[Mark: I'm posting the whole thing only because it can't be accessed by non-subscribers and because so many MOJ readers will be interested in it.]
The pope and many others
speak for the thoroughly religious. Christopher Hitchens has the latest
best seller on behalf of the antireligious. But who speaks for the
quasi-religious?
Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of
the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and
irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but
think some of the people who define it are nuts.
Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious
people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line
but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious
Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old
religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up
from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.
And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among
quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and
economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much
lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past
few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.
According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic
white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They
have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline
Protestants.
Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence
indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no
longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults
in the United States today.”
How have they done it?
Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base.
That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on
neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience
and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.
Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and
young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with
Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use
contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their
children to value autonomy more and obedience less.
The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to
maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an
economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a
quasi-religious sweet spot.
On the one hand, modern Catholics have retained many of the
traditional patterns of their ancestors — high marriage rates, high
family stability rates, low divorce rates. Catholic investors save a
lot and favor low-risk investment portfolios. On the other hand, they
have also become more individualistic, more future-oriented and less
bound by neighborhood and extended family. They are now much better
educated than their parents or grandparents, and much better educated
than their family histories would lead you to predict.
More or less successfully, the children of white, ethnic,
blue-collar neighborhoods have managed to adapt the Catholic communal
heritage to the dynamism of a global economy. If this country was
entirely Catholic, we wouldn’t be having a big debate over stagnant
wages and low social mobility. The problems would scarcely exist.
Populists and various politicians can talk about the
prosperity-destroying menace of immigration and foreign trade. But
modern Catholics have created a hybrid culture that trumps it.
In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill
it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are
skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two
things we know about flourishing in a modern society.
First, college students who attend religious services regularly do
better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton
sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are
more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from
denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average,
than students from denominations that don’t.
This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed:
Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more
observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly
dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but
champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but
with one eye open.
The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out
the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great”
appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is
Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of
the Time.”
