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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
Had to chuckle at some of the comments – especially those about the Baptists. I was raised as a Baptist. The church is a magnificent example of Gothic architecture and because of its beauty is a historic landmark in Pittsburgh.
@AltarGirl: “Baptists are great at prioritizing scripture, knowing it, and memorizing it, but they are weak on context, theology, and apologetics.” That definitely was not the case in our church. Interestingly, a few of the ministers held PhDs – history, literature – in addition to seminary study. Needless to say, the sermons were very interesting. The adult Sunday School teacher was the Dean of Public and International Affairs at Pitt. My Sunday School teacher was a GM at one of Westinghouse’s divisions (who became so annoyed at corporate that he bought the division and started his own company). They encouraged questioning and presided over deep theological discussions. I remember going to a Baptist youth conference where I spilled the beans that we had dances and parties at the church. The looks I got!
There were other professors from the various colleges in the city. The congregation drew from all walks of life. Such interesting folks, many quite successful in their chosen fields.
When my father was transferred to a small city in Illinois, we joined the Baptist church there. After a month or so, my father announced that we were joining the Presbyterian church. He said he couldn’t be a faithful member of a church that didn’t allow its members to drink alcohol. A few years later we returned to Pittsburgh. Once again we were Baptists.
Granted, this was 50 or so years ago. Sitting here in California typing this, I have no doubt that the congregation has changed. Doubtful there are university and college deans, profs, etc., and probably few businessmen and women. Happened to see a photo taken on a Sunday morning of the sanctuary. Not a suit and tie, nor a coat on a woman – other than hoodies or windbreakers – was to be seen. Moreover, the leaders of the church have gone the way of the modern with respect to the service. Where once a beautiful choir sang the classics – Mozart, Handel et al., now it’s mostly ‘praise music.’ And more’s the pity. But that’s just me.
You’ve described my mom’s Baptist church in Hyannis, Massachusetts, and in Melrose, Massachusetts, too.
My mom’s minister had a doctorate from Harvard. Her Wednesday Bible study class was extremely interesting. She would never miss it.
The music was beautiful, and the church leaders were highly educated people. And very nice too.
That’s why most Baptists are called Southern Baptists.
And why there are Yankees and Damn Yankees. The latter are the ones that settled down south.
I dunno. I knew a Southern Baptist with Texas roots and a Ph.D. who taught Sunday School in GA for a while and might have known a thing or two about apologetics or the history of theology. A bit of weirdo he was, to be sure.
Then you aren’t paying attention. The inherent dignity of the person cannot possibly be demonstrated. That compassion or mercy are good in and of themselves, also cannot possibly be demonstrated and in fact it is quite possible to adduce instances in which they lead to greater evil later (e.g. letting that failed suicide bomber live to see another day because you know he has a wife and kids, resulting in his later successfully carrying out an attack at a bus stop killing nine people including children, turning the other cheek to that Nazi punk on the bus instead of beating him to a pulp, etc.). If you think man is just a meaningless cosmic accident or that we make our own meaning (however that is supposed to work), and reject a transcendent, eternal source of moral good, well, then, there is no rational reason not to prefer a Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin, Caesar, Napoleon, pick your monster to a Wilberforce, Garrison, Churchill, pick your hero best embodying true human virtues. In fact, if man is just a chemical accident, it would just as rational to hold funerals for all the rats killed by exterminators in Paris last week as for that heroic policeman or for that Holocaust survivor who was murdered by her neighbor. Earlier generations of philosophical materialists were honest enough to admit these moral facts, the current generation of PMs is not. What one really believes about the morality and the nature of man cannot help but influence how one treats one’s neighbors. So, once again, and as usual when dealing with this topic, Maj, you’re completely and totally wrong.
Which, of course, doesn’t contradict what Travis said. To do that you would have to show that Dalits are 16% or less of converts. That is not my sense, but I confess I haven’t looked closely.
I should have been more precise and say the Southern Baptist Convention.
It’s tough conversing with a Philosophy Major. ;-)
Speaking of things that can’t be demonstrated, how about the foundational principles of science?
Wait. I’m an SBC guy, and so our old church in GA where I taught SS was SBC too!
One Sunday the wife of a SS teacher at my parents’ SBC church in TX was congratulated for earning her MD and her Ph. D. that weekend. That outdoes me!
About one third of Indian Christians are Dalits. That’s one third of 2.5% of the population = 0.83% of the population are Christian Dalits.
About 16% of the population is Dalit, so that makes about 5% of Dalits Christians. Which doesn’t seem a particularly fast conversion rate over a period stretching from 200-400 years of British domination (depending on where you were in India).
If you run the number for Scheduled Tribes separately, who make up 9% of the population and one third of Christian Indians, that means about 7.5% of the Scheduled Tribes are Christians.
But the picture is more interesting (and perhaps more revealing) which you look at Christian concentrations on the map:
Tribes went Christian in the North East, which is where you see majority Christian areas (like Mizoram or Nagaland or Meghalaya).
The other parts where there are higher rates of Christianity are exactly where European colonisation lasted longest – in the Deep South (the Brits) or in Goa (the Portuguese – the Basilica there was standing before the Taj Mahal was built; though in North Goa, where the majority Christian population is concentrated, conversion did happen by the sword).
(I also noticed The Andaman and Nicobar Islands – about which I cannot say at all.)
Rates are lowest where the Princely States were – iow, where the Brits did not rule directly.
Which supports power = status = attractiveness, but it still doesn’t seem like a very high rate after a couple of centuries? That’s all I was saying.
I agree about the playground. Where the state’s giving out money for some non-religious purpose (skinned knee prevention, for example) to all comers, it can’t say “but not if you’re religious.” I think that case was correctly decided. And I’m not sure I’d call participating in the federal student aid programs “taking the king’s schilling” although honestly I’d need to know more about how they operate. Questions like “who’s administering the decisions about who the money goes to” and “how blank is the check” and “who receives the money in the first instance, the institution or the student” would seem important to me there. I haven’t had any dealings with that system in 25 years, but it seems to me that back in law school, the whole system felt like little more than the government paying my law school whatever the school asked for. IOW, it felt like a school subsidy more than a student loan program. Anyway, yea, as you often see in the free exercise/establishment realm, there are some pretty fine lines to be drawn on these questions.
What are the “foundational principles” of science in your mind? I’m not sure it has any. Science is simply a method for groping toward truth by trial and error, observation, experimentation, and reproduction/recomfirmation.
Cool, cool. I think we’re agreeing on stuff. That’s nice.
It’s like I said before. The foundational principles are the ones that science needs to work.
Using your language, it’s the principle that we can learn by trial and error, observation, experimentation, and reproduction/confirmation. Or the principles (however we may formulate them) which justify that principle.
I would have to go back and review, but I gave the books away because I didn’t regard them as indispensable in any fashion.
He chooses to fill his books with many just-so stories and a variety of tautologies and non sequitirs while repeatedly begging the question. If I can find a comprehensive review, I will provide it, but they struck me as the lowest form of apologetic, beginning with the above-mentioned reasons to the aspect of crass commercialism involved (Strobel is smart enough to know that Christians love conversion stories and shamelessly bangs that drum.)
Fair enough. I wondered if you’d go there. Without some willingness to accept the input of our senses though, I’m not sure there’s much to talk about. Or even any reason to believe that we are talking. So sure, it’s turtles all the way down, but I’m willing to accept that what we observe is something from which we can learn.
Who’s not ready to accept that? Besides Hume, anyway. (Oh, wait. I may know at least one other.) For my part, I was born ready. I’ve always been ready.
It remains true that we cannot learn any knowledge from what we do not already know. Since science must presume that we can learn by [etc., etc.] and must begin from the belief that sensory input is a source of knowledge of a reality outside the mind, it follows necessarily that scientific knowledge relies on knowledge not coming from science–or else that we know nothing from science.
As always, I reject that skepticism.
The turtles only go down to the foundation. Then they stop.
@barbaralydick et al
I wasn’t meaning to be derogatory.
While I am no fan of Baptist theology and still find it too light and lacking in some depth, the Baptist church will always have my respect for their knowledge of what the Word of God says.
It was the Baptists who taught me scripture. But it was also the Baptists who confused me on salvation, baptism, and “being saved”. Believers Baptism is a theology that leads to confusion for young people born in the church. I don’t think the formation of that theology goes deep enough in that it doesn’t ask certain and relevant questions or evaluate the effects on young people who may have been believers for years, but their “moment of faith” results in no internal changing, leading to repeated declarations of “moment of faith” and a general internal questioning of “am I truly saved?”
Rather, believers baptism theology stays at the surface of what scripture says in a far more literal sense. It explains away households being baptized and it takes nothing from the context of the Old Testament and the purpose of mikveh.
This is what I mean by “light”. I don’t think it goes deep enough.
It’s been my impression for some time now, that when I find a clear headed thinker, whether it’s on the Supreme Court, a journalist, biographer or historian they’re either Orthodox Jews , orthodox Catholics or a conservative protestants. The same thing was true in Japan. When we ran into a tough intellect they turned out to have been Christians. Others were just using approved talking points. The Christins were reasoning from principle and knowledge. I think the anti Christin liberal is a class thing and they tend to be poorly educated in everything but their own narrow specialty if that.
But going to the OP for a minute (what a novel idea), I think there is some insight in the observation. I’m not sure it is totally bound up with class, though, but with social acceptance and the desire for approval of one’s neighbors more generally. If the neighbors are mocking Christian morality on one point or another or Christian belief more generally, then to the weak of spirit, character and mind, it is felt to be better to play along than endure the mockery. I think that cuts across social status lines.
There is one aspect of the phenomenon that you describe that is particularly repellant and particularly Western: The willingness to “excuse” Christian faith or religious enthusiasm generally in non-whites that the same persons unhesitatingly and unmercifully condemn when they see it in the melanin-challenged persons of generally northern-central-eastern- European extraction. I saw this a lot in grad school, e.g. “John, Paul, how could you be so stupid as to believe that ignorant collection of Jewish fairy tales!” vs. “Keeshawn and D’Meeka, you go to a Pentecostal church? How charming! How does speaking in tongues work?” Twas a sterling example of that Soft Bigotry someone once spoke of….
This is a lovely and confusing smear – Idi Amin is among my favorite despots though, if only for his singing voice:
Where shall we begin with this in all seriousness though? So, your assertion is that because the scientific method can’t quantify your preferred measures of wellbeing that it’s useless… well perhaps not useless because I don’t want to engage in the same manner of pedantic overstatement you’ve engaged in, but we all get the point, nonetheless. I guess on that basis I could convince you to eat soup with a hammer and then declare that hammers lead to Hitler because you got covered in minestrone.
So, when we look at the things that give people comfort and provide them with the comforts of a good life – things like love, family, music, literature, philosophy – do you think that people who subscribe to “Philosophical Materialism” (the only philosophy which has provided man with the ability to contemplate the bounty we enjoy, currently) don’t enjoy these things or can’t make use of them? Do you think that only those things which subscribe to your particular version of a particular theology are the ones which are capable of providing such comfort? What chauvinism would that be?
I don’t believe you think that, but I also don’t believe you think what you wrote above in fullness either, so perhaps you could attempt to represent my thoughts with just a skosh of honesty and good faith?
You’d think if the elites hate “the rich” so much they’d encourage Christianity more.
No. And a person honestly interested in a rational discussion would not make that inference. What I wrote is that “goods” in particular mercy and compassion cannot be demonstrated to be good by materialist standards, and indeed, by materialist standards they can be seen to be destructive. I also wrote that absent a transcendent standard of the moral good, there is no rational reason to prefer the model of a murderer and tyrant to that of a freedom fighter and humanitarian (using examples for each). That is also true. By purely material standards, evaluating only the physically observable results of their actions, some of the most successful persons to ever live were war-mongers and ruthless killers on vast scales (e.g. Caesar, Napoleon).
Maj, Philosophical materialism did not even provide us with the scientific method, much less with its fruits. Modern science, its methods and basic assumptions, came from the enlightened and distinctly theistic minds of Francis Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, James Clerk Maxwell, Gregor Mendel, and well, I could go on. The key minds shaping modern science were with a handful of exceptions (Watson and Crick come to mind) Christian and Jewish theists and it is those who start with the premise that the universe is the product of a rational mind who have the best and most reasonable ground for expecting it to follow rationally predictable laws and law-like regularities. Even Carl Sagan and Paul Davies conceded this at points in their careers.
As for whether PMs can make use of or enjoy those things, of course they can. But they do in explicit contradiction of their professed world view.
I think we just agreed again, unless I misunderstood this, and that you were just making the (academic) point that even the things we learn from science are premised on our acceptance of a foundation (about the value/validity of our perceptions of the material world) that we cannot prove. Did I get that right? If so, I’m with you.
Additionally, although it’s (mostly) confirmed by trial and error, some basic symmetries are assumed, assumed to a degree beyond what experiments themselves would dictate (in that deviations from these symmetries are written off as experimental error). One is that time and space do not behave mysteriously differently in different regions. (Relativistic effects can warp spacetime, but then the presence of matter explains that.) We expect physical laws not to spontaneously change just because it’s Tuesday, or Kansas. That sort of thing.
In short, we assume it is possible to reliably learn from observation. This seems so obvious, but it’s notable that, since humans are social creatures mostly geared toward observing other humans, and the social sphere is one of the more difficult spheres in which to reliably learn from observation, we do make this assumption so confidently when “simple” physics is involved. I know, it’s not like there’s any other choice. We have to assume it, pretty much. But less because we can prove it than in order to prove anything at all.
This again is a non-sequitir.
The philosophical priors of the particular discoverers of various scientific ideas or concepts have no bearing upon the underlying facts. There are no “Christian Scientists” or “Christian Discoveries” in that sense because there is no “Christian Science” – there are only the underlying facts which are independent of the discoverer’s personal beliefs. When Aristarchus of Samos first attempted to calculate the Earth’s circumference (he came close!) that concept didn’t depend upon the beliefs of his tribe or culture.
These facts don’t care about the philosophical underpinning of Judeo/Christian thought, whose ur-forms bear no resemblance to reality as we apprehend it – and have been suitably modified over time to better resemble the regular, predictable and symmetrical nature of reality.
A bold claim dispelled by history.
All of civilization has been experimental in nature, and our capacity as rational creatures to apprehend the fruits of what these various philosophies produce ought to tell us that there are examples on both sides – I guess I’m not agreeing with the caricature you paint of “materialist standards” but I’ll thank you for attempting to do my thinking regarding what is good and moral for me!
. . .
No it’s not. Or at least to the extent is it true (pulling a St. Augustine on you), it is equally true for your “transcendent standard.” Prove to me, or more importantly to Hitler, that your transcendent standard isn’t just some nonsense you made up to restrain him? What are you going to fall back on? Whatever it is, I promise you, I’ve got one too.
Or if Jesus is in a tomb, but YMMV.
How could history possibly be capable of dispelling that claim?
You are are aware of the is/ought problem, no?
Meanwhile in Rome, Pope Francis declares that there is no Hell!
The lower class (of souls) simply vanish.