No church for you! Ha ha ha!

M. Simon has an interesting post commenting on Walter Russell Mead’s “Inequality Grows As Poor, Ignorant Atheists Swamp US” which Glenn linked earlier.

As Mead notes, those with nothing to cling to are dropping God, who seems these days to appeal mostly to people who have it better in life:

According to the American Sociological Association, the uneducated and the poor (often of course the same people) are dropping God like a hot brick; the ‘bitter clingers’ are increasingly better educated and more affluent than the unchurched.

So that’s what the Christian religion has been reduced to in this country.

“Bitter clingers” versus atheists.

It wasn’t that way when I grew up, and such a dichotomy does not portend well for the country.

The study Mead cites focuses on whites (“because black and Latino religiosity is less divided by education and income”), and it shows a sharply downward trend of church attendance among lower class whites:

While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for those without college degrees compared to those who graduated from college, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

“Our study suggests that the less educated are dropping out of the American religious sector, similarly to the way in which they have dropped out of the American labor market,” said lead researcher W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

The study focuses on whites because black and Latino religiosity is less divided by education and income. Most whites who report a religious affiliation are Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Mormons, or Jews.

Relying on nationally representative data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth, the study finds that moderately educated whites—those who have a high school degree but who did not graduate from a 4-year college—attended religious services in the 1970s at about the same rate as the most educated whites—those who at a minimum graduated from a 4-year college—but they attended at much lower frequencies in the 2000s.

The least educated white Americans—those who did not graduate from high school—attended religious services less frequently than both the moderately educated and most educated in the 1970s and that remained the case in the 2000s. “The least educated have been consistently less religiously engaged than even the moderately educated, meaning the gap between the least educated and most educated is even larger than the one between the moderately educated and most educated,” Wilcox said.

In the 1970s, among those aged 25-44, 51 percent of college-educated whites attended religious services monthly or more, compared to 50 percent of moderately educated whites, and 38 percent of the least educated whites. In the 2000s, among those aged 25-44, 46 percent of college-educated whites attended monthly or more, compared to 37 percent of moderately educated whites, and 23 percent of the least educated whites.

46 percent versus 23 percent is a pretty stark difference. As to what might account for this apparent failure of religion among lower class whites, I think it would be a mistake to point simply to a lack of belief in God or in a higher spirituality.

According to a 2008 Gallup survey, the number of people identifying themselves as not believing in God or in a universal spirit has only risen by about one percentage point in the past decade. And according to the survey, lack of any belief (which would translate more or less into atheism) is LOWEST among those in the “high school or less” category. In other words, a total lack of belief in God or spirituality correlates with higher education.

So what’s with the poorer whites rejecting organized religion in greater numbers than ever before? This is a good question, regardless of your personal opinions about God or the proper role of religion.

Mead identifies two reasons for the apparent decline/failure of religion: First, the lack of outreach by churches:

It is the most scorching indictment of America’s religious communities I can think of that more has not been done to reach out to those most in need of both the spiritual and the social benefits of faith.  Every member of a religious congregation in this country should be asking how he or she could be doing more.

Add to that the modern obsession with keeping religion out of schools:

Second, the increasing disconnect between many poor and poorly educated Americans and the values and ideas that make for success in this society is in part a consequence of efforts by well meaning liberals to keep religion out of schools.  By what we teach and what we don’t teach, what we talk about and where the silences are, we convey clear messages to young children.  We have been broadcasting a clear message to two generations of young people that religion doesn’t matter.

OK, what I want to know is why would that message resonate more with lower class whites than their more affluent counterparts?

I wonder whether the push to keep religion out of the schools has also led to a concomitant politicization of religion — to the detriment of what used to be called Christianity. I say “used to” because I have watched over the years as “Christian” (once a perfectly legitimate generic term) has been reduced to a loaded word invoking fundamentalist/RTL/anti-gay/anti-evolution stereotypes. It is now dangerous to say you’re a Christian, because people (on both “sides” of this squalid equation) will take it the wrong way. The Christianity that I knew and grew up with is being killed off by an alliance of fundamentalists and atheists. Say what you want about religion, but that sucks.

And how welcoming are churches to less affluent whites? Not only don’t they have as much extra cash to shell out, but what’s in it for them in attending? Especially in this economy, when having less money and less education correlates with higher rates of foreclosure, higher rates of living off the taxpayers, precisely what do these people get by going to church? And what church would that be? People who are well-educated and better off tend to be divided into two camps: the self made and those who inherited their wealth. To the extent that the spiritually inclined members of these camps would go to church, it would not surprise me if the former gravitated towards churches which emphasized the virtue of hard work, with the latter seeking churches offering some form of expiation for the sin of having inherited wealth. These are two very different needs. The former lies in gratitude, while the latter lies in guilt.

The equation is irrational, but it is coming down to this: gratitude over wealth is “conservative,” while guilt over wealth is “liberal.”

But the once working, now unemployed poor whites — especially those who came of age in the postmodernist, entitlement, self esteem culture — why on earth would they be grateful to God? And why would they feel guilty? What they have is simply resentment. I don’t know whether there is a Church of the Resentful, and the preachers who scream “God damn America!” usually aren’t targeting poor and uneducated whites. In fact, their very whiteness (being seen as “white privilege”) might make them unwelcome.

So the churches offer them little or nothing, and no one cares.

Whatever they get has to come from the government.

(And to think that they used to call religion the opiate of the masses…)