Media Framing, Race, and Individualism

Last fall, the Benton Harbor (Michigan) High School football team garnered a lot of national attention after they won their first game in three years, had their first winning season in 26 years, and made it to the playoffs for the first time since most can remember. Here is a selection of the media attention:

• ESPN: 74-year-old Accomplished Coach Takes Unlikely HS Team to Playoffs
• Sports Illustrated: What Benton Harbor Needed Was Elliot Uzelac
• ABC News: Football Coach and Team Get Big Surprise 'Thank You' on 'GMA'

One thing you might notice in that coverage is that the narrative adopted almost universally by the media is that their new coach, Elliot Uzelac, was the reason for the team's success. Not the community. Not the boys on the field. Uzelac. This is not a post to attack Uzelac. I know little of the man, and I'm fully willing to accept that he is upstanding and well-intentioned. This post is not about a man--and that's the point. This post is about how the success of a community, a school, and a team are distilled down to a story about an individual. And at that, the media have transformed what could have been a story of triumph for a city that is 90% black and 90% impoverished into a myth about an affluent white man. For example, in the ABC piece, reporter T. J. Holmes tells Coach Uzelac in the midst of celebrating with his players, "Yes, you turned around a football team but a community as well" (6:35). This is the White Savior Industrial Complex in action.

Individualism, (the Illusion of) Control, and Self-Driving Cars

The self-driving car seems like an imminent inevitability. More than just convenience, they promise to make us safer. People are easily distracted or impaired (e.g. from exhaustion or chemicals); computers are consistent and singly predictable. Sign me up! When can I get one?

[record scratch]

I see trouble on the horizon. We already have a safer alternative to personal, private automobile use: public transportation. People in the United States, however, have been reluctant to use public transportation, in part, because we are culturally far more individualistically oriented than communally oriented; we valorize individual choice over collective benefit. Given that this is the case, I am skeptical that the average American will be willing to give up direct control of his car.

There are two issues along these lines that are far from reconciled, yet. First are the implementation of the technological options and their adoption by users. It is possible that self-driving cars could actually end up being more a series of automated override failsafes; in other words, people would continue to drive cars as they always have, but the cars will be smart enough to stop people from doing the stupid things that we frequently do. Second are the laws regarding the technology. How comfortable will our lawmakers, politicians, and judges be reframing laws that remove human operators from accountability? Today, when there is a car "accident," we typically attempt to assign blame to one or more drivers (i.e. individuals). In a future where there is no human (at least directly or immediately) driving the car, whom do we blame when--in the increasingly rare instances where they do happen--car accidents happen? Do we blame Google? Ford? a nameless computer engineer?

I think that it's easy to see how self-driving cars could force us to reconceive--or perhaps reproduce--our culture.

Fearing the Devil or the Absence of God?

The Devil or Satan, a personification of evil, fits well with the Muslim, Christian, and, to a lesser extent, Jewish narratives. Atheism, however, is outside of that narrative, which has made it so much more terrifying historically, and why atheists have fallen consistently near or at the bottom of most people's lists of trustworthy individuals. Here's what we can see from the GSS data on the topic.

One unfortunate thing is that the GSS does not regularly ask about belief in the Devil or Hell. However, belief in Hell was consistent over the years that it has been asked so, for our purposes, let's just assume that the percentage of people who believe in the Devil and Hell have been consistent over the long term (a pretty big assumption, I know). We can see clearly that over time people in the U.S. have been becoming more tolerant of atheists in terms of their freedom to speak in public, teach in colleges, and have books they've authored in libraries. This is a fairly dangerous practice, but if we follow the models, we have to go back a long time to reach those moments when attitudinal questions dropped below the belief questions, in a few cases all the way back to the late-1800s and the most recent, only to the 1970s.

From non-systematic intuition, I would guess that people have been worrying less about the Satanic and more about the atheistic recently, but the GSS data, as shown above, suggests a different story. This of course assumes that belief in Hell or the Devil correlates well with fear of Hell or the Devil, which I think is fair. What does it mean, though, that people in the U.S. are drifting toward acceptance of the godless with sustained fear of God's nemesis? Does this signal a change in the religious narratives?

Here is one theoretical stab. An important part of orthodox Christianity historically--and especially Evangelical Protestantism more recently--is voluntarism, the belief that individuals need freely to choose their faith or allegiance. Coupled with the Protestant notions of individualism (i.e. no need for priestly or institutional intercession between the individual and the divine), it is easier to see how the toleration of atheism might be increasingly seen as necessary, while belief in Hell and the Devil, though persistent, become coercive relics.

To conclude, here is a recent story about fears of children and Satan worship in India. The parallel for those of us who remember the Satanic scares in the 1980s in the U.S. are stark.

One-off Megachurch Ethnography

While traveling over the holidays, my wife and I grudgingly visited a megachurch with a couple of our hosts who had recently become members there. While by no stretch of the imagination systematic, rigorous, or thorough, I want to offer just a few notes and observations here on that experience.

Let me begin by highlighting a few themes. First, the mise-en-scène was all about entertainment. We repeatedly heard comparisons to "being at a rock concert," which were quite accurate. Instead of a formal liturgy, the service followed a pattern of brief message--music--brief message--music.... Second, the term "surrender" was recurrent. "Surrendering to God's will" is a very comforting message for those who lack agency in their lives (i.e. the marginalized) as well as for those who imagine challenges to their agency through social change (i.e. the privileged). There was no discussion about discerning God's will, and I would guess that this is due to the active avoidance of contentiousness in such congregations. Finally, there was a lot of talk tacitly and explicitly about persecution. "You are not alone" became a mantra late in the service, and the pastor equated being a Christian surrounded by non-Christians to sexism and racism, apologizing to those in the congregation who had felt wronged in their lives.

That final theme, persecution, is related to an interesting paradox: megachurches simultaneously offer anonymity and community. People seem to relish the experience of walking into the building without being pestered but then being told they "are not alone." This might at first seem contradictory. After all, can a true sense of community exist among strangers? Perhaps people are doing community differently today than in the past. That is, being alone together is only contradictory by pre-postmodernist standards.

Who Are the "Religious But Not Spiritual?"

There's been a lot of talk lately about the growth of the religiously unaffiliated and, in particular, of those who claim to be "spiritual but not religious." There's no dearth of scholarship on this area of increasing Sheilaism. I'm interested, though, in the folks who claim to be "religious but not spiritual." Here is just an exploratory look at this group using logit regression of GSS data. I created a dummy variable for those who simultaneously claim to be slightly spiritual or not spiritual (SPRTPRSN) and moderately religious or very religious (RELPERSN).

Surprisingly, neither race nor gender are predictive of this identity; education and income, however, do have a significant effect in some models (though, these variables add little information to the predictions): those who have at least a bachelor's degree are less likely to be "religious but not spiritual," and those who have higher levels of income are less likely to be "religious but not spiritual." Year of the survey is relatively predictive, though.

While the move is small (only 2 percentage points over 12 years), the variable is significant at the zero-order (p=0.008) and is robust when controls are added. People are increasingly less likely to claim to be "religious but not spiritual," but that these people exist at all is somewhat surprising. I'll be looking more at this in the future.

Why E.W. Kenyon Is Unimportant

In his book A Different Gospel, Dan McConnell [1] claimed that the Faith Movement, theological parent to the Prosperity Gospel, rests on Kenneth Hagin's plagiarism of the New Thought metaphysics of E.W Kenyon. This is certainly interesting historically and theologically, but sociology, it detracts from the more important point that the Word of Faith movement and the Prosperity Gospel in particular became popular not because of the supply of an idea (at least not alone) but because of an underlying increase in the demand for individualistic religious tenets which themselves were the result of overarching social structural changes. By this reasoning, both Kenyon's and Hagin's popularity were responses in line with the same social epiphenomenon. The New Age philosophies/religions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and the self-oriented recasting of evangelical Christianity of the mid- to late-twentieth century are part of the same trend. In effect, it doesn't matter if Hagin stole his ideas or words from Kenyon. Assuming he did, we can speculate that someone would have inevitably innovated the Prosperity ideas independently if he hadn't to fill the supernatural void in the shifting worldview of the times.

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[1] McConnell, D. R. 1988. A Different Gospel: A Historical and Biblical Analysis of the Modern Faith Movement. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers.

A New Heaven for a New Earth

Over the twenty-hour round trip car ride from Georgia to Indiana and back that we made recently to visit family, my wife and I listened to The Lovely Bones audiobook. In many ways, it reminded me of a favorite movie of my wife's, What Dreams May Come. One of those ways in which they are similar struck me as quite telling. Both present a vision of the pleasant afterlife as types of designer heavens, places consciously constructed by the desires of each individual. This seems radically individualistic and quite different from more historic and traditional conceptions of heaven that are essentially one-size-fits-all. The idea that one person's heaven is distinct from another person's heaven seems like a recent innovation to me. (If anyone more familiar with the history of religion knows better, please let me know in the comments below.) This seems like yet another example of the old Durkheimian hypothesis that religious beliefs are reflections of the social organization of societies from which they spring. As contemporary society becomes more individualistic, our beliefs about heaven reflexively become more individualistic as well. We don't as much share an afterlife so much as we have afterlives that are tailored to our specifications. Among those countless options available to the dearly departed are when, for how long, and even if our exclusive heavens overlap with the heavens of others.

Interestingly, we seem to have been much more comfortable historically with designer hells, places that are ironically suited to one's sins in the material world. Think Sisyphus and his stone, Tantalus in the water with the fruit, the varied punishments in Dante's Inferno, or Homer and all of the donuts in the world. There appears to have been a shift in the metanarrative over time from collective eternal joy/individualized eternal torment to individualized evolving satiation/collective fixed pain. Quite the one-eighty.

Anyway, The Lovely Bones was surprisingly moving, although we found it far from perfect. I haven't seen the movie adaptation, but I've heard that it was horrible.

Java with Jesus

In this recent episode of Fresh Air on NPR, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann discusses her ethnography among Evangelical Protestants. She describes how she got interested in researching this particular group:

I went to the home of one evangelical woman, and she told me that if I wanted to understand, I should have coffee with God. She had coffee with God all the time, she hung out with God, she chatted with God and talked with God as if he were a person. And I was blown away. I was so intrigued by what that meant and how she was able to do that.

Evangelicals understand God to be personal.[1] What they mean by this is that God is presently active in the world and, moreover, that he cares intimately and deeply about each of us as individuals, much in the way that a parent cares for a child or a friend cares for another friend. Largely, this is a reaction against other monotheistic traditions whose theologies paint God as abstract, nebulous, remote, and even, at times, distant. Paul writes about the community of believers as the "body of Christ" (see 1 Corinthians 10:16 and Ephesians 4:12). Seeing God as being apparent in the collective is decidedly different from imagining God manifest in an individual interaction.

What Luhrmann describes, however, seems to be qualitatively different than just the notion of a "personal" God. The people whom she observers and to whom talks envision the divine as radically personal, even to the point of literally putting out a cup of coffee for him and talking to him as if he were a person sitting in the room. The psychic comforts that such a practice must elicit are obvious, but I wonder if there might not be an unintended consequence: Does "having coffee with Jesus" transform God into an individual and limit the communal, transcendent nature of the divine? Does this transform the ineffable into a Buddy Christ? Does God become profane?


Then there is this slice of awesomeness.

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1 - The notion of a personal God does show up in all of the Christian traditions and even to an extent in Judaism; however, it is of unique import among Evangelicals.

Misunderstanding "Religion"

The above video of a spoken-word piece by poet Jeff Bethke has been making the rounds in the Twitter- and blogospheres. Sadly, Bethke has incorrectly conflated several concepts, and I think it deserves a response. Bethke is correct that Jesus did not intend to found a new religion. It is clear from the biblical texts that Jesus saw himself as a reformer. He was not, however, anti-religion as Bethke postulates. Religion/Jesus is a false dichotomy. It may be an appealing juxtaposition to young Evangelicals and to those who have been damaged by religious institutions and their leaders, but it is not consistent with the words and actions of the historic Jesus as transmitted through the Gospels. Jesus attempted to reorient but not to abolish.

Overall, though, thought along the lines of what Bethke preaches in his poetry is nothing new. It's part of an ongoing trend, that decline-of-communalism/increase-in-individualism theme to which I keep returning. Durkheim recognized that "religion" was inherently social. If it isn't social, it ain't religion. Radical Evangelicalism, as Bethke's piece demonstrates, is uncomfortable with the communal nature of religion. Beginning with Luther--who, like Jesus, did not intend to start a new religion but only to "reform" the one that he so loved--the unquestioned necessity of the mediating nature of a community gave way to direct access to the divine. Ironically, Luther sowed the seeds for the downfall of religion. If religion is by definition social and our theology no longer requires the social aspects of religion, religion goes away.

If we're discarding religion, what replaces it? Durkheim called it "magic," a practical, client-based endeavor that is decidedly individualistic in nature, but I don't think that exactly captures what Bethke intends. We might call it "spirituality," as in spritual-but-not-religious, but I don't think that's quite what Bethke means, either. I think this is something different.

The newer, younger, hipper brand of Evangelical Protestantism that seems to be gaining popularity lately is more socially minded than the older, more traditional Evangelicalism from which it came. People like Shane Claiborne are increasingly concerned with poverty and marginalization, what a hundred years ago might have been recognized as the social gospel. So, here is my question: is Evangelical Protestantism reversing course? Have its individualistic tendencies peaked like a ball having been tossed into the air resting for an instant at zero acceleration before beginning to find its way back down toward the ground? Can this explain the contradictions inherent to much of this new theology?

Misunderstanding American Religion

A few thoughts here on this op-ed piece on the divergence of religion and spirituality. First, a quote:

If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.”...By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.

What religion is he looking at? This seems like stereotype. My church is not like this. Conservative Evangelicalism has managed to convince everyone--believers and nonbelievers alike--that they are the only game in town.

Religion and politics, though often spoken about in the same breath, are, of course, fundamentally different. Politics is, by definition, a public activity. Though religion contains large public components, it is at core a personal affair. It is the relationship we have with ourselves or, as the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “What the individual does with his solitariness.” There lies the problem: how to talk about the private nature of religion publicly.

Wrong. Religion is by definition social. It is not an individual pursuit. Private engagement with the divine is spiritualism, and this is the problem: the nones are growing because people are increasingly disinterested in collective engagement.

The Opposite of Patriotism

Please, oh please, read this new blog post from Paul Krugman. He is right. Here is the gist:

...[Patriotism] is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.
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...[S]upporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn’t hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!
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If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost.

Amen.

Getting the -schaft

I was reminded yesterday about an old theoretical expression of the ongoing discussion I have between communalism and individualism. Ferdinand Tönnies introduced the respective German types Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft is essentially social organization/interaction that is group-oriented for the group's sake, while Gesellschaft is social organization/interaction that is self-oriented for one's own benefit. There is really no good way to talk about these concepts without misconstruing or oversimplifying them, but I'll risk it and write that we can think about them as being roughly realized in the following dichotomies: rural vs. urban, agricultural vs. industrial, family vs. stranger, traditional vs. modern, etc. To say that Gemeinschaft = communalism and Gesselschaft = individualism would be wrong, but I think these concepts offer another way to think about the abstract distinctions and transition about which I have been blogging here for a while. I just wanted to introduce the terms for future use.

The Divided Brain

I think this clip from RSAnimate is interesting. I'm trying to think if this helps me in my ongoing argument about the increase in individualism at the expense of communalism.

I and We in Libational Context

I'm getting pumped up for the the new Ken Burns' documentary, Prohibition. Prohibition was an attempt at "social engineering" or, more accurately, intentional cultural manipulation. While a grassroots movement, it resulted in a top-down result. It didn't work. The problems of alcohol, however, did not disappear with the Cullen-Harrison Act. Two years later, Bill Wilson offered the world an individualistic response that resonated much more with the the increasing individualism that industrialization had ushered in, Alcoholics Anonymous. What I am proposing is that the 18th Amendment failed in part because it was a communal solution in an individualist society. It's one thing to say, "We have a problem, and it is demon liquor," a far different thing to say, "I am Bill W., and I am an alcoholic." More on this kind of dichotomy here.

I and We in Religious Context

I grew up in a Protestant denomination in which we confessed the Nicean Creed. Later, I joined the Roman Catholic Church. Today, my wife and I officially joined the Episcopal Church. When I was a youth in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the creed began "I believe..."; in the Catholic and Anglican traditions, the same creed began "We believe...." When I was converting, I noted this difference but didn't understand it. Now, as a sociologist of religion, I appreciate the significance. We's point toward a communal orientation; I's point toward an individual orientation. We's are used by most of the communal-oriented religions (e.g. Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism), I's by the individual-oriented (e.g. Evangelical and Black Protestantisms). This difference of orientation has profound significance. Am I a "we" or an "I" among other "I's?" Do I acknowledge the synergy of social interaction or do I insist, as famously claimed by Maggie Thatcher, that "...there is no such thing as society. There are [only] individual men and women..."?

The JAMA Blames Parents for Their Obese Children

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) just published a commentary titled "State Intervention in Life-Threatening Childhood Obesity." Here's a selection to give you the gist:

Many biological, psychosocial, and behavioral factors affect energy balance and, therefore, childhood weight gain, with parents playing an important mediating role. Ubiquitous junk food marketing, lack of opportunities for physically active recreation, and other aspects of modern society promote unhealthful lifestyles in children. Inadequate or unskilled parental supervision can leave children vulnerable to these obesigenic environmental influences.

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State intervention may serve the best interests of many children with life-threatening obesity....
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In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable from a legal standpoint because of imminent health risks and the parents' chronic failure to address medical problems. Indeed, it may be unethical to subject such children to an invasive and irreversible procedure without first considering foster care.
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Ultimately, government can reduce the need for such interventions through investments in the social infrastructure and policies to improve diet and promote physical activity among children.

Here is the problem: the authors acknowledge that obesity is a social problem, caused in part by cultural and structural contraints on healthy behavior. They even conclude by stating that the government should intervene in order to help kids eat better and exercise more. The bulk of the piece, however, is aimed at blaming parents for a social problem that is largely out of their control and of which they are also likely to be victims. In short, the authors admit that this is a societal-level problem but prescribe an individual-level solution.

This issue is not unique in its capacity to incite error in the level of analysis. Indeed, virtually every governmental response to social problems makes this mistake. Take the criminal justice system. We know that crime is a social thing caused in part by issues that are economic and structural, but we futily try to solve it by prosecuting and locking up individuals. Take welfare. We know that poverty is a social thing caused by the way that we have organized our economy, but we try in vain to eliminate it by giving individuals food stamps, subsidized housing, and Medicaid.

The solution to social problems like obesity, crime, and poverty must be themselves social. Even just talking about taking kids away from their parents because they are obese is cruel and needlessly contentious. We must dig deep and look to the root of these problems if we hope to solve them.

Taxing Parents of Obese Children

Add this one to the list of terrible ideas that should be thrown away now, now, now. Basically, the proposal aims to reduce childhood obesity by refusing tax deductions to the parents of obese children, not actually adding a tax. Essentially, it's parent blaming par excellence (e.g. "It's the parents' responsibility that have obese kids"). Moreover, it ignores larger social issues. It's part of that larger problem of individualist thinking that I'm always railing against. It's not about "habits" but habitus. This means that any serious proposal for a solution to rising obesity rates needs to address its structural roots. Ditching the Farm Bill would be a good start. Make high fructose syrup expensive and the pounds will magically melt away.

Oh, and why would we want to raise the taxes of those who are more likely to be poor? Nothing about this makes sense.

Today's Lesson in Social Research Methods: Reductionism

I have heard an extraordinary number of reductionistic interpretations about terrorism lately. Most follow the pattern, "Osama bin Laden was responsible for al Qaeda, 9/11, and the spread of terrorism over the last two decades. Now that he is dead, these problems will recede." This is another example of the tendency for our narratives to be individualistic. Reductionism is falsely attributing the cause of some large-scale event or macro-level phenomenon to a small-scale or micro-level incident. Here is a quintessential example: What caused WWI? If you answered "the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand," you probably aced your high school history test, but you are, nonetheless, absolutely wrong. The killing of an individual has never started or ended any war.

Structure vs. Agency and Free Will vs. Determinism

I've always found it interesting how different academic disciplines approach similar problems with varying language and frames. I was intrigued by this interesting piece in the Times about philosophies regarding free will. Here is a bit from the article:

...[R]egardless of whether free will exists, our society depends on everyone’s believing it does. The benefits of this belief have been demonstrated in other research showing that when people doubt free will, they do worse at their jobs and are less honest.

...

“Free will guides people’s choices toward being more moral and better performers,” Dr. Vohs said. “It’s adaptive for societies and individuals to hold a belief in free will, as it helps people adhere to cultural codes of conduct that portend healthy, wealthy and happy life outcomes.”

I wonder how this translates to people's acceptance of structural constraints. Take race as an example. The common conception of racism is bigotry. Why did the white guy get hired instead of the black guy? Well, the boss discriminated against the black candidate because he is prejudiced against blacks. This is what we would call sociologically an agential explanation: racism exists because individuals choose to hold deleterious views of others. Sociologically, though, we know that these kinds of explanations can only go so far. In the aggregate, we have a preponderance of evidence that whites have better chances of employment, controlling for virtually all other influences (e.g. level of education). The agential explanation would suggest that there are a lot of bigoted bosses out there, but that's not in fact what we find. To the contrary, most people who do hiring are quite aware of issues of race and do not hold overtly racist views; nonetheless, the hiring discrepancy remains. Even when individuals choose not to be racist, the problems of race persist.

I wonder, though, what would happen if all people bought the sociological argument. Among sociologists, there is a feeling that if we can get people to understand the complexity of issues such as structural racism, we can undo it, but the experiments highlighted in the article would suggest the opposite: making people aware of the deterministic nature of social problems should make them wring their hands of any moral responsibility toward social change.

Running List of Pet Peeves: #11 "Hostile Hallway Habits"

In the halls of the building of the school where I work, students often congregate outside of their classrooms before their classes begin. On the one hand, I am glad that they are there early and ready to go. On the other hand, they fail to respect that they are in a hallway. Hallways are for walking, not lounging. Now, I sympathize. You don't want to stand around, waiting for your professor. Fair enough. But, do you have to sit with your feet extended into the center of the hallway--on both sides? There are occasionally students who will retract their feet to make way for a passerby, but that is rare. More often than not, I am forced to goosestep over your limbs so that you can be comfortable.

Then, there are the guys (and yes, most are men) who will walk several persons abreast down the hallway completely oblivious to the people who are travelling toward them, in the opposite direction. On several occasions, I have stopped in my tracks only to have people walk into me as if I were invisible. Annoying.