Understanding the "nones" as a demographic dissent

Some people are very uncomfortable with the category of race. Whether for personal, biographical reasons, they just feel like they don't fit any particular category, or for political or philosophical reasons, they get the US census at the beginning of every decade and balk at the question, What is this person's race?

This reticence, interestingly, does not show up in the final results. The final census doesn't list some small percentage of people as not having a race or as not having answered the question. This is because, as NPR recently reported:

When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.

A similar phenomena has happened with the new studies of religious demographics, where an increasing number of people have refused to answer the question, the now notorious "nones." Analysts have tried to interpret this response in various ways. The fundamental mistake that has been made, as I have argued, is to treat the people who answer the religious affiliation question this way as a unified group of people.

The problem may go deeper than that, though.



My interpretation of this group has been to insist on pluralizing the "nones," and talk about how cultural shifts have allowed for a new variety of ways to position oneself in relationship to religion. I.e., there are more people willing to self-identify as atheists and humanists, but there are also increased numbers of religious people who understand themselves to be religious but who aren't affiliated with any group, there are those who are affiliated but uncomfortable with public identification, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and so on.

When I have done that, though, I was still insisting on reading this group as defined in terms of ways of affiliating and belonging, as essentially being a complicated subset of a category but still, despite the complications, in that category of religious affiliation. Perhaps, though, that is what the "nones" object to.

Another way to understand this group is as objecting to religious classifications. Not strictly religious affiliations, though there's some of that, but to the project, in general, of religious demographics. 

Elizabeth Drescher, who I have criticized on this before, makes this point excellently in a recent piece, "None" means "None". After re-reading her more recent piece, and reflecting back on a point that Michael J. Altman made about the implicit problems of understanding the "nones" in terms of affiliation, I'm having to rethink my approach. It still seems fairly accurate, as far as it goes, but the unwieldy complication of the taxonomies of (dis)affiliation cause me to suspect I'm missing the point when someone says "none."

Drescher reports on one interview with a young "none" that's specifically enlightening in this regard:

When I asked if he would see himself as 'spiritual but not religious,' he rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically.  

'I don't want you to be thinking of me in terms of spirituality or religion,' he continued. 'Not my religion—if I have one—not your religion. These designations just should not be part of how we relate to each other no matter what we believe.' So, he eventually concluded, 'You can go ahead and call me ‘none.’ But only if you know I really mean "none" by that.'

The suggestion, I think, is quite interesting: rather than thinking of this group as religious in a specific way, might we not think of them as simply dissenting from the category?

Perhaps the "nones" aren't mainly to be thought of as religious or non-religious in a new or different way, but as a group that has a problem with the question, in much the same way that some protest self-identifying with a particular race.

Those people aren't themselves a new demographic, but rather are saying that they think the category is a problem.

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Michele Bachmann's post-eleciton disasters

Michele Bachmann's ill-fated campaign for the GOP presidential nomination ended over a year ago, after a brutal loss in the Iowa Caucuses. Bachmann, who is now returning to Congress for her another term, had serious religious right bona fides, having been politicized by Francis Schaeffer in 1977, but couldn't rally the Republican faithful and couldn't manage the necessary transformation into a plausible national candidate.

Her campaign went from disaster to disaster.

Her campaign is still going from disaster to disaster, long after it's over.

A year after the campaign, Peter Waldron, the Bachmann staffer in charge of evangelical outreach is now saying the congresswoman is refusing to pay staffers for work they did. It's a relatively small amount of money. Bachmann ended her presidential campaign with more than $2 million in her war chest and reportedly raised more money in her congressional campaign than any other candidate, but is, according to the disgruntled ex-staffer, refusing to pay out on less than $5,000 of outstanding bills. Which seems like strange behavior.

Or, as Bachmann's one-time head of Christian outreach put it: "It is sobering to think that a Christian member of Congress would betray her testimony to the Lord and the public by withholding earned wages from deserving staff."

The official response has been accusations that Waldron is lying. Which he may be, though that only calls into question the Bachmann campaigns competency in another way. This man, after all, has a historythat would have given another political team pause before making him a key part of its strategy.

There's been some speculation that this conflict stems from a separate post-campaign disaster, the ongoing investigation into the alleged theft of a list of homeschooler's e-mails. According to the Star Tribune, the Bachmann campaign eventually paid the homeschool group $2,000 for using or misusing the list, but the campaign is also being sued by the individual they got the list from and the criminal investigation into how that happened is still open.

Whether that's the source of the conflict or not, the public fight between Waldron and the Bachmann loyalists has now escalated, with the ex-staffer now making colorful accusations about unusual things going on in the campaign and the extreme extent to which Bachmann let her staff control her. Things were so bad, according to Waldron, that avid supporters didn't recognize the Bachmann they thought they knew, and "More than one staffer was grateful to God that she didn't win the nomination."

This isn't reliable information, of course, but there is a clear pattern of very bad judgment from this Republican leader of the religious right. Whether one believes the ex-staffer or thinks he's crazy or both, the conclusion would be the same: Bachmann lacks the ability to surround herself with reasonable, reliable people. A good number of her history of crises can be attributed directly to this fact, and she'll likely continue, despite her success at fundraising and winning the vote of her Minnesota district, careening from disaster to disaster.

Her fiercest supporters and critics hold that this is because of her strong ideological positions. It seems possible, though, that it's just incompetance.

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The religious practices of corporate alter egos

Are businesses, legally speaking, just the alter-egos of their owners?

The absolute clearest, most on-point exploration of the issues actually at stake in the religious liberty court cases involving for-profit business and the new health care rules is this piece by Howard M. Friedman, a former law professor and the blogger at Religion Clause. He raises this question, looking at one way the argument is being made for the religious freedoms of corporations.

Friedman notes that, in addition to questions about corporate personhood and the constitutional guarantees about exercise of religion, there are some curious quandaries about corporate law being brought up by these cases, specifically in the ways owners appear to be undermining the sorts of legal distinctions intended to protect corporate owners.

Friedman writes:

In the Affordable Care Act cases, some courts have avoided the difficult issue of whether a business has religious conscience rights by instead concluding that the business is so closely identified with its owners that it may assert the owners’ religious objections as its own.

This idea—that a corporation and its owners should be treated as the same person—is a well-known concept in corporate law, commonly referred to it as “piercing the corporate veil.” Most of the time, lawyers warn their corporate clients to do everything possible to avoid this “piercing,” since the doctrine is usually invoked when creditors of a business are making claims against the personal assets of a company’s shareholders, seeking to recoup their losses from an insolvent business by going after its owners. There is a vast amount of case law on when a court should allow “piercing the corporate veil” to reach shareholders’ personal assets, often focusing on abuse of the corporate form, misleading of creditors, or lack of corporate formalities. Business lawyers look to whether the corporation is the mere alter ego of its owners and routinely advise their corporate clients to emphasize the corporation’s separate existence from its owners.

However, the pleadings filed in many of the contraceptive mandate challenges purposely blur this line, collapsing the beliefs of the business with its owners, inviting “piercing.”

The distinction between an owner or a shareholder and the corporation itself, as Friedman notes, is an important legal underpinning of modern capitalism. What happens to these companies if they succeed in obliterating that distinction remains to be seen, but it could be serious.

The entire piece is well worth reading:  My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

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Could charity replace welfare?

Here's something you can learn in the line at the welfare office in Clayton County, Ga.: People generally don't ask for help until they really need help. Until the heat is shut off, or the rent is very late, or there's no more food. Until there are no more ketchup packets and saltine crackers in the cupboard. Until their children are very hungry.

And by then it's too late.

As a reporter for several years on the south side of metro Atlanta, I spent some time exploring the area's social services, and the public responses to the problem of poverty. One of the things I found was this specific bureaucratic problem of lag time between the application for and approval of government assistance. The approval process takes time. Time that those who ask for help don't have.

No one applies for help they need in 30 days.

What happens is this: They meet the case worker. They fill out the paperwork. They provide information and sign at the x, and they tell the caseworker what their situation is. Then, at some point, awkwardly, normally, they clear their throat and say, "so ...."

"So ... how soon could this ...?"

And then the government worker says, "When is the last time you ate?" Or, "Do you have food to feed your kids tonight?"

And they don't. They never do: that's why they're asking for help.

Then the case workers lead the people down the hall to what was a break room, but is now a food bank. The get out boxes and bags and they fill them with good things to eat. They send them home with soup and bread, potatoes and canned vegetables and mac & cheese. There is no application process for this. You only have to go and wait in line, meet with the case worker, say that you're hungry and don't know how you'll feed your kids, and you will get food. While you wait for the government to do something, you will be fed. And it's privately funded food.

The food bank in the welfare office in Clayton County, Ga. is actually a private charity. The food isn't paid for by government of any level, but actually is put there by a dozen businesses and services organizations, each of which commit to stocking the food bank for one month a year. It's given away by the social workers who work for the government, but provided by private charity.

This is the kind of charity that many conservatives, particularly Christians, believe is better than welfare programs and should replace welfare programs.

There are very strong teachings in the New Testament about charity and caring for the poor, and those Christians who object to public assistance programs that help the poor don't just ignore those teaching, despite what some critics say. They believe it's very important to assist those who need assistance, but also that how that's done is critical. They argue, on both practical and theoretical grounds, that the state should not be the entity doing this work that needs to be done. Charity in itself is good, but the government ruins that, and makes things worse.

I wonder, though, practically speaking, if charity could replace welfare.

Purely as a pragmatic issue, would it be possible? Could private charities move beyond assistance, beyond helping at the points where the system of government assistance is breaking down, replacing government with benevolent associations as religious conservatives say would be preferable. If given the chance, could and would people of good will take care of the poor voluntarily, giving enough money to private organizations to functionally replace the social safety nets now in place?

I'm not sure they could.

Currently, in Georgia, to take the example I know best, private charities don't seem robust enough to replace welfare programs. They are, for the most part, themselves in perpetual financial crisis, struggling to raise enough funds to do what they currently do, which is is only substitutionary, filling in when government-funded social programs fail to meet immediate needs. Where welfare systems are being dismantled, and assistance has been drastically cut or made dramatically harder to get, charities are not prepared -- not funded or staffed or supported in a way that they could be prepared -- to do more. They're already doing everything they can, and it's an ongoing struggle.

Welfare programs such as TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, have been gutted in Georgia, in recent years, and the needs of needy families have not just been simply or easily met by charitable organizations.

As Slate recently reported:

Even as unemployment has soared to 9 percent and 300,000 Georgia families now live below the poverty line—50 percent higher than in 2000, for a poverty rate that now ranks sixth in the nation—the number receiving cash benefits has all but evaporated: Only a little over 19,000 families receiving TANF remain, all but 3,400 of which were cases involving children only. That's less than 7 percent, making Georgia one of the toughest places in the nation to get welfare assistance.  

What's Georgia's secret? According to government documents, interviews with poor Georgians, and those who work with them, it's a simple one: Combine an all-Republican state government out to make a name for itself as tough on freeloaders; a state welfare commissioner so zealous about slashing the rolls that workers say she handed out Zero candy bars to emphasize her goal of zero welfare; and federal rules that, regardless of who's in the White House, give states the leeway to use the 1996 law's requirement for "work activities"—the same provision that Republicans have charged President Obama wants to unfairly water down—to slam the door in the face of the state's neediest. 

What this has created is a land that welfare forgot, where a collection of private charities struggle to fill the resulting holes. 

There are plenty of people who would argue that -- though it might be hard at the moment -- this should happen, though. Public welfare ought to be replaced by charity. Fill the safety net with holes and let private organizations take over.

Joel J. Miller recently argued at Patheos, for example, that though there might be practical reasons to commit tax monies to care for the poor, doing so is "to remedy one evil with another." He writes:

compulsion is almost always assumed in the public discussions around the topic of social justice. We jump from the moral imperative to give to the political expediency of a forced transfer, to the legal tactic of a compulsory program. That is not only a stretch, but betrays a misunderstanding of virtue.

This is also the fundamental argument made by the Acton Institute, which promotes religious arguments for the free market and argues that religious organizations, rather than the government, should provide for the poor. As the institute's founder, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, has argued:

What is [morally] required of us as individuals may or may not translate into a civic policy priority. In the case of the welfare state, it is possible to argue that it does great good (though I would dispute that). Whether it does or does not, however, a government program effects nothing toward fulfilling the Gospel requirement that we give of our own time and income toward assisting the poor.

[....] I cannot see how this method of redistributing wealth has anything to do with the Gospel. Jesus never called on public authority to enact welfare programs. He never demanded that his followers form a political movement to tax and spend. Nor did he say that the property of the rich must always be forcibly expropriated. He called for a change in the human heart, not a change in legislation. There is a massive difference.

Both Miller and Sirico hold that, on principle, government programs to help the poor are wrong, even immoral. But they would not argue that the only moral option is for the poor to remain poor, to be destitute and go hungry. Rather, they advocate that charity replace welfare. They want a program like the privately funded food bank in Clayton County that's currently housed in and administered by the government officials to replace the government systems of assistance, rather than merely serving to supplement the government programs.

Whether or not one agrees with arguments about the morality of public assistance, the practical aspects of private charity seem like they should be matters of fact. Many, I suspect, would be happy to disregard the ideological questions of preferred public policy if it could be demonstrated that the poor would be adequately cared for by private charities. A solution is a solution, after all.

Georgians themselves are quite generous, too. They're good people and willing to give. If charity could work to replace welfare, it should work in Georgia, which ranks eighth in the nation in terms of giving. In 2011, Georgians give about $4.8 billion to charity. This is a combination of private giving, corporate giving, foundations, and bequests. Typical households gave about 6.2 percent of their income, even as the economy was still struggling, unemployment rates remained high and all the rest.

Is that enough, though, to take care of the state's poor?

According to Slate, there are about 300,000 Georgian families living below the poverty line. For a family of four, that means an income of less than $23,000 per year.

For that family of four, groceries would cost about $520 a month, according to the estimates of the USDA. That's the "thrifty plan,"  not an excess of groceries. Keeping to that minimum, the cost of groceries would add up to an annual cost of about $6,240, nearly a quarter of family's income if they were exactly at poverty level.

If the family lives in the Atlanta area, a crowded one bedroom apartment should cost them about $757 per month, according to HUD estimates of fair market rent. If they live in the cheapest place in the state, Jenkins County, where 22 percent of families live below the poverty line and there are fewer jobs, monthly rent on a one bedroom apartment will cost them a little more than $400 per month. If the family of four that lives exactly at the poverty line is in Jenkins County, then rent will eat up a fifth of their income. If the family is in Atlanta, where there are more economic opportunities, housing will take more than half of their annual income.

Georgians -- including these very poor Georgians -- are very generous, though. There's more than $4 billion being given to charity every year. So could it be possible to help those living below the poverty line with private charity?

Some back-of-the-envelope math: To give each of the 300,000 families living at or below the poverty line the money they need for groceries -- just covering the cost of food to help them out -- assuming poor families average out to families of four who need $520 per month for groceries, this would cost about $156 million per month.

That's $1.87 billion per year.

Perhaps it could be done for less than that, but this is not counting administration costs or distribution costs, buildings to house food banks or anything like that. This is imagining a scenario where poor families are just given credit to buy food for themselves, and the process of doing that is completely cost free: $1.87 billion.

Do the math on housing, and it works out pretty much the same. To pay the rent for 300,000 families living at or below the poverty line, or even just offset the cost of housing, would be very expensive. If you figure an average stipend of $500 per month for housing, that's a monthly bill of $150 million. Annually, helping the poor pay their rents in this way would cost about $1.8 billion.

Which is still significantly less than the government currently spends on welfare in a given year.

In 2012, state and local governments spent $5.2 billion on welfare in Georgia, more than all private giving combined. If every existing penny of charity in the state were to go to fund existing programs -- with donors just replacing tax payers as the source of funding -- there'd be a $400 million shortfall.

Disregarding the current welfare programs, though, and just focusing on the possibility of private charity for basic, practical expenses to help the state's poor, covering grocery costs, supplementing rent on cheap apartments, and you're still talking about $1.8, $1.87 billon.

This be a major, major undertaking for those who wanted to fulfill "the Gospel requirement that we give of our own time and income toward assisting the poor," as Siricio put it. Either of these charitable efforts to replace welfare would require about a third of what Georgians currently give.

Assuming that that the money currently being given is going to good things -- a fair assumption, I think -- then private giving would have to increase from $4.8 billion to, say, $6.66 billion.

On the one hand, that's not impossible to imagine. Many churches ask their members to give 10 percent of what they earn to charity, and if Georgians all did that, giving would increase by nearly 4 percent.  If individuals, corporations, foundations, bequests all increased giving by three or four percent, it would be possible to pay for the groceries of all of Georgia's poor, or give them a significant offset in the cost of a one bedroom apartment.

Not both, though. And, seriously, $1.8 billion is a lot of money.

That's roughly the amount the Salvation Army was given in 2010 -- nation wide. The Salvation Army has a massive fund raising operation, established institution and a long history of experience at this sort of thing. It's difficult to imagine how that success on a national scale could be equalled in increased giving in a single state. A state, remember, that already gives more than normal.

This increase in giving is even more difficult to imagine when one factors in the problem of inflation. Nationally, giving actually has gone up by about 4 percent or so a year for the last few years. That meant an increase of nearly $70 billion given away. Once you adjust for inflation, though, this increase basically disappears. When adjust for inflation, giving in 2011 is actually equal to giving in 2000, despite the fact that in the last decade the number of American families with children in poverty increased from 5 million to more than 7 million, and the number with children in deep poverty went from 2 million to more than 3 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

So where would this money come from? Would it be possible to increase giving by nearly $2 billion, inflation adjusted, in the state of Georgia?

Could the private funds be found -- practically speaking -- to take care of the state's poor?

Those at the Acton Institute will argue that charity will increase if taxes are cut. If government spending goes away, as it is in Georgia, and if people get to take home more of their income, as they do in Georgia right now, then the amount given to charity will correspondingly increase. Because, as one of Acton's research fellows put it, with this withering away of the state,

Capital is ... freed up for private charity. When people keep more of their disposable income, they can be more generous instead of abdicating their responsibilities for their neighbor-in-need to politicians and bureaucrats.

The president of Acton has argued that "Private charity tends to be inversely related to growth of government welfare" and that when "budget cuts go into effect, people will reach deeper into their pockets to help those genuinely in need."

That doesn't seem to be true, though. Giving doesn't correspond to tax rates, but to economic growth. When recessions hit, giving declines, and when the economy improves, giving does too. In recent history, giving increased a good bit during the late '90s, corresponding pretty directly to the boom years of the dot-com bubble. The Bush tax cuts, by comparison, which went into effect in 2001, by comparison, saw no corresponding increase in giving. According to Giving USA, rates of charity pretty consistently correspond to the Gross Domestic Product, more than any other economic indicator, fluctuating between 1.6 and 2.3 percent of the GDP between 1971 and 2011. This means that, generally speaking, charity doesn't increase when there's increased need, in the way that government spending might, but rather seems to be another kind of luxury spending that people, in aggregate, spend when they have.

Given the reality of actual giving, it's hard to see how charity could replace welfare, practically speaking. Even if it the case that charity is morally superior and vastly preferable to welfare programs, it doesn't seem that the money could be raised, even in generous Georgia, to replace government in taking care of the poor and establishing some kind of social safety net.

This is not in anyway a criticism of the existing charities. Those that exist do real and important work, and help the poor in many places where existing government programs fail. Throughout my time as a reporter in metro Atlanta, I was impressed by the commitment and by the successes of private charities. I was moved by their charity when I saw sick people given medical care, the homeless given shoes, and hungry children fed. That doesn't change the fact, though, that all of this was supplementary to the welfare system, and could not have replaced it. 

There are those who would like to see religion radically transform people, and change the way the poor in America are cared for. Tim Keller, for example, recently said that Christianity ought to have a direct impact on cities, giving rise to a really redemptive philanthropic spirit. He said:

Christ changes the way we use wealth and power. Our understanding of work must reflect what Robert Bellah (from his book, Habits of the Heart) describes as a contribution to the common good. Along this line, I'd express a desire to populate the city with people who embody this vision. I'd want to see an explosion of philanthropy, in which we don't spend money on ourselves, but instead cooperate with others who want to make the city a desirable place to live. Much like Wilberforce did in the early part of 19th-century England, we would pursue healing and redemption.

It seems an admirable goal. As it stands, though, Georgia has some of the most generous cities in America, and the private charity there is not even close to replacing welfare.

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J. Gresham Machen's signs of the times

What will be the end of that European civilization, of which I had a survey from my mountain vantage ground—of that European civilization and its daughter in America? What does the future hold in store? Will Luther prove to have lived in vain? Will all the dreams of liberty issue into some vast industrial machine? Will even nature be reduced to standard, as in our country the sweetness of the woods and hills is being destroyed, as I have seen them destroyed in Maine, by the uniformities and artificialities and officialdom of our national parks? Will the so-called 'Child Labor Amendment' and other similar measures be adopted, to the destruction of all the decencies and privacies of the home? Will some dreadful second law of thermodynamics apply in the spiritual as in the material realm? Will all things in church and state be reduced to one dead level, coming at last to an equilibrium in which all liberty and all high aspirations will be gone? Will that be the end of all humanity's hopes? I can see no escape from that conclusion in the signs of the times; too inexorable seems to me to be the march of events. No, I can see only one alternative. The alternative is that there is a God -- a God who in His own good time will bring forward great men again to do His will, great men to resist the tyranny of experts and lead humanity out again into the realms of light and freedom, great men, above all, who will be messengers of His grace. There is, far above any earthly mountain peak of vision, a God high and lifted up who, though He is infinitely exalted, yet cares for His children among men.

-- J. Gresham Machen, Mountains and Why We Love Them, 1933.

The "signs of the times" really do dramatically change. Even though what the signs say is always the same, regardless of whether the specific sign is a new national park or gays openly serving in the military, regulation of child labor or employee health care.

Machen -- a Reformed theologian at the forefront of opposition to Modernism and Christian liberalism -- climbed the Swiss Alps in 1913 and 1932, in both cases ascending a peak on the eve of a world war. He believed Modernism, especially in the form of the "higher criticism" taught by German theologians, had significantly weakened Christianity, undermined it, and was threatening the faith and also civilization, leading directly to the destruction and devestation of World War I and World War II.

He was a significant influence on Francis Schaeffer, and can be thought of as the grandfather of today's religious right, though many reformed Christians, such as Machen biographer and religious-right-critic D.G. Hart, would argue that politically-oriented American Christians have strayed too far from Machen's ideals. I.e., that they are not conservative enough to be Machen's true heirs.

Those who are direct spiritual and intellectual descendants of this leader of Christian fundamentalism have famously been called "Machen's warrior children," emphasizing a Machenian attitude that's praised by some as a willingness -- a boldness in being willing -- to defend truth.

Machen, it's important to say, accepted the name "fundamentalist." He thought there was a better word for it, though: orthodox.

What's perhaps most notable about this quote, if one is looking for historical precedent for contemporary conservative Christians, is the sense that it's "experts" who are the problem. "Experts" who, through an exercise in "tyranny," have lead humanity away from both light and freedom. There's a deep strain of anti-intellectualism in American history, of course, and that's been of significant aspect of religious experience throughout the history. Machen states it so succinctly, here, and puts experts up as the most basic problem.

Notable, also, are the two politically issues Machen highlights. These are the "signs" he sees in America in the 1930s. In the piece, he mentions the international situation, decrying Mussolini by name and Hitler by reference. Domestically, however, Machen sees the end of civilization and betrayal of Reformed Christian truths in a) national parks, and b) federal child labor laws.

Two peculiar issues, if ever there were.


This was, after all, the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, the depth of the Great Depression and the beginning of the New Deal.


Overall, Machen wasn't particularly interested in politics. Certain less than his "warrior children." Here, though, in 1933, he does for a moment speak politically, and chooses out of all the issues of the day to take a stand against national parks and child labor laws. There's probably an explanation for why these could have seemed so pressing from a particular cultural position. To first sight, though, the choice of issues highlights certain characteristics of this worldview, and goes to show how strange many political fights seem from a distance.

The only National Park in Maine in 1933, as far as I can tell, was Arcadia National Park, the first National Park east of the Mississippi. A system of carriage trails through the park were then being built by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and that seems to have particularly offended Machen. In one of his books he wrote,

When I first went there it was about the sweetest and most beautiful lake and mountain region that could possibly be imagined. It really seemed as though no human being would have the heart to destroy the delicate charm of those woods. But then came Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Lafayette (later Acadia) National Park, and all was changed. Huge roads now scar practically every mountainside and skirt the shores of practically every lake. The woods near the roads have been ruthlessly ‘cleaned up.’ The natural beauty of the region has been systematically destroyed. When I go into that National Park, with its dreary regularity and its officialdom, I almost feel as though I were in some kind of penal institution .... Certain it is at any rate that the best way to destroy true recreation is for government to go into the business of promoting it.

I don't know how it looked in '33, but today, to be sure, Machen's assessment that "the sweetness of the woods and hills is being destroyed" seems strange.

I can imagine other reasons he might have had for opposing the park -- libertarian principle, perhaps, or just privileged annoyance that what one enjoys is now widely available -- but the argument he makes is somewhat bizarre.

The constitutional amendment that Machen references as the other "sign of the times" was ratified by 13 states in 1933, but never acheived the necessary 2/3 majority. The Child Labor Amendment is technically still pending approval. The amendment reads: "The Congress shall have power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age." The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 -- a key piece of New Deal lesgislation -- succeeded where the ammendment failed.

Machen seems to have opposed the amendment specifically for being too general, and not specifying what sort of child labor congress might be interested in prohibiting or limiting. He said, in another piece on the topic, that the amendment was "the most sinister attack upon American institutions and the sanctity of the American home that has been made for half a century."

Further, he made the sort of limited government, anti-government argument that's standard on the right:

[The amendement] would take by far the most important part of human life out of the hands of state legislatures in touch with local conditions, and put it into the hands of the army of government agents, which any exercise of the powers to be conferred by the amendment would require. There could scarcely be a more disastrous blow at the very foundations of American freedom.

Though few conservative Christians in America would, today, make an argument against child labor laws, the logic Machen employs about the privacy and the sanctity of families, that "the family" constitutes a seperate sphere that ought to be autonomous, the federal government represents a kind of hideous, alien aberration of the normal order of things, is quite common.

That's the way it seems to work: the signs of the times change; the interpretations of said signs are consistent, though, across time.

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