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Is Christianity Rejected Because It’s a “Low Status” Signifier?
I came across this intriguing post from Patheos’ site. The thesis is that in the aftermath of such things as the Scopes monkey trial, being a Christian has become a marker of low status, and that this explains both its decline and lack of appeal as well as the failure of attempts to “engage the culture” by making it appear hip.
The idea behind the “engaging the culture” movement was that, rather than withdrawing from the surrounding culture as their fundamentalist cousins did, evangelicals should go forth to meet it. The expected outcome of this going forth was a revival of Christian faith.
It sort of makes sense. If enough evangelicals, the idea was, could be trained to engage the surrounding culture, especially in the culture-making arenas of politics, education and the media, eventually these well-placed agents of change could turn things around.
What this plan never took into account is the dynamics of social status. Evangelicals sought to engage the culture by being relevant, by creating works of art, by offering good arguments for their positions. None of these addressed the real problem: that Christian belief simply isn’t cool, and that very few people want to lower their social status by identifying publicly with it.
I suspect that there is some truth to it. Your thoughts?
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I don’t think you are a proxy for what Spin is talking about.
You find Christianity benevolently foolish. Not something to be openly mocked and denigrated, right?
There is a segment of the left that does think it deserves mockery and denigration. I don’t know why.
I will never forget having lunch with my husband one Sunday where a gay man sitting behind us was loudly ridiculing Christ. I wanted to face him and ask if he heard anyone denigrating gays near him and if so how he would feel if they were.
Instead, we just left.
The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
But look at all the primitive superstitions which are held in high esteem, or at least discussed with indulgence, amongst the social elites, Cato. Yoga and horoscopy are widely practiced, and with much more spiritual investment than you find in rec center stretching sessions or Jean Dixonish tabloids.
Looking for a primitive superstition developed to gain elite social control? How about Buddhism? The amount of time, money and moral energy spent on guru-led spiritual cures by elite Americans, many of whom express contempt for primitive Christianity, is quite telling.
When Buckley noted you would not be invited back after mentioning God twice at a dinner party, it was clear he meant the Christian God. Most other gods have a standing invitation.
The low status of biblical Christianity in many parts of America has little to do with its non-rational priors.
I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I’m a good proxy for Spin’s leftist villain or not, but I see both benevolence and maliciousness in the foolishness I see in Christianity. I fully understand and at least partially share the feelings of that gay man you heard. Christianity has not been benevolent to gay people qua gay people, and I find that to be a large mote in its eye. And there are others. On the other hand, I’m also aware that Christianity has motivated millions to feed the hungry, care for the sick and teach the children, etc. in a way that speaks to a genuine benevolence in there somewhere. And while I find prostilization annoying myself, I’m aware that at least sometimes, it is motivated by a genuine – if in my opinion wrong headed – concern for the eternal salvation of its object. So like most human institutions I guess, I find Christianity to be a mix of benevolent, benign and benighted.
Eschatology: the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.
I didn’t say that young (and reforming and, now that I think of it, militantly missionary versions of) religions are the only ones that have eschatologies, I said they emphasize them.
I have never had a Hindu, reformed Jew or Buddhist tell me that if I didn’t convert to their tradition, I would go to hell and/or contribute to the apocalypse. Muslims and Christians (and evironmentalists, of course) have offered this warning/condemnation/sales gambit.
And yes, these are both comparatively young. Especially Islam, which is the youngest of the Abrahamic faiths and a mere pup compared to Hinduism.
I’ve often thought that @Spin‘s point about class-related anxieties explains why Unitarian-Universalism remains a middle-upper-middle class denomination. It’s not that the congregants are actually smarter or better (sigh) but they are generally well-educated and so have, in general, daily lives that reaffirm their personal agency and worth. On Sunday, they can therefore be happy to go to a church that does not assure them that someone higher and better is in charge. (Besides, “who could possibly be higher and better than moi?”)
Where God is needed, God tends to be permitted at least a walk-on part in the drama—at AA meetings, for example, or when someone has just been diagnosed with a deadly disease, or (briefly) after 9/11.
What is the causal relation between believing in things which cannot possibly be demonstrated and acting decently?
None, as near as I can tell. This is the central conceit that bothers me so deeply – that holding these beliefs is a good in and of itself and that good will automatically follow from holding them. Neither of these things are true.
I hold them all in equal, low esteem. Eastern mysticism is an affect of certain hoity-toities who deserve a swirlie.
Is a good society one that feeds the hungry and poor but sacrifices some x% of the population?
Atheists in western civilization are still living in a world with the vestiges of a Christian tradition, but even so, atheist belief systems still involved horrifying amounts of death – holocaust, stalin, mao, abortion.
It is amazing, if you study it, how many pagan religions prior to Christianity embraced human sacrifice.
I think what the biblical literalists miss is that by insisting the Bible to be literally true, you push many people away from accepting the Bible’s higher truth.
The 200_s. So not yesterday, but not all that long ago, either. I attended evangelical bible studies (though a mainline church) while in college, and while I wasn’t 100% your typical evangelical belief-wise, my beliefs were close enough to fit in. It was on things incidental to the faith (like choice of worship music, opinion on evolution) where I felt a little like a fish out of water among evangelicals.
I’m not sure how much postmodernism in itself has to do with it. There are Christian postmodernists and PoMoCons (postmodern conservatives) – and I think it’s pretty normal for PoMoCons to be Christian traditionalists. Though it’s possible “postmodern”, like “evangelical”, is often used as a class marker rather than a label for actual beliefs.
Yes, that happens. But in my experience, cultured respect for the Christian story happened, too. Admittedly, that kind of respect requires cultural literacy, and there are a lot of cultural illiterates these days.
I’m pretty certain that was a rhetorical question, so I’ll let it stand given that the answer is obvious.
As to the second, I’ll point you to Dennis Prager who noted that the most dynamic religion of the 20th Century was Leftism, and the bitter fruits thereof become obvious.
And there’s no doubt that human sacrifice was a part of many religions – but that is explicitly not a part of secular tradition. Even with that said, Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice as well: it’s just centered on the sacrifice of one particular person rather than ongoing sacrifices.
Among rationalists, Buddhists practices are touted not as a belief system, but a set of habits which promote a more organized, resilient mind. Yoga is similar, but for mind and body. (Horoscopy? I think it’s much more common among elites to mock horoscopes rather than believe them.)
It’s easier to treat exotic spiritual practices as not really true, but effective for certain human needs nonetheless. It’s a sort of National Geographic syndrome: the quaint customs of benighted foreigners need be no more than quaint, and they don’t have to be taken seriously in order for enlightened people to extract the good from them while dismissing the backwards aspects as not really necessary anyhow.
Yes, anathema. The left abhor individuality. Do you?
But wasn’t the narrative “designed” far before its believers had any hope of obtaining, let alone maintaining, social control? Certainly the later established Church was greatly interested in this, but I have a hard time applying that motive to Paul, writing letters from prison to a fairly diverse group of believers, in terms of their social statuses. It would be one thing if, in those letters, Paul tries to gin up a new political order that would have benefitted him personally or put Christians into political power, but that is just not the focus of the narrative at all. His narrative seems mostly an attempt to flesh out the meaning of events he actually believes occurred (and his audience believes occurred).
Again, I don’t doubt that the Church later had a great interest in maintaining social control, I just doubt that when the narrative was “designed,” that was the goal in mind.
I’m mostly in agreement with this. Certainly I agree about the yoga, horoscope, crystals, essential oils, nonsense. Its as much gibberish to me as Christianity is (and god help me, I get a lot of it from my in-laws so I know whereof I speak). The only quibble I’d have is with how well all of it is tolerated in polite society. In my experience that new age nonsense is slightly less welcome than you seem to think it is, and Christianity is slightly less unwelcome than you seem to believe, though I’d probably concede your point that as between the two, Christianity is the usually the more unwelcome. I guess the other quibble is that broad generalizations like this (yours or mine) inevitably over generalize. I’m not sure we could discuss this subject though without tolerating a little over generalization though.
[Edit: I didn’t mean to knock yoga as an exercise practice or strength building activity. I’ve done it and rather like it and certainly see a health value in it. It’s the attribution of mystical powers to it that I find nonsensical.]
I was in a Comparative Religion class in college, and instructor brought in a Muslim speaker, and he made a great statement. He said “Do not judge Islam by the actions of Muslims. Rather, judge the actions of Muslims by the standards of Islam.”
My favorite passage in the Bible comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:
That is the standard by which Christians should be judged.
I don’t think Christian beliefs are “a good in themselves” but I’m a little confused. I think it’s a commonplace that beliefs often generate actions. And deeply held beliefs more so. I can’t look at the network of Catholic hospitals, and schools and soup kitchens across just this country and not conclude that Christian beliefs have played a part in motivating some of this good. I don’t think that everything these beliefs motivate is good of course, but I believe the beliefs motivate action, and that some of that action is very good.
I didn’t know we were talking about individuality. No, I do not abhor individuality. To the contrary, I value it highly.
Remember Tom Lehrer’s National Brotherhood Week song.
Allow me to clarify: I see no causal relation directly between believing (for instance) in the doctrine of Transsubstantiation and the commission of good works. Certainly, other people do good works without believing things that are nonsense, so the irrational beliefs don’t seem to be integral to them.
I make the same argument re: Mormonism – Mormons are by my estimation generally good and decent folks, but my question is always: why can’t we have goodness and decency for their own sakes? Why is there this overhang of “believing things which are preposterous” as a precondition for doing good?
It is at the very minimum non sequitir and of a piece with the notion that faith is a good in and of itself. How about faith in the scriptures of Scientology? How is that not a good but faith in Christianity is? There’s a type of chauvinism there which doesn’t transfer and I find bothersome. This faith is good, but that one is bad… it all seems somewhat arbitrary and subject to accident of birth.
Does that mean that Christianity is either malign or evil? Of course not. But it cannot be the sole cause of good in the world either, which means that Christianity’s values are the important thing about it, not its theology.
I didn’t mean to suggest that social control was the sole object of the narrative. Clearly another is simply comfort for the afflicted. When in extremis we all want to hope for a light at the end of the tunnel, a better world to come, etc. The “narrative” gives hope of that too, even today. It is a “carrot and stick” narrative though, with the carrot giving comfort and the stick exerting social control. Both are and always have been there in the narrative, though their relative impact has varied from time to time and place to place throughout Christian history.
Leftism and secularism are both god-less religions, ergo both atheist.
I watched a biopic on Lee Strobel recently, author of “The Case for Christ.”
While he was trying to prove Christianity wrong, he was, as a journalist, investigating a criminal case for what was believed to be a gang related shooting of a cop. During the trial and investigation, it becasme known the defendant was an informant. Upon guilty conviction, aided by Strobel’s own reporting, the man was imprisoned and killed. As a rat and a cop killer, he stood no chance.
Eventually, Strobel discovered the cop was dirty and the defendant had been innocent, but it was too late.
Through all of this, Strobel was presented with more evidence of Christianity’s veracity than what was needed to convince him of this innocent man’s guilt. At some point he realized he was willing to act on far less evidence for something with far greater implications if he was wrong than he was for Christianity that holds no consequence if he’s wrong.
Every day, we act on x amount of evidence. Frequently, we require far less of it to come to conclusions in politics and policy than what we ask of God in proving his existence.
The skeptic isn’t immune.
That’s a funny definition of atheism, but the left explicitly deifies certain ideas – that outcomes ought to be equal; that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed; that human nature is infinitely malleable.
These are all metaphysical concepts which have all the motive power over the left that the statement “For God so loved the world” has over Christians.
I’ve read Strobel’s books. I remain unimpressed at his circular reasoning.
Did you not read my comment? Jiminy christmas…
I wasn’t asking you to be impressed or convinced.
I merely ask for a bit of humility in your own abilities to assess truth based on evidence.
Here is the relevant comment:
That’s extremely nice, but it’s a long book and there are other things in it, not all of which are so poetic and laudable, including passages regarding gay people. I’d be very happy to see us all judged by the passage you cite though.
It is that very provision of evidence which seems to be the rub.
I think this is a straw man. Believing those things may be a motivation, without it being a precondition. Unreligious people do good things all the time, and religious people do lousy things all the time. This isn’t black or white. But when a church builds an hospital and funds health services for the poor, all the while claiming that they feel called to do so by their faith, I see no reason to disbelieve them.
Deleted. Irrelevant in light of a later comment.