The drone sightings over New Jersey are but the latest demonstration of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony

 I see men as trees, walking.

-- Mark 8:24

Religion Unplugged story about how politics influences US Protestant pastors' perceptions of church budgets completely misses two data outliers in 2018

 

 Pastors Paint Poor Picture Of Economic Impact On Churches

“Overall, pastors’ perceptions of the economy’s impact on their churches are statistically related to the pastor’s own politics. Since both politics and economics are external factors to a local church, it is not surprising that the influences become combined for some,” said McConnell. “More surprising is that pastors report actual offerings which fit these differences in political leanings.”

In 2018, under Donald Trump, an astounding 45% (green), a record high in the data going back to The Great Recession, said the economy was having a positive impact on church budgets, and an equally astounding 14% (blue), a record low in the data, said the economy was having a negative impact. 

It's right there in the graph, but it goes completely unremarked.

Political differences in any other year notwithstanding, 2018 looks like an amazing year of consensus among US Protestant church pastors from both sides of the political aisle, agreeing that things were pretty damn good. 

2018 had marked a notable shift for the Trump presidency, which wasted its first year in office trying to repeal Obamacare and quickly pivoted to the economy, which Larry Kudlow famously wanted front-loaded in 2017 instead of the healthcare issue. Almost immediately in 2018 the Trump administration began talking about an economic boom in the wake of the passage of its tax cut package late in 2017. And if you paid attention to the conservative media, the narrative built into a crescendo in 2018 so that by September of that year even Noah Smith, no right winger, for Bloomberg was talking about it as an actual fact.

Was it? 

If you and your kin had suffered under the effects of the 2009 crisis, which just went on and on and on under Barack Obama, it sure seemed like it. The end of the drought for these people, who were dying of thirst, was deeply felt, and explains why the memory of what happened to them continues to exert such a powerful influence on support for Donald Trump in 2024. Barack Obama and the Democrats did little for them. That is how we got here.

In relative terms in comparison with past booms, however, there were many indicators which were improving but were not really stellar, and some not really improving at all, including on both fronts full time jobs, wage growth, GDP growth, new home sales, housing starts, average age of vehicles on the road, road travel, growth of not in labor force, inventories, and industrial production. To critical thinkers, the economic boom narrative seemed exaggerated.

But perception is everything, and it's NOT surprising that the story missed that. Elites specialize in overlooking the little people.

No one understands the appeal of Donald Trump except all the millions he has helped, clinging to their guns and their religion.

 

   

Baba Ramdev, the face of yoga, ayurvedic products and patriotic nationalism in India, is poor in name only

From the story here:

It might seem like an impossible arrangement—observing an oath of poverty while also being one of India’s top entrepreneurs. ...

Ramdev’s home is on the outskirts of the city—in a walled garden he shares with bees, butterflies, and armed security guards. I entered the estate through two huge gates with golden lion-head door knockers, and drove down a brick path toward a complex of tidy white buildings. Ramdev received me in a comfortable parlor, with an ample porch and several couches and armchairs. “Nowhere in our religious books and scriptures is it written that a sanyasi should be a mendicant,” he said, referring to the kind of beggars I’d seen along the Ganges. ...

Stuart Ray Sarbacker, a professor of comparative religion at Oregon State University who’s studied Ramdev’s career, calls him “the most prominent face of yoga in the entire nation.”

Megan McArdle discusses the failure of communism beyond the small scale . . .

. . . but misses that its origin is in the most intimate unit of small scale experience of all, the nuclear family. Once you extrapolate much beyond that level ("Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother." -- Mark 3:34f.) it's not going to last long.

Megan McArdle, here:

[C]ommunism has never successfully worked above the level of a small group; it’s trying to manage transactions with strangers on the logic of small-group reciprocal altruism. Those small groups have a lot of social mechanisms, from shaming to threat of exile, to prevent people from cheating. When you try to scale it up to millions of strangers, it collapses into destitution or bloody tyranny. 

And all that believed were together, and had all things common. ... And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. ... And one of them named Ag'abus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world; and this took place* in the days of Claudius. And the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief to the brethren who lived in Judea; and they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul. 

-- Acts 2:44; 4:32; 11:28ff.

*probably sometime between AD 44 and 48

Trump "supporter" Peter Thiel has it exactly backwards: Our economic decline is a symptom of our cultural decline

Peter Thiel tonight at the Republican National Convention, already being quoted here at the libertarian-friendly Real Clear Politics:

 "[F]ake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline."

Back in 2010 Phyliss Schlafly clearly expressed in the wake of the battle against Obamacare how it is precisely cultural degradation leading to the decay of the family which results in the enormous costs destroying the American economy. The truth is that limited government cannot exist without social conservatism. People who won't limit themselves cannot produce it, just as gay people cannot produce the next generation.

While Thiel's sincerity is questioned on psychological grounds, real conservatives recognize that the project of making America great again is futile apart from moral renewal.

Jeffrey Goldberg Thinks Mormonism's Bad Rap Is Due To Its Proximity To Our Own Times

For Bloomberg.com, here:

In talking to my Mormon friends (some of my best friends are Mormons), the answer is clear. The practices and origin stories of most religions, when viewed by outsiders, all seem fairly strange. But Mormonism seems just a bit stranger than the rest. The great fear is not that Americans will see a Mormon politician as too sinister to lead the country (the way that some Baptist leaders once saw the Catholic John F. Kennedy) but that Americans will see a Mormon as too bizarre to be president.

They point to the issue of “sacred underwear,” the derisive term for undergarments worn by some Mormons to remind themselves of their religious responsibilities. Many find the concept odd, but should they? Is Mormonism really that much stranger than other religions?

I vividly remember learning from a Catholic friend that, each Sunday, his family would attend church to drink the blood of Jesus and eat his body. Freaky. But is it any freakier than the sight of a bunch of Jews gathering around an 8-day-old boy to watch a man with a beard snip off the tip of the baby’s penis, and then to eat blintzes afterward? Religious Jews, of course, also wear a variation of “sacred underwear” -- zizit and tallitot, traditional garments that date back thousands of years, to the ancient Middle East.

The Mormon tradition dates back less than 200 years, to Palmyra, New York. What Mormons suffer from more than any other major religion is proximity. The foundation stories of Mormonism took place in the age of skeptical journalism, and they took place in the U.S.

This seems right to me, except that the lineage factor is missing from the analysis and what significance that has for the progenitors, which cannot be understood apart from an appreciation of doctrinal matters. 

Jews find Christians especially strange because Christianity is an heretical sect of Judaism which crossed the line and made a god of a man.

Christians find Islam strange because it is an heretical sect derived from an heretical sect of Christianity which crossed the line and made a man of a god.

Mormonism is an heretical sect of American Christianity which American Christians historically found objectionable more on moral grounds than theological, so much so that they quite literally drove the Mormons out west to Utah.

In point of fact, the Supreme Court of the United States itself ruled against statehood for Utah until Mormons officially abandoned polygamy because the practise was considered by the Court to be destructive of public (Christian) morals. No state in the union was going to be allowed to be a polygamist enclave.

Imagine such a ruling today, say about same sex relations.

Theologically Mormonism's problem for Christian America is its divinization of not just one man but of all men. But as far as I can tell, the Mormon in the race for president is probably the last Mormon I'll have to worry will push his ideas on anyone.

I'm not convinced he has any.

Compared with the ideas of his opponent, however, I can live with that.