Book Review: To Change the World

To Change the World is a difficult book to critique. It's broad in scope, arguing that the Christian Right (Dobson & co.), the Christian Left (Wallis & co.), and the Neo-Anabaptists (Hauerwas & co.) have all basically got it wrong. Rather than "a pox on all your houses," James Davison Hunter argues that Christians should look to Jeremiah 29 in the context of exile and adopt a posture of "faithful presence" in positions throughout the culture.

The difficulty with a book like this is that it is of necessity so large that to be readable it can only criticize summaries, and summaries are going to be straw men in one way or another. As far as the political Right and Left, Hunter makes a very good argument that the very politics they practice underwrites the political assumptions that create the sense of injustice and aggreivance they feed off in the first place. A vicious feedback cycle that gets us nowhere. They need their enemies, and some among them idolize their own ossified positions. I'm with Hunter on this -- hence the irony and tragedy in his subtitle.

Hunter's criticisms of the neo-Anabaptists are more problematic to me. That's quite a diverse group, especially because Hunter includes people like Richard B. Hays, who don't truly belong. Hauerwas does belong, but Hauerwas has produced such a large body of work that I can't help but feel that Hunter is cherry-picking in what he quotes. For instance, if you're going to say that neo-Anabaptists are all about disengagement, you need to look at the counterargument that is Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures, in which he adapts natural theology to his own framework. This and Hauerwas's State of the University are the best things I've read by him, I'd say, and they're not about disengagement by any stretch of the word. So my favorite writings of Hauerwas are nowhere to be found, but how could they be? There's only 300 pages here, and I'd be complaining if there was much more. The truly wrong -- as in, that's just wrong -- quotes come from other "neo-Anabaptists," none of whom I have read. How influential are those?

And yet ... I have the feeling that Hauerwas is indeed incomplete without other people showing where he's not quite all that, and I did find this section one of the most interesting parts of Hunter's book. Just like G.K. Chesterton and Hauerwas create sparks and tension, I'm happy to have other sources of that. I like sparks. Dissonant chords are interesting.

I have to conclude that Hunter's underlying thesis is not wrong. I do think "faithful presence" indeed comes closer than the other three positions as described in this book, and that's what I want to focus on. Mainly, I find elements of "faithful presence" in the non-extreme positions of the other three "wings" of Christianity, in a mere Christianity kind of way. I'll bet Hunter would agree, and I appreciate the positive agenda those two words start to write for us. So this book does just what it can do. It doesn't slay the giants, but I don't think it sets out to. It does point out that changing the world is hard, we can't do it alone, and relying on God with patience, perseverance and wisdom is what's really important. I can appreciate that, and reading this book, I did appreciate it.

Learning Geography from It's a Small World?

It may seem that learning geography from It's a Small World is about as useful as learning astronomy from Space Mountain. But these rides form important impressions on whole generations of kids, so it's worth analyzing them and thinking about what we're saying. Here's a geography blog with an entry on doing just that for It's a Small World. It's a bit long and tends a bit too much toward making fun of the strange colors and caricatures in the ride, which is like criticizing The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the fact that a caterpillar probably wouldn't be able to eat so much on Saturday. There's a lot more to think about with what the stereotypes are doing, and the all-white finale (and the not-so-subtle insertion of classic Disney characters into the mix). Still, it's a step in a very interesting direction. Some day I'd love to teach a class on Theme Park Studies where we do things like this.

And, by the way, all those Saturday morning cartoons and Pokemon shows have a big effect on a lot of people (and not just Herman Cain). I'd argue that you understand more about people by studying these than other less-read and less-experienced works.

Book Review: Christians Are Hate-filled Hypocrites-- and Other Lies You've Been Told

(You can tell my ambivalence from the frequency of "however"s below!)

The title of the book says it all. The thing is, the first chapter quotes Rodney Stark extensively and I kept thinking throughout that Stark would've done it better. However, I welcome actual data applied to actual problems however I can get it. I'm glad it's out there because many of the things the author discusses are cases where the media has distorted some sociological data. However, it just doesn't do enough to avoid being a disappointment. My favorite part of the book was actually a chart from a blog that shows conversion rates from one denomination to another, which tells me that 75% of evangelical youth remain evangelical when they grow up. If that stat surprises you (because many people who have youth-group seminars to sell trumpet stats that are much lower than that, probably to sell tickets to their seminars) then you may want to check out this book.

It also doesn't help that, you know, everyone's a hypocrite in one way or another, so the accusation that Christians are hypocrites doesn't surprise or shock me, or even strike me as needing defending. However, some of the other assertions -- like that church doesn't affect divore rate -- are rightly put to rest in this book. I just wish there had been more of a focus on that, rather than measuring "warmth of feeling" toward other groups in the last half, which I don't find particularly helpful. Oh well.

Name Chart

Here's a figure from a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing how frequently babies were given certain names in certain years. The message of this graph is "the faster they rise, the faster they fall." Which means Aidan as a name should pretty much disappear in the next few years!

Don't Believe the Cover

The Newsweek cover this week claims to describe "The Decine and Fall of Christian America." I would find this very interesting if I were convinced it is actually happening. There are many aspects of "Christian America" that deserve to decline and fall, so part of me hoped that the article would be about that. But it's not, it's about the increase of "secular mindsets" and things that have been around for years. The problem is the article starts from a faulty (or at least incomplete) reading of data and builds a house of cards on that. It is built on the premise that people are changing their beliefs about God, when what's happening is they're changing what box they check for overall affiliation -- they are not significantly changing behavior.

Here is the misleading paragraph, early in the story (and one of the few parts with actual relevant numbers):

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

Did you notice how in the second half of the paragraph there's a shift from percentages to numbers? I hunted down some of the actual numbers to check and, you know, Rodney Stark is right: the numbers that are actually growing significantly are mostly "no affiliation" people, not really atheists, which are such a small relatively constant percentage that they don't have much of an affect on the big picture (apparently they just buy their militant-atheist canon books a lot). But, look at Stark's book, when you ask these no affiliation people what they believe you find pretty similar numbers to the mainstream of Christianity! (Maybe this points out that "fuzziness" extends into Christianity, but it does not imply that there's a major sociological shift going on.) These people pray, they believe in God, they just haven't gone to any church for years and don't see its relevance or purpose. These people have been like this for a long time, only now they're changing the box they check from "Christian" to "no affiliation."

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The funny thing is, articles like this one are powerful; if they repeat a distortion enough times people start to believe it. Quick, take a guess, what's the percentage of atheists in France? A.) 30% B.) 50% C.) 70% ?

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Oops, I wrote that question poorly, because, France is actually only 14% atheist. And most of the other European countries aren't even in the double digits.

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So that's where the real challenge is, not convincing people that there's a God, or even telling them about Jesus, they know, but think it doesn't change things for them. I think the proof is in the pudding, with evidence: showing how Jesus can change lives and communities, how it matters beyond just "checking off a box." The demographic shift is not from belief to non-belief: it's from community structure to lack of structure (for those who are changing to "no affiliation" at least). And there are ways the Spirit can move in that if we listen to the true data, not to someone else's facile interpretation of it.

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PS: And if "Christian America" is really declining and becomes a minority, then bully for that and Thy will be done. Read Stanley Hauerwas' Resident Aliens for the reasons why. A "Christian America" that follows Christ would look very, very different in any case.

Book Review: What Americans Really Believe

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/What-Americans-Really-Believe/Rodney-Stark/e/9781602581784

This book is an interesting fast check out from the library. I can't recommend buying it, but I wouldn't have read it if it were any longer or denser (therefore, more "worth the money"). Stark is a sociologist who used to be at UW for three decades and then moved to Baylor. This is a summary of recent polls in which he has asked Americans what they believe about x, y, and z. He will often take a poll question that's been interpreted one way and ask those type of respondents a few more questions to show that the results were correct but the interpretation of the results was wrong. I get the feeling once in a while that if someone turned the tables and asked a few more questions of HIS respondents, maybe some of HIS conclusions would be reversed back! But this is a valuable antidote to some ossifying common wisdom.

One point is a piece of data I thought I quoted on this blog not long ago (but now can't find it, maybe I just thought about blogging it!), that upwards of 30% of Vermont residents claim no religion when asked, making them the "least religious" part of the US and overtaking the Pacific Northwest for that category. The headline on the story of course was that religion's on the decline and has been for decades (a common-sense datum repeated off-hand in a blog interview with the skeptic Penn Jillette recently). Stark goes back to the data and finds that, funny, atheism's holding steady at 5 percent or less of the population, so he asks the people who say they have no religion just what they believe. A minority are atheists, but some are just anti-organized religion people and many are "New Age" types (not sure what to call them these days?). They're just not claiming a religion but statistically they're just about as "spiritual" as any other group (not that there's anything wrong with that). So it's not that people are believing stuff less. If anything they're believing more -- too much!

The common-sense datum I got deflated in myself was the conviction that people who went to mega-churches would be less active in service than those who went to smaller churches. Nope, because mega-churches score high in every measurable quantity across the board, hours of service, agreement with doctrinal statements, and everything inbetween. The mega-churches apparently grow for some good reasons. As someone who's seen his congregation grow from a couple hundred per Sunday to about 1600 ... I guess I should stop carping about the "sit back and take it in" mode of big churches, because I guess by the statistics they're doing more right than the little ones. Huh.

So take this book, read it quickly, and find out which of your myths need to be punctured by a little data.