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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 think – and AlterGirl correct me if I’m wrong — but I think her point is that all “knowledge” is merely a function of evaluating probabilities based on incomplete evidence – sometimes more incomplete, sometimes less so. I think she’d further claim that the evidence for god is better than the evidence for many things we believe and take for granted. I’m with you Maj, and disagree with her on that point. But I think that was something like her point.
I don’t see a reason to disbelieve their stated reasons either, but the question in my mind is: why aren’t perfectly sensible and explicable reasons perfectly satisfactory? The supernatural beliefs don’t add anything, I guess.
I guess because “reasons” are subjective, internal things, and one of the big pieces of evidence we have for their existence is self reporting. So when someone self-reports their reasons for doing something, I tend to credit that self-report unless I see evidence of disingenuousness. I don’t see that in most of the day to day good works done by a lot of Christians who claim a faith based motivation for them.
Thank you :)
You’re welcome. By the way, my disagreement with you isn’t on the question of whether we believe a lot of things based on incomplete evidence. Clearly we do. Heck, sometimes we later learn that we were just plain way off base in some belief too. Other times we believe things that maybe our great grandchildren will discover were nutty even though they seemed perfectly obvious to us in our day. Such is the way of life. I just don’t see as much evidence for god as you apparently do.
Yes. I know how hated the p-word is around here, but supposing eschatological longings ought to be treated as merely a distraction is, in a sense, a form of privilege. It’s one thing to not have eschatological longings yourself – vive la difference – but the judgment that those who have them would probably be better off without them is pretty condescending.
Robert Nozick created the concept of “utility monster”. Many of us are closer to “disutility monsters”, though: when the idea of life is confined to the realm of biological activity, we simply do not get enough utility out of life (nor do we, in our judgment, provide enough utility to others) to justify our social obligation to live. Developing an eschatological intuition, of life-beyond-life, at least creates meaning we cannot find in life-as-biology. Don’t get me wrong, I love the biological sciences! Intellectually, how biological organisms work is awesome! The experience of being a biological organism, though? Meh. It’s inhabiting a walking corpse.
I was born into much of the privilege many Unitarians are born into, a privilege which usually includes plenty of medical and social support for physical infirmities: people expect their (and others’) infirmities to be well-managed so as to preserve personal agency and worth. However, even among the privileged, physical infirmities are sometimes mis-identified, or otherwise mismanaged in a way which undermines personal agency and worth. If others expect me to keep living this biological life, they should accept I might need an eschatology to do so. I imagine that millions of people less privileged than I am could be in the same boat.
Moreover, the conservative ethos is quite karmic – conservatives believe in the Copybook Gods of Consequences. But even an idiot can see that Consequences don’t render just payment in this life. Consequently (heh), we must either weaken our belief in the Copybook Gods (something it is socially unacceptable for conservatives to do, though that doesn’t stop some of us), or we can resort to the expediency of positing karmic effects which go beyond this life into some eschatological vision.
In fairness, the OP, the article referenced and my point (the lesser of the three) don’t address the esteem from libertarians or atheist conservatives but the low status of biblical Christianity in American society, which is sadly immune from libertarian and atheist conservative critiques as well. That low status has little to nothing to do with the non-rational basis of Christianity, evident from the predominance of entire systems of leftist belief which are far less credible and distant from observable confirmation than Original Sin, in my opinion.
Like Unitarians? :-) [Sorry I was typing out this gentle joke before reading your comment above]
I was a student back then, and I’ve been a professor since 2012. It appears to have gotten worse, fast, and even in 2009 it wasn’t great (which was the year I witnessed the first religious cashiering). I’m at a relatively religion friendly school, and while I don’t make a secret of it, being a Baptist who takes the religion seriously is not something I advertise, either. Several faculty feel quite free to disparage the religion of their co-workers and their students, openly, in public, in ways that I wouldn’t feel safe opposing in private.
It’s marginally worse for conservative academics. I try not to think about whether it is cumulative.
I wish there were a word (and perhaps there is) that described an intellectual space between “accepting a particular version of a set of facts as stated to be exactly true” and “belief,” meaning “faith.”
I’m reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I think people whose thoughts are in that particular no man’s land (people like me) are the people he is addressing in this book. I am enjoying every word of it. He is the most gracious and unassuming explainer of Christianity I have ever come across.
I believe in the statement of facts that are expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, but it is hard for me to take literally much else that I read in the Bible. It is my nature to be skeptical. If it is true as described, then thank God for God. It was a brutal existence for humanity. Who would want to live in ancient times? Not I. We were a young people. Mozart could not have survived in that brutal culture.
I guess this is where priests, rabbis, and ministers are so critically important. They create a bridge between the archaic language and symbolism and culture described in the Bible and the readers of the Bible two thousand years after it was written. Having the messages in the Bible translated for modern minds and cultures is critical for the survival of Christianity.
The odd semi-religious things referred to here–yoga, etc.–as well as tiny groups of actual religion Buddhists–are not very popular even here in southern California. By “very popular”, I’m being literal; they make for good gags on TV shows, but are actually practiced by vastly fewer people than go to church.
In the northern part of Santa Monica, California Avenue has many mainline churches and the town’s largest Catholic church. They are all pretty full on Sunday. But in my neighborhood to the south of there, the blocks are spotted with a scattering of tiny Protestant churches, mostly built in the early boom days, 1920-1950, and most are barely holding on. There are three of them within four blocks of here. They were built before parking became a necessity, before social centers and schools were commonly attached to churches, and I suspect in many cases were a midwestern denomination’s attempt to look after their brethren who’d moved to the Coast, like the Church of God of Anderson, Indiana.
Why are they empty? Lots of reasons, I’m sure, but I’d look for the cause in these words “Men are as Gods”. Life in the pre-modern age was dominated by fear and fate. Terrible things happened and not much could be done about it. Nowadays, we’ve managed to make life safer, richer and less cruel. People are less inclined to look to divine help.
I mostly agree with your mostly agree. Sure, I’m presenting a counter cartoon. New Age and older belief systems (including leftist variants on the perfectability of man) are held with varying sincerity and don’t enjoy universal respectability. Sometimes they are bitterly opposed to one another in some settings. In places, Dallas or Atlanta perhaps, a caustic aside about bible thumpers may earn you a comeuppance in polite society. In a few places, Salt Lake City (though less than you might imagine), religiosity may enjoy a higher social status.
Yet, in general, biblical Christianity is held in lower social esteem in America and the historical and social and psychosexual conditions which created and enforce this prejudice have little to do with its non-rational foundation. Christianity as a broad cultural force has been replaced by belief systems which are almost incoherently non-rational (Pinker on human agency is more foolish than anything in the Bible). Science is largely worshiped by those with little understanding of the field.
On the topic of the OP -I’m not sure. My view is complicated. On the question of whether orthodoxy has fallen out of favor, the answer is obvious. Of course it has. Is that the result of elite derision? I’m less certain.
There are entire classes of people who don’t care about elite status -they are among the least religious in the US. The most prominent in our neck of the woods are the White Working Class. There has been no shortage of Evangelical outreach to the white working class, but I see little evidence it is working. At least at my church (in the Bible Belt, I admit), our growth has largely come from college students and young families -the former at least are normally considered a first cut of the elite. This is also true internationally -I am friends with a couple of missionaries in China, and they also see most of the response come from college students and young members of the Chinese Communist Party. (And some, simultaneously horrific and hilarious theological debates about why you can’t have a secret baptism.)
So while the cultural decline may come from the elite, the religious decline is not there. Or if it is, the damage was done years ago, and those who were going to fall away under pressure already have.
My own theory, from being in these “seeker friendly” churches, is that their main evangelism problem is that they offer a bait and switch. They claim to have no doctrine, just love Jesus. Then they reveal that they actually do have doctrine, and people leave. Or, they maintain the claim that they have no doctrine, fall into heresy, and dissolve. Even long-time Christians from orthodox backgrounds that fall in with some of these seeker friendly churches become so enamored of hanging out with the prostitutes and tax collectors, they decide to take up tax collecting and prostitution, and God understands they don’t go to church.
If I may tie this to the nearby Jordan Peterson thread, I suspect much of the problem is that the people doing the outreach don’t believe their own platitudes. They may be lying to themselves first, but you can’t be a prophet without conviction, and a lot of people lack conviction.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
***
One point of order, Fundamentalists and Evangelicals aren’t the same -and the Scopes Trial was considered a great victory in Fundamentalist circles, probably well into the 19960s or even 1970s. What undermined the Fundamentalists was the (massively inaccurate) play, Inherit the Wind.
I think it’s just the opposite. So there.
Treating the Apostle’s Creed as a statement of fact is pretty orthodoxly Christian. It’s even “accepting a particular version of a set of facts as stated to be exactly true”. That you don’t treat the entire Bible the same way just isn’t that much of a stumbling block. The Bible took a while to be canonized, and the first Christians believed without the Bible’s benefit. It is our book, containing material edifying to Christian belief. But Christians aren’t Christian because they believe the Bible. Instead, they believe the gist of “the big story” in the Bible because they are Christian.
Absolutely correct. Today’s “progressives” are mostly not traditional all-that-exists-is-the-material-universe village-atheist types, they tend to be “spiritual but not religious” (in their own terminology) and believe in things a lot further out than alchemy…magical crystals, for example.
Much of this hostility toward Christianity is part of a larger cluster of hostilities: toward rural people, toward Southerners, toward people who lack college degrees…increasingly, people who lack *advanced* degrees.
I discussed this phenomenon in my post The Phobia(s) That May Destroy American.
Beautifully expressed. I like that. :-)
I’m reading the “Let’s Pretend” chapter near the end of Mere Christianity. Lewis writes that there’s nothing quite as explicative of who we are and our relationship with God as the act of saying the Lord’s Prayer. Beginning with “Our Father,” I am only pretending to be that child of God that Christ actually was. :-)
You forgot people who watch Fox News. Or listen to Rush.
This relates again to religion-as-proxy-for-tribe, and how those in the ingroup typically can tolerate anything except the outgroup.
Mere Christianity and C.S. Lewis’s other various essays and books are very relevant to the issue discussed in the OP. Lewis presents a case for Christianity that was really novel to me when I read it, though it should not have been. I couldn’t believe, when I read it, that no one had suggested it before – when I was a teenager or in Sunday School.
Looking back, I had grown a little arrogant in my dismissal of Christianity, and Lewis’s writing was very humbling. Here was a guy who was 1) obviously much brighter than me, 2) had a far greater knowledge of philosophy and the history of human thought than I had, 3) had, at some point most all of the same objections to Christianity that I had, being a reluctant convert, and 4) made it clear that I was not as smart as I thought I was with respect to those objections.
He made it clear that Christianity was a serious intellectual philosophy that I could not just dismiss as an ancient supersitition, wishful thinking, etc…
Yes. All true for me too.
C. S. Lewis is wonderful. Some things in this life are overrated. C. S. Lewis is not one of them. :-)
The Apostle Paul acknowledged following Jesus wasn’t a high status calling in I Cor. 1: “26 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him. 30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31 Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.””
@sabrdance
You get that young members of the Chinese Communist Party going to Church is the cultural equivalent of an American raised Southern Baptist busting out and joining a buddhist meditation group when they go to college, right?
For good and ill each place’s dominant religion is associated with all its cultural and historical baggage. How you feel about your place in the world past and present is going to affect how you see that dominant religion and its adherents.
You responding to Cato?
Yeah, I thought about that, and how his remarks seemed so very opposite to Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity. But then I noticed that he only referred specially to certain points of eschatology as having been propagated by an elite. I’m still not sure which points, although I may find out when I scroll down a bit more. In any case, my working theory is that if you mean this as an objection to Cato then it misses the mark.
But most Christians in India (and Pakistan) were Dalit converts, right?
(Not counting the ancient Mar Thoma church which goes back to the Apostle Thomas.)
Yay!
Nonsense! I haven’t even written it yet!
Fair enough, I reckon.
Really? What Baptist theology or apologetics have you studied? And who’s in the Catholic and Anglican history you refer to? Is Augustine there? He’s part of the Baptist heritage too.
And the representatives of that “richer history of apologetics and well-reasoned theology” would agree, and then they’d explain why that belief is perfectly rational.
Excellent!
Good.
Now if you think that eschatology isn’t about loving G-d and neighbor, you could do with a little more time in Augustine and N. T. Wright, if I may be so bold.
Oh! I’m sorry. My bad.
But do you not think that ancient Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism emphasized their eschatologies?
Ah! So it’s not about emphasis, is it? You’re only suggesting that it’s a mark of younger religious traditions that they have a particular kind of emphasis–the kind that says “Convert or go to hell while contributing to the apocalypse.”
Yeah, you might be right about that. I really don’t know.
Ask Socrates, I guess. Maybe he’ll have an answer.
Cato is right in # 47, though, that “beliefs often generate actions. And deeply held beliefs more so.”
I wouldn’t have my faith if I didn’t think it had been demonstrated pretty darn well.