The political expediency of 'culture war'

It's useful to remember, when "culture war" fights reach a fevered pitch, that these conflicts and controversies are stoked and perpetuated in large part by people who don't really care. 

It's politics. And political expediency. 

There are those who do care, of course, and who really are deeply concerned about religious colleges and hospitals, for example, being required to offer birth control as part of their health care plans. But there are just as many or maybe even more who seize on such issues without any convictions except political gain. As much as Republican leaders shouted about "religious liberty," it was fundamentally political "points" that motivated them, not fear of religious exercise being curtailed by a Health and Human Services mandate. 

This is clear in how the issue has been handled after it passed from the headlines. 

As Politico reports:

"But now, with the rule set to take effect Wednesday — part of the 'Obamacare' law the GOP hates so much — the fiery repeal rhetoric has fizzled. In fact, few on Capitol Hill are saying anything about it at all.

"And that House vote to block the rule? Never happened — and isn’t in the works either. A group of die-hards on the issue asked for it again in a closed-door meeting [last] Wednesday with House leadership but said no promises were made.

"Even Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), one of the most vocal critics of the rule and co-sponsor of a bill to eliminate it, has gone quiet now that the rule is about to kick in."

If one actually believed that this mandate is a violation of the free exercise of religion, this isn't how you'd respond. The actual actions of the representatives make it seem like this wasn't seen as a matter of defending the Constitution, but rather rhetoric and politics. The issue is a wedge, which might move some voters right, and motivate others to go to the polls.

There's no evidence, though, the Republican party as a party agrees with those suing the federal government over this birth control mandate that "after August 1, 2012, Plaintiffs will no longer have the right to make health care insurance decisions in line with their Catholic views," because on Wednesday the HHS rule "will go into effect and force Plaintiffs to pay, fund, contribute, or support artificial contraception, abortion, abortifacients or related education and counseling, in violation of their Constitutional rights and deeply held religious beliefs."

It's hard to see how the Republicans' very tactical response is anything other than a betrayal.

Not that there won't be congressmen and women across the country campaigning for re-election on the platform that something must be done on the issue they failed to do anything about.

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Now I'm shifting the square / with the man from ArkansasHe took my rook, oh Lord / My king's about to fall

More Houndmouth

Porter Perkin's write-up: "When Jared told me to check out his cousin’s band, Houndmouth, I was skeptical. Jared’s from Indiana, after all."

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Why do people still not know if Obama is a Christian?

Recent Pew poll results on perceptions of Romney's religion say pretty much exactly what one would expect. More people know he's Mormon than used to, but they're either OK with that or don't care. The poll found "unease with Romney’s religion has little impact on voting preferences."

The more interesting information, here, is that 51 percent of registered voters don't "Identify Obama as Christian."

This isn't because they think he's a Muslim, though. There are some who think he's Muslim, but the number that identify Obama with Islam has been pretty consistent and relatively small, upticking only slightly from 12 percent right before the 2008 election to 17 percent today. 

The big block of registered voters who don't say Obama is a Christian are not saying for sure what his faith is. They're saying they "don't know." Nearly a third say that they don't know, now, a number went as high was 41 percent in 2010. From the looks of the numbers, about 10 percent of voters have, over the course of Obama's first term, gone from thinking he's a Christian to not knowing if he's a Christian to thinking he's a Christian again -- all without ever saying he's Muslim.

It's possible to read this "don't know" as simply the safe version of saying he's Muslim. Some Republican officials have taken this stance of allowing doubt and encouraging distrust without actually saying anything directly. Like, "he says he's a Christian ... (but I don't know)," etc.

There's another way to read this question about Obama's Christianity, though, which has nothing to do with rumors he's a secret Muslim.

It's possible 31 percent of registered voters don't know if Obama's a Christian because they don't know if liberal Christianity is really Christianity.


Consider: a year ago there was an intra-evangelical fight about the doctrine of eternal damnation, after megachurch minister Rob Bell wrote a book questioning some aspects of that idea. The terms of the fight were, to a large extent, could one still be considered a Christian if one did not believe in hell? This is not an exaggeration. Though it was portrayed as a conflict over this doctrine, it was actually about who gets to count as Christian. So John MacArthur wrote, e.g., "Is Rob Bell truly a Christian, or is he one of those dangerous deceivers Scripture warns us about repeatedly (Acts 20:29; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15; Colossians 2:8; 2 Peter 2:1; etc.)? It's a fair—and necessary—question." Kevin DeYoung, who started the extensive attack on Bell, wrote that "At the very heart of this controversy ... is that we really do have two different Gods" and "Bell’s vision of heaven and hell doesn’t work because his vision of God is false."

For people who take this position that Christianity is only Christianity if it includes a strong vision of eternal damnation, Obama's not going to count as Christian.

In one of his more extensive statements on his faith, for example, the then-Illinois state senator said,

"I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. 
I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.
 That’s just not part of my religious makeup."

DeYoung, and those like him, would not likely conclude from the above that the president is a Muslim, but they wouldn't say he's a Christian, either. Not a "real" Christian, anyway.

Thus: "don't know."

It's a kind of yes and no answer, as in yes he's a Christian in the sense he identifies as such, but no, he's not really a Christian, because he embraces a "phony theology ... not a theology based on Bible." The "yes" is about a descriptivist account of Christianity, which allows that people are as they say they are, and the "no" is a prescriptivist account, which holds there's an essential definition of Christianity, and someone can say they're Christian without meeting the objective theological standards of being Christian.

It's possible that nearly a third of the country's registered voters are just confused and have been tricked by conservative commentators into suspecting the president of the United States is other than what he claims to be. A more reasonable explain, though, it seems to me, is that this 31 percent recognizes Obama is, as he says he is, a liberal Christian, but they don't know that that Christianity is really Christianity.

For them, liberal Christianity is in a confusing neither/nor space that's kind of hard to name, especially when going back and forth between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions of "Christian," and that's exactly the gray area where Obama and his faith fall.

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The Mather tomb

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'Theory': a class in 6 videos

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Incarnation, in the context of demon possession

A fascinating thing about demonology and explanations of exorcisms is the way theology -- sometimes very abstract theology -- is re-cast in very different terms.
 
So, for example, an anonymous Catholic priest from the Midwest who participates in about three exorcisms a day talked to the Catholic News Agency about the incarnation, as thought about in the context of demon possession. CNA reports:

"The early Church Fathers, including St. Jerome and St. Augustine, speculated that these angels rebelled 'because of the revelation to them of God’s plan of incarnation' and their 'repulsion at the notion that God, who is pure spirit and infinite, should become a man.'

For this reason, the priest observed, they have a 'fascination with physicality' and 'making people suffer.'

'So once the rite begins, normally [the demon] starts to manifest himself in the suffering person different ways - violence, changing of the face, changing of the voice [so it] is different,' he said."

This means, according to the priest, 1) the demon is, from the demon's perspective, slumming; 2) the suffering person is suffering because of the incarnation; 3) suffering is inextricably linked to redemption.

This isn't so different than traditional Catholic theology of incarnation. But when those doctrines are illustrated with the image of a 13-year-old boy who falls down and starts growling in response to a priest's prayer, the context for the meaning of these ideas changes, and some aspects are more notable that they would be otherwise.

The idea that suffering is related to redemption, specifically, looks a lot different in this context:

"'These suffering people are becoming saints (by) the offering of their sacrifices' which God then receives and 'blesses large parts of the Church around the world.'

'When you remind the Devil of that it makes him furious,' because he knows he is losing and hence 'he wants to get what he can, while he can. If he can't win these peoples' souls, he wants to at least make their lives miserable.'"

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When talk of 'religion in politics' goes in circles

In northwest Washington State, where my parents live, traffic engineers have spent the last decade or so implementing their ingenious solution to congested intersections: traffic circles.

Traffic circles, these "roundabouts," are so much better than four-way stops. More functional. More practical. They ease congestion and allow traffic to flow more smoothly. And yet: In practice, what you see is often people stuck driving around and around the roundabouts, stuck going in circles, not sure how to actually use this very useful things. Everyone just goes in circles, the whole region's traffic now a series of crazy merry-go-rounds without the music.

My fear and sometimes my frustration, in talking about "religion and politics," is that this very functional idea ends with everyone stuck going in circles.

I'd like to briefly offer two exits. That is: two different ways out of the circle. Two contradictory correctives to how we get stuck talking about religion and politics and religion in politics in the US.


My first suggestion: More of American politics is religious than we allow.

Second suggestion: Religion is less important in American politics than we allow.

What I mean by the first is, we seem stuck, too often, with only a couple of issues, a couple of topics, designated as "religious." And, many times, too, we seem to imagine the religious position as clear, and not diverse, as definitive, not diffuse and decidedly plural.

Think about health care. We've allowed to the "religious issue" regarding health care to mean strictly statements released by Catholic bishops. That is one aspect, but that's not everything. Ted Kennedy, the late "lion" of liberalism, took a break of cancer treatments to cast a vote to protect Medicare. He spent some time towards the end of his life promoting universal health care, and hoped that health care would form a substantial part of his legacy. Because of his religious beliefs. Kennedy wasn't outspoken about his understanding of Catholic social teaching and his belief that his Catholicism called for certain political action, but when asked he would cite his religious convictions as the source and motivation for his liberalism.

There are other examples. The point is just that one of the things "religion and politics" or "religion in politics" could very helpfully open up for us is the sorts of positions and people and issues that are not typically designated as religious.

The second corrective suggestion, to keep us from getting stuck going 'round and 'round, is that we get off on the other side of the circle, and think about how religion is not as important as it's presented in U.S. politics.

A lot of times what we point to as religious is really just one kind of account or justification or explanation for policies. But that religious discourse isn't necessary to that policy. It might work as rhetoric, politically or practically, appealing to certain segments of the electorate, but it's not quite right to think of the policy or position itself as religious.

As an example of this, think about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The former was deeply religious, the latter, ambivalent towards religion, unless politics and winning is a religion. But what difference did faith make in the policies of the two men? If the areligious Cheney had taken over for the evangelical Bush, what would have been different? The point at which the two men broke ranks wasn't abortion or the environment or the middle east, or any of these supposed religious issues, but the question of whether or not to pardon political allies who'd broken the law.

So maybe "religion" is a less useful idea for analyzing the Bush administration's policies than has been generally supposed.

It can be quite useful to discuss religion and politics. There's a very functional aspect of this topic. But just as a suggestion, when you find the conversation going around and around, as it does and as it will between now and November, consider these exits off the roundabout.

Ask: is there a way religion's more involved than is being recognized? Or, on the other side, is it possible religion's significantly less important than imagined?

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Chuck Colson on Abraham Kuyper

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Monologue at a Boston bookstore

Did you get my text?
My phone is about to die.
I thought I sent it to you, but it looked like it went to somebody else.
John Winthrop.
John Winthrop.
JOHN. WIN. THRuuuP.
Remember him?
From the Winthrops.
Winthrops.
You read that 38,000 page series on the Winthrops.
Well, I'm glad I didn't send you the text, then.
You would have been like, 'what is this?'
Hello?
Hello.

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Religious folk art painter passes

Greg Brown, who made Christian folk art in Indianapolis based on his interpretation of the kingdom of heaven parables in the synoptic gospels, who wrote a three-part pamphlet entitled "Secret of the Kingdom," and once exhibited his paintings in a show called "The Kingdom of Heaven is Like the Psychological Realm," died last week at the age of 62.

May he rest in peace.

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Things to think about when interpreting religious statistics

If you study contemporary religion and are interested in religious trends in America, data is not a problem. There's a wealth of data. A surplus. Lots and lots of raw info, which one can only be grateful for.

The problem isn't numbers, but interpretations of numbers.

It could be a full time job, questioning and challenging and correcting interpretations of this data.

Part of this is just because so many of the interpretations are  political, and are essentially hack work. If your mission, in reading the numbers, is to show why your side is right and "winning," whatever winning means or is supposed to mean, you're going to be able to make the numbers say what you want them to say. But that will be a shallow and facile reading. Numbers aren't so simple as to just prove straightforwardly that a certain theology is the right theology, or to allow for easy extrapolations of truth beyond the brute fact of one number or another. Ultimately, it will involve implications you're not actually comfortable with, and will involve accepting premises which, as they say on cop shows, can and will be used against you. 

So be forewarned.

In that spirit, three things to think about when interpreting contemporary statistics for U.S. religious participation:


1. For an explanation to explain one thing, it has to explain many things.

Case in point, if "accommodating the culture" explains why Episcopal numbers declined from the '70s onward, why did "accommodating the culture" apparently have no negative consequences from the gilded age to '66?

Or, if "holding true to orthodoxy" and "maintaining traditional, conservative faith" explains Southern Baptist success from the mid '30s to 2000, what happened then?

Another way to think about this is that explanations all have implications, and if you query some of those implications, making them more explicit, you can get a better sense of whether or not the argument is something more than an ad hoc guess.

So, for example, William M. Briggs, the Cornell University statistician who put the above graphs together follows Douthat's commentary on "liberal Christianity," which is changing and changing and dying for that reason. Worked into a rule, the thesis proposes: when a religion becomes indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, in an environment where religions compete for adherents, said religion will lose adherents.

It's actually a really interesting thesis. What "the surrounding culture" consists of needs clarification, of course, and it would be helpful if the corollary thesis were also considered, that when religious stand out from or oppose the surrounding culture, in an environment where religions compete for adherents, said religions will gain adherents. I can think of a number of religions that seem more oppositional to American culture than, say, Southern Baptists, which have not done so well in gaining adherents. Especially in places where the "surrounding culture" actually is most accurately described as "Southern Baptists."

The point being, if this explanation is going to account for why there are so many Southern Baptists in the American South, it is also going to need to explain why Hare Krishna and Zoroastrianism are not so popular in that same region.

If the explanation can't explain anything except the one particular point, it's not a particularly good explanation. It's likely just hackery, an ad hoc, not-really-serious argument that supports a pre-conclusion, i.e., that one side is right, "winning" because they should be winning, etc., etc.

2. There are internal changes and external changes. Changes in thought and ideas and changes in conditions and contexts. Remember to also consider the later. Many interpretations of graphs like the above emphasize or focus on only changes (or purported changes) in theology. But that's not all that's going on.

While many have, e.g., said things like Briggs says about the above graphs, that,

"those denominations which are roughly 'conservative' are strengthening, while those which are roughly 'liberal' or 'progressive' are weakening. And it doesn’t take a keen eye to see when the trouble started. With your finger, draw a vertical line at 1960 or so on each of these plots, and then allow yourself a slight 'Ah,'"

that only takes changes of ideas into consideration. What other external factors changed in the mid '60s?  It's true that the 1960s saw a leftward lean for many churches, but it was also a time when America's immigration policies changed, which meant that the racial make-up of the country changed. One could plausibly "draw a vertical line at 1960 or so on each of these plots" and then think about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and how that has dramatically reshaped the demographics of the US. In the cases of Catholicism and Pentecostalism, here represented by the Assemblies of God, it's quite possible to argue that growth has everything to do with that immigrant influx. Methodists and Episcopalians, on the other hand, are nearly 90 percent white.

I don't know why it's so hard to imagine that culture is not just mental and psychological, but also material, but it is. Changes that happen -- in religion or anything -- are often better explained by charting changes in context and conditions than by accounts of how people have suddenly transformed.

3. Correlation and causation are not the same thing.

Anyone who interprets contemporary religious numbers should have to have this tattooed on the insides of their eyelids.

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The fictitious history of the Episcopal Church

Conservative critiques of the Episcopal Church seem to have come up with a fictitious history of the church. It makes sense -- or enough sense -- on the level of critique, except that it's also always historical, and it's about how Episcopalians used to be but now have changed. And on that level it's very strange nonsense.

Ross Douthat, doing this:

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.

Russel Mead says the church's extreme irrelevance comes from the fact that it followed "the theological path of least resistance as it makes the transition from a church that once spoke to a nation to a sect in communion only with itself."

Philip Jenkins makes the same argument, essentially correlating the decline in church attendance to a change in the Episcopal Church's relationship to American culture. The church began, the implication goes, to just accommodate culture at some point, and then there wasn't any real difference between being in church or not, so what was the point? Thus the decline. Jenkins says what especially worries him, as an Episcopalian, is that the church leaders won't reverse this trend, but instead will be more accommodationist, adapting even more to "secular" "liberal" culture, instead of staking out an oppositional position that would legitimize the church's continued existence.

Except the Episcopal Church's "golden age" was actually more like the "gilded age."

The church's high-water mark came when it was most staunchly on the side of the status quo. Not when it was prophetically standing against the culture, but when it was, in large part, a club for powerful people and an endorser of proper opinion

The Episcopal Church was at it's height in 1966. According to the Historical Statistics of the United States, which is put out by the US Chamber of Commerce, in 1966 the Episcopal Church had 3.6 million members in the US. More than ever before; more than ever since.

The church's reputation at that moment was as the church of the J.P. Morgans and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and Astors, who dominated America and the Episcopal Church from the 1900s to the 1920s, and made the Episcopal Church into a quasi-national church. In the '50s, according to one report, about three-quarters of New York Times wedding announcements were for weddings in Episcopal churches. It was the church of Wall Street. Church as country club. The "Republican Party at Prayer." One prominent member in the late '60s was Gerald Ford, then the House minority leader. Another was George H.W. Bush, then a congressman from Texas. John Lindsay, the leading liberal Republican from New York, was Episcopalian. As was William Randolph Hearst, as was William Davis Taylor, then the publisher of the Boston Globe, and as were one third of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart and Byron White. When Dwight D. Eisenhower died in '69, he laid it repose at the Washington National Cathedral.

This was not a counter cultural church. This was not a church offering an alternative to the dominant status quo.

And yet it was really, really popular. So if something changed between the height of the 1960s and the bottom dropping out of attendance today, it wasn't that Episcopalians suddenly started "accommodating" to popular opinion and polite society.

In fact, the decline that conservative critiques are pointing to began about a decade before the changes they'll specifically point to as causes. The Episcopal Church began to make the changes that upset conservatives in the mid 1970s: changing the prayer book in '76, declaring homosexuals to be "children of God" deserving of equal rights in '76, ordaining women in '77, ordaining an open homosexual in '77, and so on.

By that time, though, the church was already in decline, having lost about 800,000 members between '66 and '75.

It's perfectly legitimate to critique the changes in theology in the Episcopal Church over the last four decades. It's legitimate, too, to point out how the power, prestige and numbers of the church have more or less evaporated in recent years. Successfully correlating the two things, though, and claiming, even, that there's a causal relationship between the two things, is going to take more work.

But imagining a fictitious history where the Episcopal Church stood against the trends of its day, taking stands for orthodoxy and the Bible against the elite of the era is just nonsense. The Episcopal Church never occupied the culture space of, say, today's Jehovah's Witnesses. There are definitely some things that have changed with this church and with American culture since the 1960s, but this story about this sudden cultural accommodation to fashionable liberalism is fantasy.

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The Jonathan Edwards Center Germany, inaugurated. More info here.

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One last song

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Andrew Sullivan's anti-Mormon biogtry, ctd

Andrew Sullivan has -- kind of amazingly -- now discovered that Mormon theology of America is -- OH MY GOD! -- complicated.

A Sunday afternoon post, citing an actual news piece with actual scholars actually quoted: "it turns out Mormon patriotism has a more complex past than you might think."

Unless, of course, "you" thought about it.

Or, like, googled.

These scholars quoted in the piece, Kathleen Flake and Quin Monson, aren't exactly difficult to find. They're not hiding from the press. Flake has been on PBS. Monson on NPR. Both have been quoted in the Washington Post.

A few minutes of due diligence would have answered some of Sullivan's questions about the policy implications of Mormon beliefs about America's part in the divine plan, if those questions hadn't been just rhetorical cloaks for anti-Mormonism.

Besides, even the most rudimentary knowledge of Mormon history -- e.g., what happened to Joseph Smith, and why the Mormons ended up in Utah anyway -- would, if reflected on a little, show that Mormon patriotism is of course tempered by critiques of America.

This is how it is with "refined" and "classy" bigotry. The "scrim of rhetorical finesse" covers up sloppy, sloppy thinking, and stupid, stupid research.

And just as a general point, a good rule of thumb: theology is always complicated.

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Marx explains German philosophical prose

"German literature, too, labored under the influence of the political excitement into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of 1830.... It became more and more the habit, particularly of the inferior sorts of literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their productions, by political allusions which were sure to attract attention. Poetry, novels, reviews, the edrama, every literar production teemed with what was called 'tendency,' that is with more or less timid exhibitions of an anti-governmental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigning after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political opposition there were mixed up ill-digested university-recollections of German philosophy, and misunderstood gleanings from French Socialism, and particularly Saint-Simonism; and the clique of writers who expatiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of ideas, presumptuously called themselves 'Young Germans,' or 'the Modern School.' They have since repented their youthful sins, but not improved their style of writing.
 

"Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle class, when Hegel in his 'Philosophy of Law,' pronounced the Constitutional Monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words, he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here .... [They] brought forward bolder political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French Revolution. The abtuse philosophical language in which these ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the 'young Hegelians' writers enjoyed a liberty of the Press unkown in every other branch of literature."

-- Karl Marx, in Revolution and Counter-Revolution; or, Germany in 1848, giving a historical account of the obtuse and turgid style of philosophical German prose.

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The ambiguous economics of religious construction

Among the many economic indicators of America's lingering economic troubles, one of particular religious interest is TLRELCONS. That is: total religious construction, as measured in spending by the Department of Commerce. The latest numbers, crunched by the economic research team at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, show spending on religious construction fell off a cliff with the recession of 2008.

Just crashed.

And not by a little: Spending now is less than half what it was in 2006.

It's a "Bear Market in God."

 

But why? It's not at all clear what's causing this or driving this, or what's behind it. What are the conditions favorable or unfavorable to church, synagogue, temple or mosque construction?

Looking into the numbers, it becomes even less clear what's going on.

There are several curious things -- some unanswered and kind of perplexing questions -- about this sharp decline in religious construction spending.

First, religious construction was already in decline at the time of the economic crisis.

In April 2002, for example, religious institutions in the US spent a total of $8.75 billion on construction. Throughout the summer of 2003, spending on houses of worship continued to regularly pushed close to $9 billion. In June 2003: $8.73 billion. July: $8.79 billion. August: $8.8 billion.

By the beginning of 2006, this was down to $8 billion.

That's still a lot of funds poured into construction projects, of course, but the point is that before the recession, religious construction funding was in decline.

By comparison, 2006 was a peak year for residential construction spending, and for total US construction spending, which also includes public construction, institutional construction, etc. That was the height of the building boom -- and the housing bubble -- but religious construction spending was already on the wane.

As Joe Weisenthal writes at Business Insider, it doesn't seem to be a matter of economic downturn: "It's just a long, secular trend."

This fact counters the dominant narrative that churches were doing fine, building and growing and building again, until they suffered a sudden, surprising setback because donations disappeared in the financial crisis. The news story so popular in the last few years has been that churches are getting foreclosed on because of the crisis. It was a great story. Nice and dramatic. It illustrated the crisis without any detour into subprime mortgages or any of the institutional practices that caused the financial collapse, and generally managed to make the victims of foreclosure seem sympathetic. The thing packaged perfectly for headlines: Banks foreclose even on God!

A good story, but a bit of a farce. In one particularly bad year, according to Reuters, 138 church buildings were sold after defaulting on loans. But there are something like 344,894 congregations in the United States, meaning the repossessed, re-sold buildings accounted for roughly one for every 2,500 religious religious structures.

Perhaps more critically, the story missed the way that the economic crisis was serving as an easy explanation, a ready-made narrative, but was not necessarily the whole story. Just because real estate agents, bankers, pastors, church accountants and everyone else was saying "financial crisis" like it was an explanation, didn't mean it actually was. The numbers show that something had changed in the way money was spent on religious buildings well before the economic crisis.

But what?

Second, spending on religious construction hasn't recovered in the slightest.

There's no hint of a reversal or even a weak, tenative recovery. Other types of construction spending have come back at least a little. Private construction spending dropped from a high of $6.7 billion in March 2006 to a low of $2.2 billion in June 2009, a huge dive, but that was the floor, and it didn't keep declining. The spring of 2012 has seen a slight increase, actually. It's coming back, maybe a little. Not so with religious construction.

At the official end of the recession, spending on religious construction was at about $6 billion. In March 2012, spending dipped to about $4 billion. In April, it down to $3.8. In May, $3.5.

Where's the bottom? At what point will spending on religious construction turn around -- or even just level out?

Presumably that depends on a change in the conditions favorable to building religious buildings, but what conditions are those?

Third, spending on construction by religious institutions actually spiked during the recession.

Not by a lot, relatively speaking, but still, it's a spike. The numbers show that by mid 2008, spending had dropped to about $6.9 billion, but then increased that fall by about $500 million. Spending in September, October and November was at a rate of about $7.4 billion per month, just slightly below 2007 levels.

It's possible there're really easy explanations for this. What they might be, though, I don't know.

Perhaps mosques, meeting houses, etc., spent the extra money to finish up projects they'd delayed because of the crisis. But then why hasn't that repeated itself, and why is no similar late-recession spending spike seen in private or commercial construction? Perhaps something happened towards the end of 2008 that made those responsible for deciding on such spending think things had changed, but again, what sign, and why weren't similar indicators seen by other sectors of construction spending?

The only similar movement I can find, actually, is in public construction spending, which is spending meant to affect the market in accordance with the economics of John Maynard Keynes, not spending that responds to the market. I don't see how the rational for that public spending might be related to religious institution's rational.

On the other hand, maybe it is, in a specifically religious form: A lot of churches, for example, when undertaking big building projects, use the language of "sowing" and "expecting," and a kind of build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy. Maybe, in the middle of the recession, some groups decided to act on faith, and spend and build their way to the recovery, though a specifically religious sort of recovery.

I'm not entirely sure I buy that, nor can I think of any readily available evidence that might show that to be the case. But the odd blip is there still to be explained: Who spent an extra $500 million on a religious building in the middle of the greatest financial disaster in however long, and why?

Fourth, the decline in religious construction spending doesn't correlate to "secularization."

The one explanaiton proffered for this chart has been secularization, or the idea, basically, that religious institutions have stopped spending money on building because they've stopped receiving money in donations and they've stopped receiving money because fewer people are attending religious organizations.

There's not much interpretation of these TLRELCONS numbers -- perhaps because they seem so disconnected with anything else economists or economic reporters might be trying to explain. There's nothing like a real consensus of an account that I can find, or even, actually, much in the way of accounts at all. There are a couple of references to secularization, though.

But, despite being very reasonable sounding, neither aspect of the secularization thesis is supported by facts.

While it's true, for example, that charitable giving dropped off in the recession, it hasn't continued to decline. There was actually an increase in giving in 2011. And then another increase in 2012. According to one widely-accepted group's studies, giving declined by nearly 13 percent in 2008, but has ticked upwards since then. In 2010, Americans gave about $6 billion more than had than the year before. In 2011, they gave $12 billion more than they had in 2010.

That's not nothing.

In fact, on a "relative historical basis," according to the Atlantic, it's a pretty high level of philanthropic giving, and actually "slightly exceeds the inflation-adjusted value in 2000, making it more than in any year prior to 2004." This reportedly corresponds to a long-term pattern, where American's charitable giving increases by about 2.6 percent in the two-year period following a recession.

Not all of that is religious giving, obviously, and religious giving hasn't rebounded in the way that giving more generally has rebounded. Giving to religious institutions decreased by 0.8 percent in 2010, according to the same study. It decreased again by 1.7 percent in 2011. In both years, though, religious giving accounted for the largest portion of charitable giving, so that roughly one out of every three dollars given away was givien to a religious institution.

That's more than $100 billion given to religious institutions in a very bad year.

That amount and the rate of change, critically, bear little to no resemblance to the decline in religious construction spending.

And even if the post-recession decline in charitable giving exactly correlated to the decline in religious construction spending, we still wouldn't know what was going on. Charitable giving increased from 2002 to 2006, and yet religious construction spending declined. There could perhaps be an argument that this kind of giving and that kind of spending are related to each other in some way if only the period after the recession is considered, but what about before?

The same problems persist in attempts to correlate religious attendance and religious construction spending: They just don't relate in any clear way.

There's a very well-known story, now, about the rapid rise of a group sociologist call "nones." That increase in religiously disaffiliated people in America does increase at the same historical moment that this spending on construction by religious affiliations decreases. Disregard first appearances, though. The increase in the "nones" is not going to work to explain the bear market in synagogue and temple, etc., construction.

Why? Because, 1), the change doesn't exactly line up right. And 2), the change is change in identification, not necessarily attendance. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of people who say they don't attend religious services of any sort has increased by 8 or 9 percent, according to Robert E. Putnam and David E. Campbell. That's significant, but it's a matter of self report, and not an unambiguous indicator of religious behavior. What we know, from that statistic, is only that the way people describe themselves to strangers on the telephone changed in this particular way by this particular amount during this particular time frame. It may be the case that these 8 or 9 percent of people used to, before the 90s, regularly attend religious services, but we don't know that. It's at least as plausible that they didn't, but felt they needed to say they did because that's what was socially acceptable to say when someone you didn't know asked you this kind of private, kind of loaded question.

To what extent that change in self-identification has meant an actual change in the numbers of people in churches, synagogues, etc., is pretty hard to pin down.

Besides that, the rate of the increase in the number of self-described "nones" seems to have leveled out since the recession, which isn't true at all for the dramatic decrease in TLRELCONS in that same period. Where spending on construction plummets after the recession, attendance at religious services doesn't. If you ask people how often they attend religious services, as Gallup did in 2008, 2009 and 2010, they say more or less exactly the same thing all three years.

This counters the oft-repeated truism that people flock to church during recessions -- if it was once true, it isn't now -- but doesn't explain the decline in construction spending.

Self-reports about religion are not exactly reliable, so one could disregard these self-reported rates of attendance. It would be possible, perhaps, to speculate that a decreasing number of people are attending religious services but a correspondingly increasing number of people are lying to pollsters about religious attendance, the numbers not matching the reality. Except there are a few studies that report actual head counts at actual religious services, and they don't don't show a huge rate of dis-affiliation either. From 2000 to 2007, according to one report that actually errs on the side of thinking churches and Christianity are about to go extinct, church attendance specifically declined by 1.7 percent.

That's not much. That's not really likely enough to be noted in most churches, much less cause the kind of panic that would result in a serious adjustment to spending and long-term plans.


The secularization explanation doesn't really work, then.

Fifth, a good explanation of this decline also has to explain why there's still more than $3 billion per month spent on religious building.

Daniel Shutlz (aka "Pastor Dan"), for instance, suggests that the decline is no surprise, since,

"Church buildings are almost optional by definition to begin with: as long as it was built properly in the first place and hasn't burned to the ground, you can generally make do with what you have rather than add on or tear down and start over."

While this seems right, it still doesn't really help. The core question is not yet answered, the core question being what are the conditions connected to the decisions to build or not build houses of worship? Besides not accounting for the fact this isn't simply connected to the economic crisis of 2008, Shutlz's point that, obviously, it's not necessary to build religious buildings doesn't explain why, then, people still do.

And they do. In May of this year, in America, they did it in fact to the tune of $3.5 billion. Way back in the summer of 2003, they did nearly $9 billion's worth of this by-definition optional construction. Whatever changed between the middle of the year nine years ago and this spring, it wasn't the optional nature of new religious building construction.

As it stands, at the moment, there just doesn't seem to be a good working theory. There's not a good answer, and the question still hangs there: what are the economic conditions of religious construction? When are houses of worship built? And why are they built when they are built? What dictates more religious construction? Or less?

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Holy laughter & other ecstasies

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a crocodile about to eat you at the / end

"Prosody is the articulation of the total sound of a poem"

It's got a kick in it   What a kicker   Mid-field   a 12 horse-power kicker
You got a kick?   Go tell it to City Hall

    It's as though you were hearing for the first time--who knows what a poem
ought to sound like?   until it's thar?   And how do you get it thar except as
you do--you, and nobody else (who's a poet?
    What's,
a poem?
    It ain't dreamt until it walks   It talks   It spreads its green barrazza
    Listen closely, folks, this poem comes to you by benefit of its own Irish green
bazoo. You take it, from here.

    Think of what's possible--not what's new, but what it's all about   what
about it's   all   what all of a poem is. You think of it. You put down a word:
how do you put down the last word. How do you have the last word?
    Wow. Yes sir. The last word. What intervenes, is the simplest But--
    You wave the first word. And the whole thing follows. But--
    You follow it. With a dog at your heels, a crocodile about to eat you at the
end, and you with your pack on your back trying to catch a butterfly. 

-- Charles Olson, "A Foot is to Kick With."

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