Prosperity And "Fundamentalism"

Daniel Larison has a couple of good posts up in response to Andrew's attempt to defend Obama's comments about religion. Andrew casts the remarks as a reference, not to faith as such, but to "a certain kind of religion, a neurotic, rigid variety that is often - but not always - part of the fundamentalist psyche," and that can indeed be a manifestation (or so "history has sometimes shown," he contends) of "economic, political and cultural frustration." In response, Daniel makes the point that history may have "sometimes" shown this, but usually it doesn't show anything of the sort - a point that dovetails in obvious ways with my own remarks yesterday about cultural conservatism, prosperity and voting behavior.

I would also add that you can usually tell when religion-infused political movements have emerged in response to economic frustrations, because such movements tend to include (unsurprisingly) a strong economic component - from the Thomas Muentzer-inspired peasants' revolt of the 16th century down through the Christian populism of William Jennings Bryan to the variations on liberation theology that you hear from (ahem, Mr. Obama) many African-American churches today. And the fact that the agenda of post-1970s religious conservatism (what Andrew describes, frequently and inaccurately, as "fundamentalism") does not include a strong economic component ought to suggest - at least to informed observers, a category that apparently doesn't include the leading Democratic contender for the Presidency - that "economic frustration" has very little to do with its appeal.

(It's also worth noting that to the extent that contemporary religious conservatives, Catholic and Protestant alike, do emphasize poverty and economic tribulation, it's usually in the context of exhorting their co-religionists to help others in need, whether in the U.S. or (especially) overseas. Gersonism is a politics for prosperous Christians looking to do good in the world, not economically-frustrated believers clinging desperately to their churches, guns, and bigotries.)

Comments

Thomas Muentzer, interestingly enough, was a national hero for the former East Germany and seen as their ideological forebear. Just though I would point that out.

Posted by Hector | April 16, 2008 12:27 PM

Obama, for all of the artlessness and (arguably) condescending tone of his remarks, shows a far greater understanding of the subject than Larison. The fact that the overall economy has boomed does help to explain the reactionary cultural climate in small towns... because these are, by and large, people who have been less successful and feel alienated from the metropolitan elite.

Sure, there has been a groundswell of upper-middle class religious conservatism in America (what you're calling Gersonism). But that isn't what Obama was encountering in rural PA. He's describing a phenomenon that runs deeper than economic dislocation and is only loosely connected to religion.

There are a large number of Americans who feel alienated from our political and economic institutions and our popular culture. They aren't impoverished, but they aren't secure either. When they engage in politics it is usually to lash out at some alien aspect of our society -- gun control, people they aren't comfortable being around (gays, immigrants, hip hop gangstas), the ACLU, etc. At times they are angry and bitter. In most cases there are valid concerns (teen sexuality, crime, terrorism, personal freedom, job insecurity) that have been blown out of proportion.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | April 16, 2008 1:14 PM

I'd wager that LaFollette Progressive and Barack Obama together haven't spent two weeks of the past ten years in non-coastal small towns, yet they are total experts on what makes the people there tick.

As they say, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.

Posted by y81 | April 16, 2008 1:40 PM

y81. Ross is a Harvard man, so you might want to rethink your next impulse to be witty.

Posted by MLP | April 16, 2008 2:03 PM

Well said, y81.

To further the condescension point (not just by Barry, but his devotees):
I have a brother that's been all "Obama" all over me the last 3 months. He emailed the other day inquiring about my thoughts on "bitter"...i made my points...and pointed him toward George Will's latest column on Barry's condescension.

After reading Will's article, my 39 year old brother went on to say to pontificate about who Adlai Stevenson really was (as if he were even alive at the time) and Will's take was ignorant. Also said Will "couldn't see the forest, only the trees in front of him".

I asked my brother if he saw the irony in his remarks (his snarkiness in refutation of a column about snarkiness)...he got mad.

Is there a chance Obamania could be tied to Scientology? My brother also talks a lot about "getting clear". Not sure what that means.

Posted by NC Hick | April 16, 2008 2:19 PM

Two cents:

Ross' formulation of Obama's remarks are kind of screwy. He seems to deny that working class families don't feel bitter because we haven't seen a movement of bitter working class people with a economic agenda and plan. This is a little stupid, just because there have been working class voters who have turned their bitterness into an political movement doesn't mean that every working class group in every era is going to do so.

Reading this post and the other one about this topic it seems that once again Ross is attacking Obama for not being a conservative, or at the very least an economic conservative.

Also, there is a big leap between examining Obama's statement and transforming that into liberal dogma.

I mean you never, ever see a wealthy, elitist, private school educated Republican condescend to working class voters. Thats just never happened.

Posted by MLP | April 16, 2008 2:49 PM

I agreed with Ross' earlier post, but not this one. Just because some religious movements don't have strong economic components doesn't mean that they aren't fueled by people who are not doing very well in this life and are hoping for better in the next life. I am thinking of things like the tent revival movement in the 19th Century, Billy Graham's crusades, and of course, people like Joel Osteen and Rick Warren now.

Ross assumes that because some religious movements have an overtly leftist component, that those that do not must not be fueled in any part by economic anxiety. I don't see how that follows.

To draw an analogy, many prison ministries don't really focus on the political issue of calling attention to prison conditions or getting innocent people out of jail. That doesn't mean that the experience of imprisonment isn't what brings people to the ministry.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 16, 2008 2:51 PM

Dilan Esper beat me to it - well said.

Posted by berger | April 16, 2008 3:08 PM

The heartland of religious conservatism in the U.S. today is not the Rust Belt, but the South, which is doing much better economically than in past generations: As Michael Barone pointed out: "Per capita income in Mississippi [traditionally the poorest state] was 36% of the national average in 1940; in 1999, it was 72 percent, well below the national average, but given the lower cost of living here, a level recognizably American." And Texas is far more prosperous than that.

The pain from closing of heavy industrial plants in Pennsylvania and the like has tended to be concentrated not among Baptists but among Catholics.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 16, 2008 3:58 PM

Dilan,

I'm not sure I get at all your references especially to Billy Graham and Rick Warren. Warren's church is in a pretty (if not very) prosperous Orange County while Graham's crusades got their big start in the 1950s and 60s, hardly a time of economic struggle. (Joel Osteen and his fellow "prosperity gospel" types seem to be another sort and it probably is pretty interesting to think about why they seem so prominent now). I certainly wouldn't deny that economics has nothing to do with religious movements of one sort or another, but the error in Obama's remarks (well, one of the errors anyway) was to posit some kind of temporal relationship between economic frustration, political inaction, and certain religio-politico-cultural phenomena. Or something like that.

Posted by Michael Simpson | April 16, 2008 4:11 PM

I'm enjoying the neo-scholasticism involved in parsing the meaning of "cling" as to "religion" as if Obama published a law review article. On the Village Voice's new Stupid/Evil scale, I'd have to give this a 90/10, much, much more stupid than evil.

After six months of grueling 24/7 campaign, the man was speaking to doners and volunteers about canvassing in certain areas and gave a glib and gave superficial answer that, to most Americans, is exactly what it is, a glib and superficial answer from someone who is most likely exhausted. No one, except nitwits, expected Obama to provide detailed and subtle analysis.

My only issue is that Obama's comments is that he left out age. Those Pennsylvania and Ohio towns he's was most likely referring to are old, old, old. Lucky he did not, since nothing relies upon old people and the media as much as reminding old people that they are, in fact, old.

No one, except for bloggers and talking heads and a few nitwit commenters, gives a rat ass about what he meant by "cling." Might as well argue about how many angels fit on the head of a pin. BTW, Ross, how many do fit on the head of a pin?

I understand this post isn't so much about the use of "cling", but I thought I'd vent a bit.

Okay, I'll go sit back in the corner now.

Posted by Pagan Love God | April 16, 2008 4:49 PM

A wise man once described American conservatism as "irritable mental gestures." Y81 does his team proud.

I went to an elitist Ivy League school called Indiana University. Most of my friends and family live hundreds of miles from the nearest large body of water. And I've seen a great deal of anger and frustration aimed at Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood in recent years.

It's interesting that Obama is seen as "condescending" for attempting to describe a certain mindset he has encountered on the campaign trail, but it isn't condescending for wealthy conservative elites to appoint themselves defenders of the common man and denounce other wealthy elites for failing to have simple, common tastes and interests like "all the real people in the heartland." Very interesting.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | April 16, 2008 5:39 PM

I tend to agree with Pagan Love God. This wasn't a dissertation. It wasn't even a blog post. It was an off-the-record somewhat-lazy statement to sympathizers. He was trying to explain to overenthusiastic supporters why resistance to Barack Obama in rural Pennsylvania might not be racist, or at least that that might be oversimplifying things a bit. The whole statement isn't entirely coherent, and there is no point overanalyzing it.

Viewed as a thesis about the sociology of religion, it was sophomoric. Which is still a big improvement on what George W. Bush could come up with.

Posted by Pithlord | April 16, 2008 6:00 PM

Well, right-wing politicians' statements, even off the cuff, get parsed minutely for the hidden dog-whistles which educated, centrist swinging voters don't discern but which are immediately obvious to the gap-toothed with their guns, pickup trucks and Confederate flags. Even such details as which town or city a candidate gave a certain speech at, are subjected to this intricate Kremlinology.

I do think it's odd that Obama would say this, even to that audience, when he's one of the most explicitly religious candidates the Dems have run since Jimmy Carter. It would have fit the pre-existing image of, say, Kerry or Dukakis, even Gore, more closely.

Posted by Rod Blaine | April 16, 2008 6:15 PM

Ross is ignoring the ancient and universal history of the ruling class channeling popular anger away from themselves and toward various scapegoats, who are are often defined by religious criteria. Jews, heretics, infidels, heathens and assorted sinners du jour-- and it helps when these targets are living well themselves like medieval Jewish userers or the modern-day Hollywood elite. Add to this the fact that religious leaders often belong to the ruling class themselves, and are sometimes throroughly corrupted by its temptations (see: Alexander Borgia, Pat Robertson), and I think Ross is being blind as a bat here.

Posted by JonF | April 16, 2008 7:39 PM

Ross is right that w.w.c. Republicans are not the down-trodden masses. But he fails to notice how much of their Republican affiliation has to do with an extremely bitter status anxiety about their cultural identity. This anxiety isn't immediately economic at all.

Posted by matt | April 16, 2008 8:37 PM

Re: But he fails to notice how much of their Republican affiliation has to do with an extremely bitter status anxiety about their cultural identity.

What is this anxiety about cultural identity all about? I find the concept frankly puzzling. I'm a white guy with working class family roots, though now entering the upper middle class. I currently live in one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the country, and both the cultural and class divisions here are quite jarring sometimes. Yet any anxiety I have has to do with economic concerns-- the price of gas, the security of my job, etc. (Or with purely private concerns like my health and the stability of my relationship). Why should anyone feel "cultural" anxiety? As I said above the fact that the guy down the street speaks Spanish, or my coworker has different opinions on religion than I do, is utterly harmless. It does not pick my pocket or break my leg. What's to be anxious about?

Posted by JonF | April 16, 2008 9:51 PM

So, okay, I'm supposed to take seriously intellectual arguments about the motivations of Christian religious believers made by Christian folk who believe Jesus's mom was a virgin, that Jesus came back from the dead, and that Jesus floated to heaven.

That's not exactly a set of beliefs that gives me much ground for taking them seriously. Let's get real here. Religious people are religious for a lot of different reasons but none of those reasons have anything to do with what is true. In every case, Christians "cling" to their beliefs for reasons having to do more with their disappointments than anything else.

Sheesh, these folk won a lottery so huge (evolution) it makes the biggest powerball jackpot ever look like a piker's tip after a cheap lunch counter meal. But,they are so much deserving of some nebulous "more" that it makes believing all kinds of tripe virtuous.

Obama was right about ALL Christians, including himself.

Posted by sewells | April 17, 2008 8:42 AM

There may not have been a strictly economic component of post-1970s religious conservatism, but there certainly was an anti-elitist element. And moreover, there certainly was and is an economic component to conservative populism in general. Rising median prosperity (it hasn't risen that fast, though) isn't enough to disprove this--instability and inequality can still fuel anti-elite sentiment.

At the end of the day, some working class whites of fairly modest means ($30,000 to $50,000 household income) voted for Bush by quite a margin. At least some chunk of people large enough to change the outcome of that election were indeed voting against their interest (if the GOP actually ran a pro-family campaign like Ross and Reihan talk about that would be one thing, but Bush's 2004 GOP was definitely out to screw over exactly these people.)

It's sort of the premise of Obama's campaign that lots of people on all sides--liberals and moderates, populists and elites, westerners and arabs, cultural conservatives and social liberals--have all become too invested in the fight and are acting against their own stated deeper goals, and therefore Pareto improvement is possible. Which is sort of what Obama was saying here--that Washington and liberals in general have let down the working class, and therefore the working class will focus on things that actually achieve some sort of apparent success, like religion and community. This dynamic is to the detriment of both elite reformers and workers, but it was the elites who abandoned the workers first, not vice-versa.

Posted by Consumatopia | April 17, 2008 12:11 PM

Thanks goodness there's no such thing as time travel! Otherwise, Obama could go back in time a couple decades, make this gaffe, and accidentally give the GOP a strategy to avoid fading into oblivion...

Posted by BobN | April 17, 2008 1:31 PM