{"id":12346,"date":"2019-03-05T23:06:11","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T05:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=12346"},"modified":"2019-03-05T23:06:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T05:06:11","slug":"secularism-and-community-a-few-words-on-alienated-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2019\/03\/secularism-and-community-a-few-words-on-alienated-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Secularism and community: a few words on Alienated America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"
https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/all-saints-christian-holy-faith-2887463\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

So I just finished Tim Carney\u2019s Alienated America<\/em>, and have a few rambly thoughts.<\/p>\n

To begin with, it\u2019s very good.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the book in a nutshell:<\/p>\n

When you look at the localities which supported Trump in the primaries, and which continue to be his core supporters now, they\u2019re not the evangelicals which gave him their votes in the general election \u2014 they were faced with the binary choice of Trump vs. Clinton, which really was a choice between a professed pro-life candidate who would appoint originalist Supreme Court justices vs. a candidate with no limit to the extent of her support for abortion rights.\u00a0 Instead, his supporters were actually less likely to be religious, and in particular, less likely to be affiliated with religious institutions (though they might well profess that God\/religion was \u201cimportant\u201d to them in a vaguer sort of way) than supporters of other candidates.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, when those Trump supporters expressed that \u201cthe American dream is dead,\u201d or found Trump\u2019s message to that effect persuasive, it was because, in their experience, that was true \u2014 and not because of their personal financial situation, but because they lived in communities which had, well, lost their community-ness, and because having community ties is actually essential to \u201cliving the American dream\u201d and overall well-being (e.g., social capital).<\/p>\n

In contrast, in places like uber-wealthy Chevy Chase or uber-Dutch towns in Michigan and Iowa, voters chose otherwise; both these areas had in common strong community ties, though it the former case it\u2019s through swim clubs and book clubs and children\u2019s sports teams and in the latter, it\u2019s through churches.\u00a0 Likewise, among immigrant groups, however much they may be struggling, as long as they are connected through their religious communities (whether churches of compatriots, or mosques or synagogues), they still have a sense of American dream-ness.\u00a0 But outside wealthy communities, it is the church\/house of worship which is the key source of community-building, and the decline of churches and religious affiliation (which, contrary to stereotypes, is actually occurring more generally among the working class than the upper class) is hitting these communities hard.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, when working class folk have no source of community identification, or even a sense of ethnic identification, they\u2019re more prone to see their primary identification with their race, that is, being \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carney\u2019s prescriptions:\u00a0 well, given that the issue is the loss of community institutions, his prescription is not some sort of big government program.\u00a0 The role of the government is, at best, to stay out of the way to a greater degree than it has done in the past.\u00a0 Instead, he calls on readers to take steps as individuals to help develop community institutions where they live (though, let\u2019s face it, Carney\u2019s readers most likely live in areas where community institutions are doing just fine).<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ve been mulling over his book, and his ideas have been sitting in a draft ever since I first came across them in the various articles which previewed the book, such as this one at The American Conservative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Heck, I actually purchased the book, rather than just waiting for it to come off hold at the library.\u00a0 (Conveniently, my husband\u2019s workplace is a short drive from one of the few indepedent bookstores in the area, so I didn\u2019t even need to buy it from Amazon (or Barnes and Noble, which is the only other alternative, and there are fewer and fewer such outlets around here).<\/p>\n

And there are two directions to my train of thought.<\/p>\n

The first is personal:<\/p>\n

Last weekend, while I was at the Scout outing, the school my son attends, my parish\u2019s parochial school, had its annual gala.\u00a0 Now, I\u2019m not a big fan of auctions, especially when it comes to the solicitation of donations where prospective donors are asked to just go out to the store and make a purchase at retail price.\u00a0 Maybe the atmosphere of the gala, and the open bar and the general having-a-fun-time atmosphere means that people are willing to bid over and above what they know to be the retail price.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s important to the overall long-term success of the event to have enough \u201cstuff\u201d available to bid on.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s neither here nor there.<\/p>\n

What did bug me over the past week was all the social media sharing of everyone smiling, groups of 10 or 20 women in their shimmery evening gowns.\u00a0 My husband and I went a couple times, and it just wasn\u2019t for us; too much time spent trying to find shoes and a dress that worked for me and in any case, I\u2019m just not the sort of person with dozens of friends to talk to there.<\/p>\n

So reading over the past week about the importance of community connections was challenging for me as an introvert.\u00a0 And at the same time,\u00a0given that the way our church \u201cdoes community\u201d is with a lot of cliques, I wish there was a better way.<\/p>\n

But my second line of thinking is more historical\/cross-cultural.\u00a0 It goes like this:<\/p>\n

There are a lot of authors whose overall approach to the \u201crise of the nones\u201d in the United States is that the U.S. is just catching up to Europe.\u00a0 Secularism is just an inevitable outcome of modernity and the U.S., once an outlier in this regard, is simply no longer an outlier, in the same way as we are no longer an outlier with respect to birth rates.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t buy that.<\/p>\n

My working hypothesis is different:\u00a0 we may appear superficially to be on the same path as Europe, but \u201csecularism\u201d is not a uniform monolitic\u00a0form of society, and the path we as a country are taking is really a quite different one.\u00a0 In the United States, the \u201crise of the nones\u201d has a lot more to do with the decline of social institutions, and churches in America, as Carney so profoundly observes, function (or functioned) as social institutions to a much greater degree than in Europe.\u00a0 In the United States, churchgoing had as much to do with simply being a part of the churchgoing community as it did with expressing a belief or finding great meaning in Sunday services.<\/p>\n

In Europe, in contrast \u2014 or, rather, in Germany, since that\u2019s what I know at least a bit of something about, community life is not centered around churches, and, it seems to me, never was.\u00a0 Sure, back in the day, people went to church.\u00a0 But communities had Vereins<\/em> \u2014 the Turn und Sport Verein offered, and offers the equivalent of what American park districts have, plus the team sports of high schools, and fitness classes for adults; a Blaskapelle for music, others for preserving local culture.\u00a0 My hunch, at least, is that European towns could lose their religious practice without it affecting community life because whatever element of community life that was connected up with church (maybe a religious procession, for example) was only a small part.<\/p>\n

Now, that being said, I don\u2019t have a sense of how strong (or weak) community ties in 2019 Germany, say, are.\u00a0 And I haven\u2019t really dug that deeply into the story behind the collapse of religious belief, except that I have the impression that the devastation of World War II played a role.<\/p>\n

But in the United States, two things happened.<\/p>\n

In the first place, yes, many of the early immigrants had religious motivations, but that was really only a small piece of the history of American immigration.\u00a0 Outside of the Puritians, most immigrants were just coming to seek their fortune.\u00a0 I\u2019m kind of just guessing a bit here, but I would presume that those immigrants were not necessarily disproportionately religious, and one can imagine that actually being comparatively more religious leads one to stay at home, where you\u2019ll have the certainty of being able to practice your religion.\u00a0 But at the same time, the need to reconstruct institutions upon arriving here lent itself to the church becoming the primary social institution and the primary way that its members accessed social capital.<\/p>\n

At the same time, you had these multiple cycles of revival.\u00a0 The First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, the church tent revivals \u2014 I\u2019ve even read statements that the rise of born-again Christianity in the 80s was a Third Great Awakening.\u00a0 Did these periods of revival exist in Europe?\u00a0 I have the feeling that revivalism is a part of \u201cAmerican exceptionalism\u201d \u2014 and, heck, a lot of the Wokism that\u2019s going on among young people now has the characteristics of revivalism, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

But in any event, if what caused the decline in religious affiliation in America is really the decline of church as a community institution, then that means that America is still \u201cexceptional\u201d and is still following a different path than Europe.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that we can shrug off the implications of none-ism; in fact, it means that we cannot use the model of Europe and say, \u201cthey abandoned religion and seem to be doing just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consider the Benedict Option.\u00a0 Yes, I have yet to read the book and only know its general outline, that is, I understand that its general premise is that a smaller church which is still a church holding to its beliefs is better than trying to preserve an institution with larger number of members at the cost of abandoning its theology for a Spong-like message of \u201cchurch as community engaged in humanitarianism,\u201d a sort of Reform (or Reconstructionist) Judaism-like version of Christianity.\u00a0 And maybe this is true, but I\u2019m not so comfortable with abandoning the idea of the church as a form of community (which, incidentally, the evangelical\/mega-churches do much better than Catholic churches these days, with their Small Groups and support groups of all stripes), given that the church as sponsor of community life is probably the best hope of such, especially to the extent that, depending on the particulars of a given church community, it offers, to a greater degree than Carney\u2019s Chevy Chase swim clubs, some hope of inclusion of all social classes, depending on how economically integrated or segregated the wider area is, and from how wide an area that church draws its membership.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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