Losing Our Religion

 The post over at Unsupervised Learning interviewing Ryan Burge is subscriber only on my desktop. I can read only a little, and I can listen to but 20 minutes out of a 50 minute podcast. But I can listen to it in full on my device and get at the full transcript, though it is clunky to read it there.  I'm old.  I don't like long-form reading on a phone. I can use it to extract specific quotes or review a section, but it's usually not otherwise worth my effort.

I like Burge.  His substack Graphs About Religion is quite interesting, and I don't doubt his use of data. But his generation is showing in his analysis. He is the age of my two oldest sons and of bsking. He has an impression, I think accurate and fitting the data of how many people have claimed to be evangelical over the years, that there was a more unified evangelical popular culture in the 1990's.  Evangelical kids went to large festivals, listened to common music, had similar t-shirts and other merch, and shared cultural beliefs more than they did before and after. He grew up Southern Baptist himself, and is now American Baptist, a much less evangelical branch.

He points specifically to the political uniculture that everyone was and is expected to be right wing, and it clearly frosted him then and still does. Perhaps that is a little strong.  At minimum, he feels it is confining, limiting. I tend to agree. I was always conscious of only partly sharing the common beliefs when my children were in Christian schools.

But he errs greatly in seeing this as some divisive force that grew up in the 80s and topped out in the 90s, referencing Newt Gingrich.  That movement was very much a counter-reaction. The evangelicals did not decide to separate from popular culture so much as recognise that they were positively hated in the shiny bright culture who thought they were smarter and better.  The religious left, whose existence was denied for many years, aspired to be part of this NYT/WaPo NYC publishing, academic culture, held the reins of power in American religion. The seminaries and faculty of denominational schools tilted left, so that a liberal clergy and conservative laity was common across the mainstream denominations. They gravitated to headquarters and boards, and they decided where the charitable and political action money was going to be spent. Not only UCC and Episcopal churches funded radical causes in other countries, but even the Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, etc did so as well. 

I was in a more conservative denomination teaching a middle school unit on the Ten Commandments and receiving materials from the publishing arm at headquarters and was given things like advocating for minimum wage increase under the category of Thou Shalt Not Steal. The social gospel held the institutional power and saw it threatened and lashed back in hatred. I grew up UCC, and I read enough of CS Lewis's commentary on what was happening in C of E in the 40s and 50s to know that this had been going on a long time and was deeply embedded.

We didn't start the fire.