Please Read This Book

Here's the Amazon link. Especially read it if you regularly find yourself commenting on and/or criticizing the state of the American Church. It's really mostly data, which is to say, there's not very much theory or explanation in the thing, but there doesn't need to be. A lot of the data is pretty unsurprising (more evangelicals have read the Left Behind books than any other group), but a good deal of it really challenges many of the assumptions found in public discourse regarding religion, and especially evangelicalism (evangelicals differ very slightly from the rest of the US in terms of most political stances, and are the least likely of all groups to be involved in political activity).

A few other tidbits:

• Most people who identify as "non-religious" do not identify as "atheist."
• As of 2007 (the year when the data for most of this book was gathered) only 4% of Americans claimed to not believe in God, the same percentage as in 1944.
• Church attendance has not changed significantly one way or the other in the past 100 years (with the exception of fewer catholics attending mass regularly after Vatican II made it no longer a sin).
• More Americans have religious affiliation now than they did in 1776, and church attendance has risen since then.
• In the past 40 years, churches identified as "Liberal Protestant" (ranging from Unitarian to Lutheran) have collectively had a 49% decrease in church attendance, whereas churches identified as "Conservative Protestants" (ranging from Pentecostal to Southern Baptist) have collectively had a 158% increase in church attendance.
• Christians who attend "Megachurches" (congregations over 1,000) are far more likely to express signs of personal commitment  (regular church attendance, tithing, evangelizing), to have strong relationships within their church, and to engage with the larger community outside the church (through volunteering, etc), than are people who attend churches with under 100 congregants.
• The poor give more money to the church than the rich in terms of percentage of annual income. Those making $10,000 or less a year give 11.4%. Those making $150,000 or more a year give 2.7%. 

The author of the book is primarily Rodney Stark, who is the preeminent sociologist of religion alive today. The book is written in a way that is accessible to people who don't really get statistics, but it doesn't sacrifice depth. In other words, you have no excuse.

If we are to analyze, discuss, critique, condemn, or improve the state of Christianity, or religiosity in general (I'm looking at you New Atheists), then we must have a clear and empirically verified view of the landscape. This book provides that. Please read it.

Sorry About the Flailing-and-FUNDIES!!!!

Right, first of all. To the people who contacted me based on the last blog post, thanks. It wasn't really as bad as it seemed. I'm not really drowning, rather, as Nate said, "You just like to make a show of flailing." He's right about that; I do have a bit of a melodramatic side. I'm sorry if I caused any of you any distress. I'll do my best to restrain myself in times of silly post-adolescent angst.

Now, my current predicament. I've been sick since around 10pm Monday night, and it shows no sign of letting up. Nate is bringing me apothecary of some kind to fix my ailments, but while I sat here on sectional-love-seat feeling completely justified in my complete and utter lack of academic progress over the past two days, an interesting little concept wormed its way into my fever-addled mind like a ribbon from a flying nun's untidy bun falling to the ground.

The thought was this: GONZO JOURNALISM! Or, perhaps more appropriately stream of consciousness based off of your/my altered state due not to hallucinogenic drugs, or other hedonistic enterprises, but due instead to two days of podcasts, oranges, NPR, an Underground Comics Collection, and stumbleupon. I realize that this is far from the true (aka: Wikipedia) definition of Gonzo Journalism, but whatever. I thought of Hunter S. Thompson anyway because I am uncultured in terms of counter-cultural movements outside of Christian Fundamentalism. To be honest, most of what I know of HST comes from the future-version named Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan.

But I'm loosing myself already.

Here's the thing, I spent probably too much time today researching some of the more extreme wings of Protestant Christian Fundamentalism. We're talking people who are convinced that the Roman Catholic Church started both Nazism and Communism, and that Jesuits are Illuminati hellbent on... um... doing vague but definitely evil things. I started reading stories of people who went on speaking tours, and wrote multiple books about their sordid history of witchcraft, freemasonry, satanism, Dungeons and Dragons, paganism, ritualistic magic, and in one especially odd case, vampirism. These people were embraced by the kind of people who went to my home church around the time that all these things were being debunked, either by Brittish Journalists (Gonzo?) or Christian publications like Christianity Today and the now defunct Cornerstone.

Then I read this blog post. It's completely void of citations, but for a vast majority of the content I found that unnecessary. Most of those ridiculous things (the Smurfs are satanists?[Meta-moment: overgrown Smurfs are satanic?]) I heard from my mother, or my friends, or my friends' mothers. Right, so... at this point we'll assume that I grew up in a hotbed of fear and epic lunacy. Right, not a problem. I knew that already.

Oh, yeah, and that hotbed of fear and epic lunacy still exists (see: Overgrown Smurfs). Yeah, not a problem. Thank God that I was somehow spared the the ideological brainwashing that would have most assuredly turned me into one of these someday. By the way, they're still allowed to do what they do, score one for the first amendment. Who said ideals were easy? Nobody? I just made myself look like a bitter little boy? Sorry guys. Seriously though, intellectually I have to agree with this, but something tacit hurts.

Where was I? Right! Crazies! So, I'm feeling discouraged and worried about where I came from, and I'm wondering how to prevent myself and others (not gonna lie, I'm thinking about my chillens here, cuz I is sentimental) from ending up back there. And, so I goes to this neat little website species-wide-phenomena (1 in 12 people ON THE PLANET) called Facebook. And one of my (anonymous) friends had posted a little something that was just as ridiculous (in a sense, I'm getting there) as the stupid things that lead my friend in 3rd grade to burn his Pokemon cards (as they were giving him headaches and nightmares). It was this statement, "At its heart, [Christian] Fundamentalism represents male insecurity and anger at the perceived 'feminization' of the church. Yet another proof that gender roles are at the root of so many of our problems." Which made me go ARGH!

Okay, before the feminists who love me decide to burn me and send a message to the others, allow me to say that I am also a feminist. Here is where I take issue, it is the condensation of a huge cultural movement/artifact to some unified, antagonistic, diabolical root. Whether this root is as theory specific as "The Male Gaze," as unlikely as "The Illuminati run by Vanilla Ice", as scientific as "Greenhouse Gas Emissions," or as impossible to disprove as "Old Scratch Hisself," whenever a thing as large as a cultural movement/artifact is reduced to a single factor, we all become fundies.

Humanity wants to have a villain. If my pseudo-mythologist mentality has taught me anything, it's that a story without an antagonist isn't going to make it very far. At our most basic core, we want to believe that all the bad stuff is caused by something specific, something with a face, something we can fight, something identifiable. Altogether too often, we take the materials in our general vicinity and create the monster from whatever our zeitgeist happens to fear at the moment.

The thing most easily available to us is, unfortunately, our neighbors. See that couple across the street? Yeah. He's a witch/communist/satanist/Muslim/Fundie/Mormon/Republican. Oh, goodness, does the poor girl know? Of course she knows, the bitch is in on it. Let the public execution begin. To reduce anyone to a single idea or concept is to strip them of their humanity and create of them an embodied ideal. This is how we make heroes, and this is how we make villains.

Maybe this is a little depressing, but... I gots some bad news for y'all. Heroes don't exist, and neither do Villains. Not in this sense. Every human being is so complex and multi-tiered that the labels of Hero and Villain apply about as much as the label Fruit applies to a banana protein shake from Jamba Juice.

Here's my point. Humanity is complicated, very very complicated. If you come to a simple conclusion that answers more questions than it asks about the human condition, then please Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. And, while you're in Jail look around and look inside and admit the fact that you can't explain the mess out there any more than you can explain the mess in there and have a little compassion, huh? I here Jail isn't a very compassionate place, so maybe go to a monastery or something, like Connor Hawke did.

Perhaps this is the mystical in me coming out, and perhaps I'm absolutely wrong and blinded by my post-modern milieu (every time someone uses that word I feel like their reasons are as follows: 20% to make a point, 80% pretention). But I believe that I believe (WE MUST GO DEEPER!!) that human beings would treat one another better if we would stop trying to explain or understand and tried instead to make the world a better, more loving, less angsty place on our exit than on our entrance.

Also, Gandhi.