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.

 

   

The word radical occurs only in the title of this essay about J. D. Vance

 I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for The New Yorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.

If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.

It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.

For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.

We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.

For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:

In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,” is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.” Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported, Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...

For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as ‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”

I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.

Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.

These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to The New Yorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it. 

Freedom really ticks them off.

I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other. 

The country is just too damn LGBT for that.

 

    

 

Ryan Burge puts nondenominational Protestant Christianity in America at about 13% of adult population using the General Social Survey

 Which would be about 33 million.

Using the 2020 Religion Census the number is only 21.1 million.

He discusses the data here. 

 

Non-denominational Protestant Christianity will be the big winner in the future in the United States and already is at 29 million strong

 Ryan Burge, here:

There is absolutely no way to gather data on that tradition, but it’s clear that it’s growing incredibly fast. ... Denominational Christianity used to be an incredibly important cultural force in American life. Leaders in these traditions use to hold sway over millions. Today, they are a shell of their former selves. ... The big winner? That new non-denominational church down the road that has no institutional baggage.     

And here:

What may be an even bigger threat to the SBC is the dramatic rise in nondenominational churches. When looking at the size of every major Protestant tradition over the last 14 years, the common thread is decline. Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians are all a smaller share of the population now than they were in 2008. The only exception is nondenominational Christians. They were 7.1 percent of the total population in 2008, but that number has risen to 8.6 percent in 2022.

One advantage of nondenominational churches is that they don’t have institutional baggage like many denominations, including the SBC. While people are skeptical of putting money in the offering plate and having some of it go to a head office hundreds of miles away, in nondenominational churches those leadership decisions are handled by people sitting in the pews each weekend. In a time of declining trust in institutions, nondenominationals are well-positioned, and are reaping the benefits through rising attendance and giving.

The difference between the Protestant version of Christian nationalism for America and the Catholic one

In the Protestant one at least you'll still be alive to not eat the actual body of the Lord and not drink his actual blood.

 

 

The root of iconoclasm is in The Ten Commandments, and some of its most ardent representatives remain Evangelical Protestants

 The Reformed Protestant view against images of any kind in worship or out is ably presented here, from which this important excerpt: 

Yet another strongly worded evangelical Protestant position against the creation of images of any member of the Trinity is found in the Westminster Larger Catechism, written in 1647. Question 109 asks, “What are the sins forbidden in the second commandment?” The catechism answers as follows: “The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counselling, commanding, using, and any wise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself; tolerating a false religion; the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind or image or likeness of any creature whatsoever.” Here, one of the most respected and widely used catechisms in Protestant Christianity since the mid-17^th century notes, in no uncertain terms, no member of the Trinity may be represented by any physical or mental image. 

The numbering of the commandments varies, but they begin this way in Exodus 20:3ff.:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. 

 

The ideas here are the whole basis of Judaism, and they are the reason why Jews regard the incarnational theology of the Christians as wholly impossible and anathema, and why Muslims came to the same conclusion.

How US mainline Protestants made themselves extinct, or, exhibit number 4,295 demonstrating how a perfesser can't put two and two together

Protestants and the pill: How US Christians helped make birth control mainstream :

By the time the pill came on the market in the 1960s, liberal and even some conservative Protestants were advocating for birth control using new theological ideas about “responsible parenthood.” ... Multiple denominations endorsed birth control. ... Meanwhile, mainline Protestant churches, and their public influence, are shrinking.

 

Gee, I wonder why? 

LOL, Presbyterian David French is completely unfamiliar with the far-right road show in revolutionary America which repeatedly called the people to arms from Protestant pulpits

He's shocked, I tell you, shocked:

 If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event. ... We know that fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic. ... what we face is an Christian subculture that is full of terrible religious purpose. The seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across our land.

 More.

In 1776 the David French of 2022 would almost certainly have been a Loyalist, and the sworn enemy of the Presbyterian Rebellion condemned by George III.

Unlike today's fire-breathing right-wing lunatics, French is a proud proponent of "elite Evangelicalism" and "elite American culture" for whom "Christian nationalism" is an oxymoron. Those crazy Pentecostal patriots supporting Donald Trump come from the other side of the tracks, in case you needed reminding. David French is above all that, and stands for everything good, proper, and reasonable, you see. Like the Pharisees did. He is not like other men.

But his idea that a "new insurrection is being organized, in a sanctuary near you" is just as crazy as his idea that January 6th actually was one.

How a now de-Christianized America is suddenly going to embrace a bunch of religious fanatics with their hair on fire is not explained, but the "apocalyptic message" of "national doom" comes for us all, including for David French.

Is there a public Christian today who is more out of touch with the deeply political nature of the history of Protestant experience in America than he?

America: The most English, the most German, the most Protestant, the most guilt-ridden this Columbus Day

 

... the idea that Britain might celebrate, say, Cecil Rhodes in the way that Spain does Columbus seems almost heretical. The English-speaking peoples evince a peculiar compulsion to apologize for their overseas victories — a compulsion not much shared by Arabs or Portuguese or Russians or Turks or Italians. When it comes to self-criticism, only the Germans give us a run for our money.

Why should that be? Is it some curious manifestation of Protestant guilt? Is it that Anglosphere universities, unusually, remove students from their families and their hometowns, leaving them in each other’s company and making them unusually vulnerable to purity spirals and silly ideas? Or is it simply that everyone loves an underdog and the English-speaking peoples are almost never underdogs?

Whatever the explanation, we have reached a strange cultural moment when the countries that did the most to spread personal freedom and representative government across the globe are also the ones most embarrassed about their achievements.

 

More.

A US Supreme Court of Judas Iscariots: All Catholics and Jews, not a Protestant among them, stick it to a Southern Baptist

Conservative SCOTUS Betrays Barronelle :

Rod Dreher:

. . . Where were you, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett? These two, by the way, also were among the majority that refused to hear the Gavin Grimm case, handing a big victory to transgender bathroom-invaders. [UPDATE: Bret Kavanaugh also left Stutzman in the lurch.] . . .   

Comments

Achilles Rienzi:

This so wrong—another stab in the back. I am angered by it. If this wasn’t a stab in the back, then what was it?

This is why people hate establishment Republicans and conservatives. Roberts has sided with the liberals in every split decision since Kennedy retired.

I honestly don’t know how this collection of Judas Iscariots sleep at night. It takes a certain type to backstab like this then sleep like a baby. They are where they are because of people who support religious liberty, then they turn around and stab us in the back.

Only a mass movement led by credible anti-conservative far right leaders will solve our problems. A far right solution but one that is not conservative is the only solution.

Honorable exceptions like Thomas and Alito aside, no group has done more to impose and solidify leftist policies than Republican-appointed SCOTUS judges.

When Protestant nonconformism and dissent, especially with regard to the real presence in the sacrament, made you heretical

False religion is, in its nature, the greatest bane and destruction to government in the world.

-- Robert South

For schismatic Catholicism 100 years before the Protestant break, 1409's three rival popes at Avignon, Pisa, and Rome are Exhibits A, B, and C

 

Alexander V Pisa

Gregory XII Rome

Benedict XIII Avignon

On the American Protestant origins of liberalism as freedom from Catholicism and the authority of the pope

From a very useful essay by James M. Patterson, "The Dogmatic Rivalry at the Heart of America":

These Protestant outbursts coalesced into a prominent mid-nineteenth century faction called “Nativists,” who found a home in the Whig Party. Nativists tended to come from the artisan classes who were negatively affected by the arrival of Irish working in factories whose cheaper products displaced artisanal work and, hence, added to the animus for the Irish as minions of “popish plots.” In his recent book Liberal Suppression, [Philip] Hamburger charts how Nativists began to use the term “liberal” during this period to refer not merely to a kind of political gregariousness [among rival Protestants] but to an independent from “foreign influence.” To be “liberal,” then was the opposite of being Catholic. Because Americans loved liberty, they had to be Protestant, since Protestants rejected the impositions of foreign princes in favor of native liberty of conscience. Hence, Nativists identified themselves as the “American Party” and their political program as “Americanism.”

The early Nativists were animated by their Protestant enthusiasm, but over time, they moved from religious convictions to political ones. ... Indeed, one of the most shocking conclusions of Hamburger’s work is the direct link between the ideology of the KKK and today’s “humanist” associations. ...

It is no coincidence that the three critics of liberalism considered here are Catholic. Both because of crises in the Catholic Church and because of the rapid social change of the past two decades, Catholic intellectuals have had to improvise an explanation and have found it to be liberalism. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, but it does explain how American Catholics and Protestants have diverged in their evaluation of liberalism. In the recent dustup between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, one saw this tension reach the surface. The Catholic Ahmari, in keeping with the American Catholic tradition, held liberalism in contempt for its failure to defend the common good, but for the Protestant French, liberalism was instrumental to forming a coalition for religious freedom against the external authority of the secular state. French seems not to understand that for much of American history, Protestants used the same argument against Catholics.

The USA had never existed without the Protestant reformers

“I love and revere the memories of Huss Wickliff Luther Calvin Zwinglius Melancton and all the other reformers how muchsoever I may differ from them all in many theological metaphysical & philosophical points. As you justly observe, without their great exertions & severe sufferings, the USA had never existed.”

 

-- John Adams to F. C. Schaeffer, November 25, 1821

Former Protestant and convert to Catholicism advocates clerical celibacy while completely ignoring that Peter and the apostles all were married

One John Bergsma, here, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH, omitting from his discussion this:

Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

-- I Corinthians 9:5;

And this:

CANON 21 of the First Council of the Lateran, Rome, A.D. 1122-1123, which is so emphatic against clerical marriage because it was still so common:

We absolutely forbid priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks to have concubines or to contract marriage. We decree in accordance with the definitions of the sacred canons, that marriages already contracted by such persons must be dissolved, and that the persons be condemned to do penance.

AP: 0% of black Protestants favor married gay Democrat Pete Buttigieg for president in Pew survey

Gee, I wonder why.

Hm, could it be because he's . . . white?

Story.

This is most certainly true: Catholics today are functionally Protestant because of capitalism, a Protestant invention

What is more comical, Michel Houellebecq's misplaced faith in the competence of theologians or his ignorance of Catholicism's responsibility for schism?

Restoration: An Exchange of Views on Religion Between Michel Houellebecq and Geoffroy Lejeune

"Can the Catholic Church regain her former splendor? Yes, perhaps, I don’t know. It would be good if she moved away definitively from Protestantism and drew closer to Orthodoxy. Unity would be the best solution, but it would not be easy. The question of the Filioque could easily be resolved by competent theologians. ... Basically, it amounts to this: The Catholic Church, in the course of its history, has granted much too much importance to reason (aggravated over the centuries, probably, under the influence of Protestantism). Man is a being of reason: That’s true, from time to time. But he is above all a being of flesh, and of emotion. It would be good not to forget that."

Protestantism's missionary gospel of inclusive brotherhood has been self-annulling

From the review of Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, here:

As Hollinger notes, by the end of World War II, commentators such as Congregationalist leader Buell Gallagher were observing that the “gospel of inclusive brotherhood” that missionaries preached abroad had begun to return home like a boomerang to “smite the imperialism of white nations, as well as to confound the churches.” Many missionaries and their families who had been assigned a key role in converting the benighted darker races to Western ways had instead gained abroad an appreciation for cultural diversity and had come back to the United States to challenge “cultural imperialism and arrogant paternalism” and play a leading role in contesting white Protestant hegemony. Hollinger charts the intriguing flight of this boomerang. ... As he sees it, their greatest importance in the 20th century is to be found in the effects of a contradictory, potentially self-annulling belief system. 

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. -- Matthew 10:5ff.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. -- Matthew 23:15

Repression of religion in China expands to include flourishing Protestant Christianity

The Miami Herald reports here:

Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.

The crackdown on Christianity is part of a broader push by Xi to “Sinicize” all the nation’s religions by infusing them with “Chinese characteristics” such as loyalty to the Communist Party. Over the last several months, local governments across the country have shut down hundreds of private Christian “house churches.” A statement last week from 47 in Beijing alone said they had faced “unprecedented” harassment since February.

A dozen Chinese Protestants interviewed by the Associated Press described gatherings that were raided, interrogations and surveillance, and one pastor said hundreds of his congregants were questioned individually about their faith. ...

Officials once largely tolerated the unregistered Protestant house churches that sprang up independent of the official Christian Council, clamping down on some while allowing others to grow. But this year they have taken a tougher approach that relies partly on “thought reform” — a phrase for political indoctrination. ...

In Zhengzhou, Henan’s capital, all that is left of one house church is shattered glass, tangled wires and torn hymnbooks, strewn among the rubble of a knocked-down wall. Pegged to another wall is a single wooden cross, still intact.

The church inside a commercial building had served about 100 believers for years. But in late January, nearly 60 officials from the local religion department and police station appeared without warning. Armed with electric saws, they demolished the church, confiscated Bibles and computers and held a handful of young worshippers — including a 14-year-old girl — at a police station for more than 10 hours, according to a church leader.