Monday, September 6, 2010
In response to my post, just below, about religiosity and G.D.P., Lew Daly -- author of, among other things, "God and the Welfare State" (here), writes:
The US is far less of a religious outlier among advanced countries if one takes into account our "existential security" deficit, as political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue.
I reviewed the book where they advanced this theory here:
http://www.acton.org/sites/v4.acton.org/files/pdf/8.1.134-136.REVIEW.Norris,%20Pippa%20and%20Inglehart,%20Ronald--Sacred%20and%20Secular.pdf
Here is an excerpt from the review, describing their thesis, which they posit as a critical advance beyond the rationalist and functionalist theories of secularization advanced by Weber and Durkheim respectively:
"They argue that the varied decline and persistence of religion in the world today is most strongly correlated with differing levels of "existential security."
Essentially, religion persists where people bear high levels of risk due to inequality, poverty, and inadequate social provision by the state. Conversely, more equal, less impoverished societies, especially those with comprehensive welfare provisions, have become increasingly secular by every relevant measure. The authors' complex regression analyses show these correlations to be very robust across more than seventy countries-agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial."
In the U.S. case, the evidence shows that our welfare exceptionalism--with higher levels of poverty, violence, inequality, and private risk--goes a long way toward explaining our religious exceptionalism.
Hmmmm. Is this an argument in favor of our welfare exceptionalism? That it helps religion to "persist"? (I kid, I kid. Sort of.) Or (more seriously), are there things that a political community could / should learn from the findings Daly relates about how public-welfare and other (one hopes) existential-anxiety-reducing policies can be designed so as to avoid bringing about, as well, a reduction in public religiosity (assuming one thinks, as I do, that public religiosity is not necessarily something we should want to wane).
Sunday, September 5, 2010
An interesting piece, and chart, from Charles Blow, in the NYT. Nutshell: America is an "outlier" in that we combine a high level of religiosity (i.e., many of our people say that religion is "important" to them) with economic productivity and prosperity.
Mary McConnell has a must-read post up over at Law, Religion, and Ethics, called "Catholic Schools and Broken Windows," which engages a must-read law-review article by my colleagues Margaret Brinig and (ahem) Nicole Stelle Garnett. Here's the article's abstract:
This paper represents the second stage of an effort to test previously unstudied implications of a dramatic shift in the American educational landscape, namely, the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. In a previous study, we used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to measure how Catholic school closures affected perceived levels of disorder and social cohesion in Chicago neighborhoods. In this paper, we use data provided by the Chicago Police Department to test two related hypotheses about the effects of Catholic school closures on violent crime rates. The first is that Catholic school closures will lead, in relatively short order, to increased crime in a neighborhood. The second is that that crime will increase most dramatically in those police beats where previous school closures led to elevated levels of physical and social disorder and suppressed levels of social cohesion in 1995. We find that Catholic school closures are linked to increase in violent crimes, and that the most significant increases occur in police beats with the highest levels of school-closure-related disorder and -suppressed social cohesion in 1995.
Our study contributes in unique ways to two critical legal-policy debates about policing and education policy. First, and most significantly, our data provides a novel means of testing the broken windows hypothesis. We know, from our previous investigation, where school closures have elevated disorder and suppressed social cohesion, and, using a 3SLS analysis to solve simultaneous equations, we are able to link these findings with subsequent elevated levels of serious crimes. These findings suggest a connection between disorder and serious crime, even if not the direct one posited by Wilson and Kelling. Second, the study contributes new and important evidence to debates about school choice, especially in light of the very real possibility that urban Catholic schools will continue to disappear unless new sources of tuition assistance become available to the students that they serve.
McConnell writes, among other things:
It strikes me that Catholic school principals and teachers in fact embraced a version of the broken windows hypothesis long before this catchy phrase surfaced in academic discourse. More specifically, Catholic schools’ relentless insistence that students wear uniforms, walk in orderly lines, observe decorum in the hallway and generally obey a myriad of sometimes petty rules reflected a profound conviction that faithfulness in these small things would encourage learning. The link between enforced order and educational excellence may have been obvious to the nuns, but as the twentieth century progressed it flew in the face of an educational establishment that embraced creativity and individuality and eyed rules with increasing skepticism . . .
Read the whole thing(s)!
Here is a new book by my friend and Wheaton political theorist Bryan McGraw, called "Faith in Politics: Religion and Liberal Democracy." John Witte's blurb suggests to me that this is a must-read:
"In this breakthrough book, Bryan McGraw offers a judicious argument for a new integration of religion and politics. Silencing religion as some liberals would do is no less fundamentalist than establishing religion as some Christians have done, he shows. It is far better for modern democracies to foster open toleration and robust engagement of all forms of faith and non-faith that can test and contest each other's policies. It is also far better for modern faith communities to develop an integrated political theology that balances responsible self-rule with reasonable public advocacy - following the example of several nineteenth-century European religious groups. Political historians and political philosophers will learn much from these learned and elegant pages."
Saturday, September 4, 2010
One striking set of facts discussed in the forthcoming book American Grace is that the three largest groups with attitudes about religion in the U.S. are first, Catholics; second, those who are not religious (17%); and third, those who have left the Catholic Church (10%, the second and third groups overlap to some extent). The Catholic Church's preminent position in size has been maintained despite a large loss of members primarily because of the influx of Latinos (due to immigration and population growth). Latino(a) Catholics are understudied.
I think to avoid deception of MOJ readers I should reveal that I have recently moved from the first group to the third. I continue to attend a Catholic Church in Ithaca (Episcopal Churches when on the road), remain influenced by and continue to look to past and contemporary writers in the Catholic tradition, and continue to share much of the views associated with Catholic social and legal theory.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Russell Moore, dean of the school of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has taken American Christians to task for falling under the spell of Glenn Beck. It's an interesting snapshot into some of the internal debates going on within conservative (particularly evangelical Protestant) Christianity today. An excerpt:
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah
