I live in the upper Midwest, and the JWs I’ve known (not all that many, really) were mostly black - probably 2/3 black and 1/3 white. My area also has Protestant churches aimed at the Vietnamese and Korean communities (they usually share a building with an English-speaking congregation and may meet, for example, on Sunday evenings) and there’s even at least one Lutheran church for the Karen (ka-REN) community from Burma/Myanmar.
If you want to see REAL diversity, check out the Baha’i faith. They believe that the only true race is the human race.
In those situations, does the liberal-snake handling spectrum closely correlate with education levels?
If they’re theologically similar, why such a difference when it comes to Creationism in school or gay marriage? You would expect US blacks to (overall) agree with things like putting the 10 commandments and Creationism in schools even if they don’t make it a vote-determining issue. I don’t know for sure but I get the impression that’s not the case.
Well, because one area where they may not be similar is in their attitude to the idea that their beliefs about morality ought to be or need to be reflected in law. The US “Religious Right” is actually out of line with mainstream Christian tradition in assigning a high importance to this question. For most Christians, it’s very important that, e.g., you should not commit adultery or engage in prostitution, but either not important or positively a bad idea that adultery or prostitution should be a crime. And while the Religious Right mostly don’t call for adultery to be a crime, they are generally more keen on the importance or centrality of having Christina moral positions reflected or enforced in civil law than the mainstream Christian tradition is.
Another possibility is that the Black fundamentalist Christians are simply picking a different subset of Christian moral principles as the priority for legislative action. The stereotypical Religious Right are keen on seeing, e.g, sexual morality reflected/enforced by the law, but less so when it comes to social justice. nonviolence or the care of the poor and the sick. It may be that Black congregations tend to reverse this priority.
Correlate? Maybe. I’m in a liberal church and 2/3 of us are college professors. I can conjecture, but only anecdotally.
Because you’ve fallen for the idea that religious belief is what drives political belief. It isn’t. Belief is complicated, but I subscribe to social construction theory. Belief (and this is not religious belief solely, but rather the sum of all of our beliefs. The belief that chairs are real and justice is good and suffering is bad etc.) is a social construct. We possess our beliefs largely due to their social utility. So the question is not why doesn’t Belief A leadbto Belief B, but rather what is the social utility of possessing either of those beliefs. If you’re a progressive atheist, the question is what social benefit is gained by possessing those beliefs, I might conjecture that shifting power structures and demographic changes among the young make such beliefs advantageous in forming social networks.
When we look through that lens, it becomes clearer. Fundamentalism is beneficial to small or marginalized communities. It espouses strict, objective views of truth that result in strong social bonds. Both black communities and poor, rural white communities can leverage these tight communities to project power as coherent wholes. Obviously though, their political beliefs do not overlap due to the different ways these groups fit into society. White fundamentalists want to ally with the traditional white power structures and preserve those structures. Black fundamentalists are locked out of those structures and benefit from an alliance with the traditionally oppressed to overturn them.
What demographic changes among the young made such beliefs advantageous? Were early adopters of those beliefs also mainly pursuing social advantages?
People who classify as poor will always be marginalized in some way. How come poor Americans are more likely to go for fundamentalism than, say, poor Canadians?
Were white evangelicals a small and marginalized community before the 60s or even up to the 80s? Even back then, it strikes me that they were far more interested in marginalizing others than they were marginalized themselves.
I would theorize and this is simply the rantings of an old man that the utility of education made the beliefs more widespread. Not that education necessarily encourages a move away from fundamentalism on its own, but rather the social structure of the educated. The Intelligent are more likely to have ‘Evolutionarily Novel’ ideas. This is a well-studied phenomenon. It’s why you’ll have really, really smart people that might believe in Bigfoot or think that we’re all brains in jars. There are many theories as to why this might be so, my personal favorite is that it is essentially sexual peacocking. They can take unpopular opinions and by successfully defending them rise in sexual status. I think there might also be something to the idea that novel ideas don’t incur as much of a social penalty among the intelligent since societies can occasionally benefit from these novel ideas. Regardless, what this meant was that early 20th century academia had largely become anti-religious and this became especially prominent in the post-war era. As such, being educated came to be associated with being anti-religious in Western cultures. As people wanted to become associated with ‘being educated’ for financial reasons, they adopted the beliefs of that particular social class. As more people moved into this belief system, it achieved a critical mass to the point that being religious was seen as a marking of the uneducated. There was social penalty for being religious. That prompted widespread movement away from religion.
Different societies have different social mechanisms. In my example above, the highly educated have become secular in western societies. We don’t see that same dynamic in other societies. In China, we’re seeing explosive growth of Christianity and largely that is taking place among the more educated. Similarly, in some Islamic societies, being more educated results in more religiosity. Canadian society differs from American society in many important ways. It has more cultural ties with Europe and during Europe’s great secularization, Canadians lagged, but were ahead of Americans. As such, the social benefits of any religious belief had less value. Fundamentalism was much less of a cultural force.
Yes, they were. In 1970, the dominant religious belief in the US was mainline Protestantism (Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc.) and it wasn’t even close. Evangelicals were a small fringe looked down upon both by mainlines and secularists. What happened was that mainlines died. During the sorting of the 70s through today, moderate churches basically got plastered. Mainlines are gutted shells of their former selves. Liberals in those churches stopped coming and conservatives moved to Evangelical churches. By the 90s, (but really with the rise of the ‘Moral Majority’ whose leaders were people like Jerry Falwell, Rob Grant and Ed McAteer - all Southern Baptists who essentially purged moderates) mainlines had almost completely lost any control they had over the religious conversation and all of the dominant voices were and mostly still are Evangelical. The Moral Majority is really where that demographic and political shift happened and really it’s what has led to today.
Don’t they tend to score higher on openness in the big 5 OCEAN test?
When you talk about social utility, you seem to mainly mean utility to individuals’ social lives rather than utility to society, correct? I get that you might often see people using debate as a form of flirting if you’re in college administration and I don’t deny the existence of that phenomenon but it seems unlikely to be the main cause of the shift that’s been happening for at least half a century now in many countries.
If mainline Protestantism used to be the dominant religious belief and they got plastered, is there a dominant religious belief today?
Yes, I mean the social utility to the individual. As I said, the shift over the last half century has been due to the increased social utility to the individual of higher education and the need to fit in with that social grouping. The grouping itself began as a ‘novel thought’ grouping, but the move towards it among the masses is due to social utility. If it became socially disadvantageous to be secular, you can rest assured that the movement would go the other direction just as quickly.
There isn’t one. The largest religious grouping right now is Evangelical Protestants at around 25% of the population, followed by Catholics at 20%. Mainlines are down to about 14% of the population. Nothing like the dominance of Mainline Protestantism from the 30s-60s. In 1960, they were above 60% of the population and Evangelicals were around 10%. Now they’re a remnant. Mainlines basically got destroyed by polarization.
The antebellum church for black Americans was a refuge, and later a center for social activism outside the social circles of white Americans. In 1815 the African Methodist Episcopalian (A.M.E.) Church was founded. It is considered to be the first national organization of its kind for black Christians in the U.S. The National Baptist Convention, Inc. (NBC) was founded as a predominantly black convention in 1880. Due to segregation, the doctrine of these two organizations was relatively untouched by any of the U.S.'s white organizations.
What modern Americans see as fundamentalist Christianity is taken for the most part from The Primitive Baptist Church, which is largely a white convention, founded in Appalachia. This is where one would find snake handlers, for instance.
There are either Catholic or Protestant Christians (for the most part) in the U.S. There are no fundamentalist Catholics, for the term is not applied to that denomination. So, the question can be honed down to, “Are there black fundamentalist denominations in the [US]?” Answering that question would involve knowing what is meant by fundamentalist. Fundamentalist Christianity is commonly thought to mean “believes every word in The Holy Bible is literally true.” I can’t recall any evidence, or assertion, that the A.M.E. *and *the NBC hold that to be true. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say the two are not fundamentalist by the above definition.
There have been individual churches established which do more or less align themselves with fundamentalist belief. However, these have not gained any significant prominence, and would not constitute proof of a significant number of black Americans agreeing with fundamentalist beliefs or interpretations of scripture.