same rate as the most educated whites—those who at a minimum graduated from a 4-year college—but they attended at much lower frequencies in the 2000s.
The least educated white Americans—those who did not graduate from high school—attended religious services less frequently than both the moderately educated and most educated in the 1970s and that remained the case in the 2000s. "The least educated have been consistently less religiously engaged than even the moderately educated, meaning the gap between the least educated and most educated is even larger than the one between the moderately educated and most educated," Wilcox said.
In the 1970s, among those aged 25-44, 51 percent of college-educated whites attended religious services monthly or more, compared to 50 percent of moderately educated whites, and 38 percent of the least educated whites. In the 2000s, among those aged 25-44, 46 percent of college-educated whites attended monthly or more, compared to 37 percent of moderately educated whites, and 23 percent of the least educated whites.

Now, just to be clear, I don't think that going to church means you're dumb - well, not always. The Civil Rights Movement was organized through the Black Baptist Church in the Southern USA. The courageous demonstrations against the Assad regime in Syria are organized in significant part through the mosques, ditto in Egypt during the revolution earlier this year. But the church of rich, white Americans is another story.

For one thing, American protestantism is profoundly conservative, emphasizing the most cartoonish aspects of American "can do" ideology and fetishizing the ideal of a family structure that has long ago ceased to exist for most people in America.

Indeed, the study points out that modern religious institutions tend to promote a family-centered morality that valorizes marriage and parenthood, and they embrace traditional middle-class virtues such as self-control, delayed gratification, and a focus on education.
Over the past 40 years, however, the moderately educated have become less likely to hold familistic beliefs and less likely to get and stay married, compared to college-educated adults. During the same period, wages have fallen and rates of unemployment have risen markedly for moderately educated men, while wages have remained stagnant for moderately educated women. For the least educated—those without high school degrees—the economic situation has been even worse, and they have also become less likely to hold familistic beliefs and less likely to get and stay married, compared to college-educated adults.

In other words, the failure of US Protestantism, or rather those streams favoured by whites, to connect with the daily lives of white workers has alienated them from the church. The study found, for instance, that workers who had been unemployed in the last ten years were much less likely to be church goers. When you find that the God of Americanism has foresaken you to the unemployment line - and that he thinks it's your own damn fault, you're probably not so keen to go visit him in his house.

It also indicates an interesting cognitive dissonance in American culture - the impression one gets from the media and from politicians is that religious observance is actually on the upswing in America when, for most Americans, it is becomes less of a factor in their lives. This points to the fact that the narrative that gets play in the media - and which fits the rich, white boys who dominate both houses of Congress - is a narrative of the upper classes. (As Marx once said: "those who control the means of production, also control the means of mental production"). But this also indicates that a gap has opened up culturally and ideologically between rich and poor in America. Frankly, that's a good thing. It suggests that American workers are less culturally identified with the American ruling class than at any other time since the Second World War. The weakening of that ideological hegemony (domination) is a pre-condition for winning workers to an alternative worldview that emphasizes their interests.

Obama Plans "Horrific Outburst Of Violence" For Afghans

God "told" George to go to war

THERE MUST BE A STRONGER WORD THAN "HYPOCRITE" to describe the moral depravity of condemning a single killer who shoots down 13 unarmed US military personnel, while planning on sending 34,000 heavily armed military personnel to shoot down Afghans. I'm open to suggestions because that's apparently the plan that's being considered by President Obama, this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
There also ought to be a word for the media that doesn't notice this not-very-subtle contradiction in values and, instead, masturbates over whether Hasan attended religious services at the same mosque as men linked to 9/11 or whether he handed out Korans on the day he went on a rampage. Does anyone perform background checks on the people who go to church with George W. Bush? How about Timothy McVeigh? (I know, putting the two men together is an unfair association - Bush is responsible for far more deaths than McVeigh). Did the two men say their prayers on the mornings in which they killed people? Certainly God "told" George personally that he ought to "end the tyranny in Iraq", "fight terrorists" in Afghanistan, and get the Palestinians their state. Why does no one suggest, as all the media are implying with their obsession about Hasan's religious activities, that Christianity is an especially dangerous religion, the practice of which must be closely observed?
I guess the word we're looking for here is also hypocrite. Perhaps the best we can do is modify it with the word racist, since it's apparent that anyone with a Muslim background comes in for special treatment and assessment that's not applied to the rest of the population.

Catholic Church Tries To Scoop Up Anglican Bigots

AFTER MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS THERE'S NOBODY LIKE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH that can sniff out a Christian faction fight and use it topick up some souls for the Lord. Seems that there's some ferment in the Anglican Church over some distinctly newfangled ideas like women's equality and - gasp - gay marriage.

"In an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse, the Vatican on Tuesday announced it would make it easier for Anglicans uncomfortable with their church’s acceptance of female priests and openly gay bishops to join the Roman Catholic Church while retaining many of their traditions."

It seems that the Catholic Church will even allow married priests to keep their jobs, so much do they smell the coins in those collection plates. But perhaps I am being cynical, after all Pope Benedict is known to have the interests of conservative Anglicans "close to his heart." Now, I'll resist the urge to comment on the fact that the Catholic Church tolerated years and years of pederasty and physical abuse of young parishoners. Hey, sodomizing the choir boys is one thing - but if they're consenting adults, well, that's just not right.
And while abuse was tolerated, so have the most right wing organizations and views been tolerated and found succour within the Catholic Church, while liberals have been shunned, even at the expense of the Church itself:

"For a church whose leadership has earned a reputation for reprimanding liberal Catholics who color outside the lines, these developments could be more than a bit frustrating. If conservatives can get special consideration, how about Catholics who have divorced and remarried but can’t take communion? Or those who back ordaining women? Or perhaps an exemption for the 25,000 or so priests who left the ministry in recent decades when they married?

Now, if that's OK with Catholics, that's their choice but let's call what's going what it is: the Catholic Church is looking to scoop up thousands of open bigots. So much for casting first stones, loving thy neighbour as thyself and the parable of the Good Samaritan. None of these sermons about equality and universal love apply to the treatment of a majority of humanity, it seems. But then why should we expect this Pope and this Church to take a stand against bigotry. Benedict did, after all, accede to joining the Hitler Youth when he was 14. He did work the anti-aircraft guns at a BMW factory that employed slave labour. He did serve in Hungary until he deserted in 1945 as the war was winding down. This is not a man I would describe as having a hearty moral fiber.
And the crimes of the Catholic Church are too numerous to bother to list here. Suffice to say that refusing to ordain women priests is one of their lesser evils, their crimes are so numerous and ghastly, from the Crusades, through the Inquisition and on into their support for fascism in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

I will add as an important addendum that there have also been many fighters for justice in the Catholic Church. People like Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of what became known as Liberation Theology. And there were many, many priests and nuns and Catholic lay people who resisted and suffered under regimes in Latin America. These people were and are heroes, both of their faith and of humanity more generally. As far as I'm concerned they stand in the true tradition of Jesus the anti-colonial, proletarian rebel. Guys like Benedict, fighting over congregations of hate-mongers and people who can't bear to be touched by a woman, well they're just filling up their boat for the trip down to hell.