The Working Class Religious Crisis

Everyone is talking about the crisis among working class whites. Well, no, not everyone, although a significant segment of the chattering class has belatedly discovered this issue. In fact, most of the people who ought to be talking about it still aren't, which is precisely the problem!

Last week, two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, published a study that, in this era of rising life expectancy for almost everyone else, found a shocking increase in the death rates for 45-54 year old whites who never attended college. Even more significant is the fact that these deaths are increasingly related to alcohol and/or drug abuse and a rise in suicides. (African Americans in that age group still have a higher death rate, but their death rate continues to fall, whereas the working-class white rate is rising, which is what is so significant.)

When the issue is addressed at all by political and cultural elites, those on the left emphasize economic policies that, in the post-1980 world, have resulted in increasing inequality and the social dysfunctions that has produced. They are correct, of course, but only partially so. Meanwhile, those on the right point to the breakdown of what one might call the communal safety net, notably working class families (once so strong, now no longer) and religious affiliation (once widespread, now no longer). They too are partially correct. In fact, people can cope (or cope better at least with poverty, poor education, inadequate health care, and lack of economic opportunity when they have strong families and are connected with supportive social networks where they can rely on others who help them feel both valued and not alone in the world. Without that life is lonelier and more lacking in meaning but economic benefits and social service can at least make it easier and help one keep going in spite of loneliness and lack of meaning.

An earlier study that seems especially relevant to this discussion is "No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class," by W. Bradford Wilcox, Andrew J. Cherlin, Jeremy E. Uecker, and Matthew Messel, and which can be accessed online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25657484.

Despite the tedious academic jargon, that study's conclusions are worth quoting in full:  

"This paper finds evidence that religious life among the moderately educated – which may be the closest analogy to the “working class” today – is becoming increasingly deinstitutionalized, much as working class economic and family life have become increasingly deinstitutionalized. Using repeated cross-sectional surveys from two national data collections programs, the GSS and the NSFG, we find that religious attendance among whites has declined most precipitously among whites without college degrees, including moderately educated whites—that is, whites with a high school degree or some college but no bachelor’s degree. By contrast, we do not find a decline among moderately educated blacks; and we do not find a monotonic educational gradient at all among Hispanics.

"Our results suggest that the bourgeois and familistic moral logics that have long been linked to religious institutions are now less powerful in the lives of working class whites than they used to be. Specifically, in the last forty years, white working class income, employment, marital stability, and cultural conservatism have all declined—and markedly more so than they have for college-educated whites (Cherlin, 2009; Wilcox, 2010). Indeed, our results suggest that these bourgeois and familistic factors may account for a substantial share of the relatively large decline of working class church attendance. Within the limits of observational data, we think that our results suggest that the erosion of the labor market and cultural structures associated with the bourgeois and familistic moral logics in American life may have played an important role in accounting for recent declines in religious attendance among working class whites.

"While we recognize that not everyone wishes to worship, and that religious diversity can be valuable, we also think that the existence of a large group in the middle of the American stratification system that is increasingly disconnected from religious institutions is troubling for our society. This development is especially troubling because it only reinforces the social marginalization of working class whites who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work (Cherlin, 2011)."

Generosity

In our society, one of the surest predictors of poverty is being a divorced wife or a child of divorced parents. In most societies (including our own before Social Security and Medicare), widowhood was the great danger. It exposed a widowed wife and her children to the danger of poverty. Of course, there have always also been some rich widows. Typically, however, a widow would have been dependent on her family. If her family had little or no wealth – if her husband had been an ordinary wage laborer, for example – then the widow would have had to depend on other relatives or on the wider community. That was why the Early Church maintained an Order of Widows – to provide for their needs and to enable them in turn to contribute to the life of the larger community. For all these reasons, therefore, widows have often served as a suitable shorthand symbol for poverty and dependence. Hence, the two widows we just heard about today. 

The 1^st widow [1 Kings 17:10-16], the pagan widow of Zarephath who provided hospitality to the prophet Elijah during a time of terrible drought, was obviously poor – so much so that she told Elijah that she and her son were about to eat their last meal and then die. Poor people are often among the most generous, however; and so, despite her desperate situation, the widow provided hospitality to this prophet of a foreign God - for which, as we just heard, she was well rewarded in return.

The widow in the Gospel [Mark 12:38-44] got no immediate reward in the Gospel story. Her role there seems mainly to highlight the contrast with the more affluent pilgrims who were donating much larger sums to the Temple. Jesus’ point was not that those pilgrims’ donations were not of value or were not appreciated or that the donors were somehow insincere in their donations. His point, rather, was that, being prosperous, they could more easily afford to be generous, at no great cost to their standard of living. The widow, however, contributed to the Temple out of her limited, meager means – revealing the generosity of her spirit and the seriousness of her commitment to what the Temple represented to her community.

We live in an era of self-centeredness, of glorified selfishness. In this era of tax revolts, “tea parties,” gated communities, health, food, and fitness fixations, and jealous, generational, and individual protectiveness, perhaps few biblical stories may seem more culturally challenging than these accounts of long ago and far away widows – the challenge to focus on something other than oneself and on one’s individual needs, not to let oneself and one’s own all-important private world get in the way of our obligations to others and our connection with the larger human community. Ours is a society in which reality is increasingly subjective, in which the Individual has become the focus of meaning and value, reducing family, community, and society to at-best secondary realities. Even churches sometimes seem more like clubs where like-minded or similarly situated individuals can feel good about themselves together.

It is often alleged that prosperity and religion do not coexist well together. The sad state of religion in much of the developed world today is sometimes cited to confirm that claim. Whatever our exact circumstances, we have all been culturally conditioned by affluence. We are forever being tempted to privilege what is individual and private over what is common and shared. Jesus’ words are a challenge to us all to rediscover what generosity actually means, and in the process to rediscover the experience of being connected with one another in a larger community, to rediscover what commitment to one another and such a community actually requires of us - but also what it enables us in turn to become, not just now but forever.

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 8, 2015

This Time Next Year

Being in our nation's capital (for our annual Paulist Fathers' pastors and Superiors Meeting), makes the mind more aware of politics or perhaps makes politics seem more salient. Or so it seems. And, of course, the November 8, 2016 election is now just a little over one year away. It seems like it has been going on forever, of course, since even government has increasingly become all about campaigning constantly more than about governing. 

The chaotic condition and diminishing appeal among non-white, female. and younger voters of the Republican party is well known and obvious even to the most disinterested - or uninterested - observer. But the Democratic party is not without problems either. Thus, last week, Church and State blogger Stephen Schneck (Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America)  posted "Under the Radar: the Democratic party is in Dire Straits," in which he highlighted the disconcerting fact that "nationwide the number of elective offices held by Democrats is at its lowest since Herbert Hoover was president. That bears repeating: The strength of the party as measured by seats held across the country is at its lowest point since the 1920s. The tremendous Democratic coalition fashioned under Franklin Roosevelt—a coalition nurtured through the 1980s—is now in its final stages of collapse." (http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201510/under-radar-democratic-party-dire-straits-30431#sthash.A3zyuytr.dpuf).

Now, I am old enough to have remembered the old FDR Democratic coalition in its sunset, to have watched it traumatize itself in the necessary but costly battle over civil rights, and then unexpectedly unravel completely in the national and cultural divisions over the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and subsequent identity politics. I have watched the whole process, of which our contemporary political crisis is the unhappy heir. The result, as Schneck notes so well, is that what he calls the Democrats' current issue profile "has shifted in our time from one about the working class and economically disadvantaged to one that emphasizes the professional classes and the special interests of identity politics. ... It’s said so often as to seem trite, but it really is true that with this shift the party has allowed itself to be choked by a fundraising process dominated by a handful of special interests—at the expense of the party’s future and, frankly, at the expense of America’s public interest. Wherever one stands on a host of issues at the center of America’s identity politics, from abortion to same-sex marriage, surely the interest groups associated with such issues should not have effective control over candidate development and the fundraising mechanisms of the party. To effectively contest elections, the party needs to field candidates who reflect the issue profiles of their local constituencies. More importantly, if it is to again become the governing party, the Democratic Party must embrace a big tent coalition of constituencies with a public interest—and not special interest—vision."

As Schneck says, this has been said before - many times before and so seems trite. But it is at the heart of much of our national political dysfunction. In fact, both political parties have become captives of the special interests that dominate the intra-party conversation and have little incentive to reach out beyond there. That's a process problem, but even worse it is also a substantive problem, in that each party has become captive to what one might call its extremist libertarian wing. In the case of the Republicans, the party has become captive to an anti-tax, anti-government, anti-society mentality that, by inhibiting governmental action to repair our fractured society, serves instead the interests of the already very rich and powerful. On the Democratic side, a cultural libertarianism that enshrines the most morally and socially destructive consequences of the sexual revolution has inhibited the party from addressing (or even acknowledging) the moral and cultural causes contributing to contemporary social breakdown, which especially hurts those at the bottom of the social pyramid (the people the FDR coalition once identified with and sought to serve), serving instead the interests of a different elite of rich and powerful.

A major challenge going forward will be whether either party (or some as yet non-existent alternative) can break out of this current trap and recover the social solidarity (and the accompanying economic prosperity for many) that the older Democratic party once stood for and imperfectly but still very successfully promoted and advanced.

All Souls Day

According to the great Pius Parsch, the lit candles traditionally recommended to be held by the people during the Requiem Mass signified "the suffering souls whose places we are taking and for whom we are begging 'eternal light'." What a wonderful image! What a vivid impression of the communion of saints, of how we are all interconnected, all somehow still in this together! In this era of increasingly diminished social solidarity, what an important lesson that custom afforded, as does the entire idea of today's Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed.

It was just 100 years ago, during the 1st World War, which Pope Benedict XV called "the suicide of civilized Europe," that that same Pope, on August 10, 1915, issued the Apostolic Constitution Incruentum Altaris, in which he extended to priests everywhere in the world the privilege previously granted by Benedict XIV in 1748 to the Kings of Span and Portugal, permitting Spanish and Portuguese priests to celebrate three Mass on All Souls Day. Benedict XV's motives for universalizing this practice were the loss of so many previously established pious provisions for prayer for the dead during the modern era but also in particular his paternal concern for the many young soldiers who were even then dying in that terrible war. (This nowadays under-appreciated privilege, which has never been revoked, permits every priest to offer three Masses for the dead today: 1) for a specific intention, 2) for all the faithful departed, and 3) for the intentions of the Pope.)

Another custom connected with All Souls Day which likewise highlights our interconnectedness and challenges us to intensified solidarity is that of visiting the cemetery. That custom too is under-appreciated today - as indeed are cemeteries in this era of cremation and abridged funerary rituals (what Hamlet might call "such maimed rites"). Thankfully, it still survives here in Knoxville where yesterday afternoon some 85 people gathered at our local Catholic cemetery for the annual recitation of the Rosary for those buried there and for all the faithful departed. The Church earnestly tries to encourage such customs by granting a plenary indulgence (applicable only to the souls in purgatory) daily from November 1 through 8 to those who devoutly visit a cemetery and pray there (even if only mentally) for the dead.

As I said yesterday on All Saints Day, remembering is a uniquely and fundamentally human activity. To remember those who have died is to acknowledge the importance of their lives - and the common humanity we share with them. To remember those who have gone before us in faith is to celebrate the different ways in which the grace of God touched and transformed each one of them - and to affirm the hope that we share with them. So today we pray that all who have died in God’s grace and are now being purified from the consequences of their sins may be admitted to the fullness of his kingdom – there to join the saints already in glory. Our prayers express our ongoing participation in that great eternal community in which hope is fulfilled in love and sin succumbs forever to forgiveness.

All Saints Day

Two weeks ago I flew home to New York for my 50^th High School Reunion. Now 50 years is a long time! Thank God for nametags, or I would hardly have been able to recognize anyone at all! It really had been a very long time since my classmates and I last left our high school behind - leaving behind not just our particular Baby Boomer generation's distinctive experience of adolescence, but also (and more than we could ever have anticipated at that time) leaving behind a whole way of life.  The High School itself has been closed since 1991. Built as an expression of post-war prosperity and confidence, as well as the zeal and enthusiasm of the mid-century Church in America, its closure was a casualty of the loss of so much of that zeal and enthusiasm, rooted in a collapse of our cultural confidence.

Our reunion, however, was not another occasion for such somber thoughts. Rather it was a celebration of one another and of the memories we share from a world long gone. Because ours was very much a neighborhood school, many of us enjoyed a connectedness with one another and with one another's families that preceded high school and in some cases perdured.  Meanwhile, we have all gone our various separate ways, along the paths life has taken us. We have become judges and lawyers, policemen and priests, teachers and truck-drivers.  And in that sense certainly, the school did a good job!

As for those classmates who could not be with us, whose earthly labors have already ended, may they rest in peace, and may we all come together again at the greatest reunion of all in the kingdom of heaven!

It is that great reunion which today’s 1st Reading [Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14] portrays and today’s solemnity of All Saints’ Day celebrates.

In November 1887, the Paulist Fathers’ founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, wrote in the Paulist magazine, The Catholic World: “When, in 1843, I first read in the catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home. It alone was to me a heavier weight on the Catholic side of the scales than the best historical argument which could be presented.”      

The doctrine of the communion of saints had had a decisive effect upon young Isaac Hecker’s spiritual search, and apparently the passage of 44 years had done little to dull its impact. Appropriately so! What would we be without the communion of saints?

For one thing, church would certainly be a duller place! Just look around! Over there is the martyr Saint George in his knightly armor ready to slay a dragon for Jesus. Across the aisle is another ancient martyr, the Egyptian philosopher Saint Catherine of Alexandria.  At this end stands Saint Bridget, a 14th-century Swedish princess, a mystic who became co-patroness of Europe, a wife and mother of 8 children who became a nun and founded an order of nuns (who nowadays even have an Anglican branch). Farther down stands Saint Patrick the great missionary Bishop and Apostle of Ireland, who obeyed Jesus’ command to go and make disciples, even if that meant going outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire. And across the aisle is another bishop, whose name we don’t even know. My guess is that the glass with his name must have been broken at some point, rendering him forever anonymous – a fitting surrogate for all those saints we especially remember today whose names are known to God alone.

The communion of saints transcends time, uniting past and present. It permeates the Church’s worship and punctuates the Church’s calendar with its many feasts and memorials of saints, culminating today in this great annual celebration in honor of all the Saints – not just the thousands of saints officially recognized by the Church, but all the holy men and women, known and unknown, who have already attained the goal for which we here on earth still strive. Living now forever with God and praising him for ever in heaven, the saints help us by interceding on our behalf, uniting their prayers with ours, imitating Jesus himself, our Risen Lord who lives forever to intercede for us [Hebrews 7:24-25].

The regular reference to and invocation of the angels and the saints, not just today but in every Mass, signifies our communion, as the struggling Church on earth, with the triumphant Church in heaven, and reminds us that the Church’s mission in this world is to mirror (however imperfectly) that heavenly community of angels and saints, and so transform the world - with love and forgiveness - according to the hope that is Jesus Christ’s great gift to his Church and the Church’s gift to the world.

As one of the seasonal turning points in the ancient northern European calendar, November 1 was the beginning not only of winter but of a new year, the eve of which was a frightening in-between time when the spirits of the dead were thought to roam about and try to haunt their old homes.  Bonfires and jack-o-lanterns (originally carved out of turnips) were part of the defense of the living against assaults from the other world. The celebration of all the Saints on November 1 represented the Christianization of that old seasonal holiday - a celebration of Christianity’s triumph over paganism and of Christ’s victory (as exemplified in the saints) over the demonic forces, which had hitherto held people in fear.

Deliberately celebrated on the day after Halloween, All Saints Day celebrates the hope that replaces fear, exemplified in the lives of the saints and experienced by us in our continued communion with them – a communion which challenges that great opponent of human hope, death, by connecting us not only with the saints already in heaven but with all who have gone before us with the sign of faith. 

Remembering is a uniquely and fundamentally human activity. To remember those who have died is to acknowledge the importance of their lives - and the common humanity we share with them. To remember those who have gone before us in faith is to celebrate the different ways in which the grace of God touched and transformed each one of them - and to affirm the hope that we share with them.

For this reason, as a sequel to All Saints’ Day, the next day the Church celebrates All Souls’ Day. We pray that all who have died in God’s grace and are now being purified from the consequences of their sins may be admitted to the fullness of his kingdom – there to join the saints already in glory. Our prayers to the saints to intercede on our behalf, together our own intercessory prayers for one another and on behalf of the faithful departed, express our ongoing participation in that great eternal community in which hope is fulfilled in love and sin succumbs forever to forgiveness.

Homily for All Saints Day, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 1, 2015