{"id":13135,"date":"2019-03-16T17:12:51","date_gmt":"2019-03-16T23:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=13135"},"modified":"2019-03-16T17:12:51","modified_gmt":"2019-03-16T23:12:51","slug":"more-on-alienated-america-and-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2019\/03\/more-on-alienated-america-and-new-zealand.html","title":{"rendered":"More on Alienated America – and New Zealand?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

So I wrote the other day<\/a> about a book called Alienated America<\/em>, the primary thesis of which is that Trump\u2019s primary support came not from evangelicals but the men and women from communities where institutions of community life had collapsed, where the people might think of themselves as \u201creligious\u201d but were not affiliated with a church, nor did they have alternate forms of community life like book clubs or swim clubs or whatever.\u00a0 They were alienated, they had no sense of rootedness or connection to people.\u00a0 And he says that lacking these smaller group-connections made them more likely to form an identity around \u201cI am white.\u201d<\/p>\n

Separately \u2014 and I say this knowing I can\u2019t back it up with a link because the topic is too vague for me to find it again \u2014 a year or two or three ago I read an article in The Atlantic<\/em> or a similarly mild-mannered left-leaning publication connecting up racism with declines in religious connection; that is, much as people have treated the decline in religious affiliation and practice in the US as a middle\/upper-middle class phenomenon (\u201cwe\u2019re educated enough that we don\u2019t need the crutch of religion like poor people do\u201d), it\u2019s really something that\u2019s occurring among white working class Americans, and, much as the educated \u201celite\u201d nonreligious folk think that American religious groups promote racism, the reverse is true, that, whether they explicitly tell their members \u201cdon\u2019t be racist\u201d or if it\u2019s just assumed in an overall message of \u201cbe nice to people,\u201d being a part of a religious group causes people to be less racist \u2014 and the rise in nonaffiliation\u00a0becomes, then, a rise in racism.<\/p>\n

Dangit, I wish I remembered that article well enough to find it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I am still not going to address<\/a> the killings in New Zealand directly; I have not seen anything in the news that provides any meaningful local context. Everything I come across\u00a0has the same narrative that treats NZ as the 51st US state.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the gist of a tweet earlier today:\u00a0 in the same way as white Americans said that Muslims have to do something about the terrorists in their community (that is, the ISIS-joiners and the lone wolves), so, to, now do those same white Americans have the obligation to stop the racists in their own community.<\/p>\n

Which \u2014 well, on the one hand, it misses the point to ignore the fact that those same Americans running off to join ISIS claimed that it was their religion that taught them that they were in the right, that in some cases, extremist religious leaders in the US were urging them on, and in other cases avoiding explaining their own interpretation<\/a> of the Koran passages which the so-called \u201cInternet\u00a0sheikhs\u201d used as proof-texts for wars of conquest.\u00a0 But those ISIS-joiners had<\/em> religious communities to begin with (and, interestingly Carney in Alienated America<\/em>\u00a0writes that Muslim immigrants are more likely to agree in polling that the American Dream is doing just fine, because they have that community support).<\/p>\n

The entire problem is that the young men who are drawn to racism in the United States (and again, do you know anything about New Zealand and its social problems or lack thereof?\u00a0 I don\u2019t) have no communities.<\/p>\n

It makes no sense to say \u201cwhite community leaders should fix troubled young white men\u201d in the same way as you can say \u201cMuslim community leaders should fix troubled young Muslim men\u201d when that is the entire frickin\u2019 problem<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And I type this in part with anger at everyone who has written a stupid triumphantalist article in Slate<\/em> or The Atlantic<\/em> or wherever, celebrating the declining prevalence of religious belief and practice in the U.S. as a sign that we are all becoming more enlightened because fewer people believe that there is something \u201cout there\u201d beyond what scientists can prove exists \u2014 though, to be fair, it is mostly the commenters at such sites.\u00a0 They take it is a sign that everyone will now be more egalitarian, will welcome people of all skin colors and sexual orientations, will assiduously seek out each other\u2019s pronouns and respectfully check their watch when they\u2019re told that their conversation partner identifies as female in the morning, male in the afternoon.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not how it works.<\/p>\n

And I think that some of those same triumphantalists\u00a0understand that, when they express the idea that what is ultimately needed for the United States to become a place of social and racial harmony is for white people to just, oh, disappear.\u00a0 Give us a Thanos-snap targeted at the right people and we\u2019ll be all set.<\/p>\n

Oh, sure, we can debate whether or to what degree the federal government should treat white supremacist online groups identical to Islamist terrorist cells, though there is a difference between a group of foreign nationals with the explicit intention of engaging in acts of violence vs. American individuals who (to the best of my understanding, in the case of, say, 8chan) complain and say (truly) horrid things, but don\u2019t collectively plan acts of violence.\u00a0 And entities such as Google and Facebook might well censor them \u2014 though it troubles me that this seems to end in people being censored for imagined offenses as saying \u201clearn to code\u201d on twitter, and that they likewise put their hand on the scale about other topics (e.g., \u201cabortion\u201d searches intentionally produce pro-abortion results).\u00a0\u00a0But how far towards a crackdown of civil liberties does this go?\u00a0 Do we put suspect young men into re-education camps?<\/p>\n

Bethany Mandel, a Jewish writer, gained notice \u2014 and outrage \u2014 for an article describing the consequences of her actions to befriend Nazis, actions which she describes<\/a> as continuously misrepresented by leftists who tar her as a Nazi herself and demand that Nazis \u2014 or racists, generally \u2014 must be ostracized, hated, have their lives destroyed, so that, while they might continue to live and won\u2019t be converted, they\u2019ll live in misery.\u00a0 She\u2019s not the only one to have written about actions in which people \u201cconvert\u201d Nazis by means of outreach rather than returning hate with hate.<\/p>\n

Now we can\u2019t all go out and engage in a program of adopt-a-Nazi.\u00a0 \u00a0But the issue of collapse of community institutions, which is all bound up together with the decline in religious practice, is an urgent one.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to fix it.\u00a0 But it makes me angry every time I come across people celebrating this.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0A Munich Neonazi demonstration, from Wikipedia, https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/b\/be\/Neonazi_2.4.2005_M%C3%BCnchen_2.jpg<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I wrote the other day about a book called Alienated America, the primary thesis of which is that Trump\u2019s primary support came not from evangelicals but the men and women from communities where institutions of community life had collapsed, where the people might think of themselves as \u201creligious\u201d but were not affiliated with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1119,668,45,91],"class_list":["post-13135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anti-racism","tag-community","tag-racism","tag-secularism"],"yoast_head":"\nMore on Alienated America - and New Zealand?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So I wrote the other day about a book called Alienated America, the primary thesis of which is that Trump's primary support came not from evangelicals but\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2019\/03\/more-on-alienated-america-and-new-zealand.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"More on Alienated America - 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