Hymns for the Working Class

This accords very nicely with what studies of Trump voters have found:

[M]any of the voters without college educations who supported Trump were relatively affluent. The graph below breaks down white non-Hispanic voters by income and education. Among people making under the median household income of $50,000, there was a 15 to 20 percentage-point difference in Trump support between those with a college degree and those without. But the same gap was present — and actually larger — among Americans making more than $50,000 and $100,000 annually.

To look at it another way, among white people without college degrees who voted for Trump, nearly 60 percent were in the top half of the income distribution. In fact, one in five white Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Observers have often used the education gap to conjure images of poor people flocking to Trump, but the truth is, many of the people without college degrees who voted for Trump were from middle- and high-income households. That’s the basic problem with using education to measure the working class. (The Washington Post)

In short, a Trump voter may be many things, but he’s not necessarily blue collar or poor. Rather, many participate in a culture that smells of the earth (in the same way, modern, glitzily-polished country music does), without necessarily being of it. This carries over into the religious make-up of such a group; it may smell of religion as much as it does of poverty and simplicity, but that doesn’t necessarily equal religious commitment (to be fair, religious commitment is very hard; we’re all constantly embroiled in fighting our own doubts and hypocrisies).

50 years ago Johnny Cash could sing anti-prison country to prisoners in a prison. Today folk and country are more likely to tickle the besuited man with a weekend hunting rifle than to uplift the wrongfully convicted. Somewhere in that transition is the story of Trump’s election, his support by religious people. It’s the story of folk and country, as much as anything else.