Most Americans Want a Servant-Leader President

The Christian Post is reporting an interesting poll done by Zogby for the American Bible Society on what qualities voters want in a president. Most Americans want a God-believing, Bible-quoting president. Since that describes the overwhelming majority of Americans, this finding is not so surprising.

An interesting detail is that most people want a president who "sees the office as a privilege to serve others, with a responsibility to God." The New Testament standard of the president as a "servant-leader" resonated especially strongly with the youngest voters. Among those 18 to 29, fully 84% said that they wanted a president who saw him- or herself as a servant-leader of the people.

Guess the Fantasy

This one comes fully formed from my sister, writing about her five year old.


Danny, sotto voce, while flinging himself about: "Gryffindor: infinity! Yay! Yay!"

Super Bowl Church Parties

If that headline doesn't strike you as odd, you are deep in the civil religion. Many churches have Super Bowl parties, showing the game on the big screen that they normally use for hymn lyrics. These parties are designed especially to draw men and teens who usually avoid going into the church. Some churches use them as fundraisers.

Until this year. The NFL is enforcing the copyright deal it worked out with the government that forbids anyone to show its games on screens larger than 55". Sports bars are exempt. Churches are not.

I think this is actually a good thing for churches. It is very dangerous for churches to simply be absorbed into the civil religion. Churches need some tension with the world, or there is no point in going. Without that tension, churches are another part of the state/school/mall, with worse seats and terrible bread.

Churches need to be in tension with all the world's institutions. And that includes the NFL.

Evolutionary Evangelists Praise Creation Museum

Michael Dowd and his wife Connie Barlow are self-described "evolutionary evangelists." Dowd, a former evangelical creationist turned UCC minister, and Barlow, an author of several books on evolution, visited the Creation Museum -- and came away praising it for telling a meaningful story that has a place for us. The average natural history museum, they note, does not tell a story.

I believe that is the main point at issue. Evolution as a scientific theory can't offer a narrative of why existence -- our existence -- is meaningful. Evolution can show change over time, and even adaptations that helped survival in particular environments. But science can't say why that matters, or if all this change is going somewhere. 19th century moralists married evolution to the quite different theory of progress, with ethically suspect results. Scientific evolutionists today stay away from making ethical claims about evolution, one way or another.

But we still need a meaningful story to understand the world with. This is why most people, if forced to choose between a meaningful creation and a meaningless evolution, will stick with creation.

Dowd and Barlow say we don't have to choose. I agree.

Dowd and Barlow are extolling a middle way that reconciles Christianity with evolutionary views.

The Mormons' "John Paul II" Dies

Gordon Hinckley, the Priest, Prophet, and Revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, died yesterday at 97. He had been the top Mormon for 13 years. This is very long reign for a Mormon Prophet, since they usually succeed to the job after decades working up the hierarchy. Hinckley's likely successor, for example, is 80.

I see Hinckley as the Mormon John Paul II because, like the late, great Pope, he served a long time, traveled extensively rallying the faithful, and was aggressive but positive about his faith. Moreover, Hinckley oversaw the shift of the Mormon majority from the Utah and the USA to the global south -- a miniature version of the massive shift of Catholic strength from north to south since John Paul's election in 1978. 1978 was also a big year for the Mormons: that was when the top leaders had their "pentecost moment" and received a new revelation to open the priesthood (full church status for Mormon men) to black people. Hinckley took that revelation and ran with it. In his term as Prophet, almost two decades later, Hinckley oversaw a slew of new LDS temples in Africa and Latin America.

Mormon growth, like Christian growth in most denominations, is greatest south of the equator. Hinckley's successor will be an old white man from Utah, and probably the couple of successors after that. Someday, though, not to long from now, the Mormon Prophet will be a darker-skinned man from far away.

No Country for Old Men

... is a great movie. I think the Coen Brothers are great moviemakers. They have made very few bad ones. I can see echoes of their previous movies in this one, especially those set in the southwest.

There are serious religious themes here.

A hunter finds a bunch of dead guys and a lone survivor of a bad drug deal. The survivor asks for water. The hunter ignores him and goes after the money. If he had left it at that, he might have gotten away with the money. But conscience comes to him in the night, and he goes back with a jug of water - the very model of Christian service. When his wife asks him why he is going out in the middle of the night, he answers: "to do something stupid."

As a result, a relentless, but strangely rational killer tracks him, leaving a very bloody trail. And a soul-tired old sheriff, a Tommy Lee Jones character played by Tommy Lee Jones, understands what is going on, and tracks the killer. At one point he tells another cop that he thinks the killer is not a lunatic, but a ghost.

The killer vs. hunter plot is the gripping foreground tale. Ultimately, though, the sheriff is the protagonist, and the real story is how he wrestles with his own conscience and principles. I think the keystone scene comes late, when the sheriff is talking to an old lawman, crippled by a villain years before. Tommy Lee Jones says "I thought when I got older, God would somehow come into my life. But He didn't."

I will not say more about what follows. The ending is ambiguous. It is designed to leave open the question of how the main story ends. I believe the Coen Brothers deliberately left open the question of whether God did, does, or will come to the old sheriff -- and whether justice will be done.

I think so.

Students at the Creation Museum

I took my Sociology of American Religion class to the Creation Museum as the final, and fanciest, field trip of the term. The students ranged from incredulous evolutionists to of-course creationists. Most of the students were religious, and most believe that God created the world. They accept old-earth evolutionist views because that is what they have been taught. Even the creation-confident were mostly very skeptical of the museum's view that all of Creation is only 6000 years old.

What struck me the most about their reactions, though, was that most of them had never really thought about how creation and evolution relate to one another. They simply accept both as true, without trying to reconcile them. The stronger Christians were inclined to accept the museum's version of how creation worked, because it is the only elaborated theory they have ever heard. The more secular-minded students were inclined to reject the museum's argument, because they accepted the museum's contention that the only alternative to their view was the materialistic atheism of "human reason."

I think the polarization of this debate has been very bad for critical thinking. When you sit down and think about the possibilities, there are dozens of ways to reconcile creation and evolution, and thousands of middle pathways on any particular empirical mystery between the two extremes.

I think the weakest part of the Creation Museum argument is the idea that the universe must have been created in about 4004 B.C. Most people believe in creation. Most scientists will accept that there are alternative theories about how old the universe is, from very very old to unimaginably old. It is not hard to reconcile creation, even biblical creation, with an old or oldish universe. Without the Procrustean bed of Bishop Ussher's dating scheme, I think most creationists and evolutionists could come to a broad common ground.

Two Words: LOLCAT Bible

This is the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I will give you just a couple of selections.

Genesis 1: 1-3


1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.
5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1


Matthew 1: 18-21

18 Now, teh burth of teh Christ was liek dis: After Marry and Joseph waz all "We's gonna get marrieded, kthnx", but before dey could had hankiez pankiez Mary was all pr3ggerz from Teh Forse.19 Joseph was liek "I has virjn - NOOOO dey be stealin my virjn! Must hied hur".20 But when he was tihnkin, zomg, a WallCat frm Ceiling Cat was liek, "Oh hai! I'm in ur dreemz, givin u messij. Don't be scairdy cat. Take Mary as ur wife - is virjn. But teh Forse is strong in tihs wun, lol! HoverCat is on hur, givn hur feetus, srsly.21 "And she gonna made a son, and you gonna call him Jeezus, cuz he save kittehs frum bein bad kittehs. Kthxbai."

A Religion Joke to End the Term

We finished the Sociology of American Religion in our January term yesterday. Before I begin the grading binge, I thought I would share a joke that I composed for the occasion.

We studied a great range of religion, from Pentecostal gifts of the spirit to high-class liberal Episcopalian such as the retired bishop of Newark. Yes, we ran the gamut from speaking in tongues to antiquing and Spongs.

Gruntled Song of the Year

I know it is early to be making a selection, but there is one out there in enormous national release that will be tough to beat: "Things I Like to Do," by They Might Be Giants.

And why will tens of millions hear this song? Because it is used in a Dunkin' Donuts ad, as the donut peddlers go national as a working stiffs' espresso chain. And the song is perfect for that sensibility.

The ad is here.

A Middle Way, Even With Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden's son wants to mediate between his father and the West. He claims his father wants a truce. Omar bin Laden and his wife are planning a cross-Africa bicycle race to raise money and awareness for kids injured in the religious wars there. This is a good cause. And perhaps young bin Laden, who is 26, is right that a negotiated settlement with Al-Qaida is possible. It seems unlikely, but I honor anyone willing to make the attempt, however quixotic.

On the other hand, Omar does appear to be a bit of a flake. His partner in this desert bicycle race is new wife, an English woman twice his age who is now on her fifth husband. And it is more of a hoot than a sign of serious politics to see an Osama lookalike in dreadlocks a biker jacket.

There was one fascinating insight into bin Laden thinking in this article. Omar told the Associate Press reporter,

"My father is asking for a truce but I don't think there is any government (that) respects him. At the same time they do not respect him, why everywhere in the world, they want to fight him? There is a contradiction."

If Osama bin Laden thinks that forcing all governments (including his own) to fight him means that they must respect him, then I think we have a window into his tangled mind. And, oddly enough, this might make it truly possible that he would also take our willingness of negotiate as a sign of respect. If that is what it takes to get him to stop murdering people, it is worth a try.

Joshua Obama

Barack Obama is Joshua to Martin Luther King's Moses. He is not the only Joshua, and there is not only one promised land. The long exodus is not about the presidency, but about overcoming the great original sin of America: anti-black racism. However the presidential race turns out in 2008, I am glad to live in a time when there is a Joshua like Obama. Not the one I expected -- the product of a Kenya/Kansas hippy union, by way of Occidental, Columbia, Harvard and then Chicago community organizing, and then the U.S. Senate. But he is a good one.

Barack Obama gave a pretty good Joshua speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church for Martin Luther King Day; if every word of that sentence seems deeply meaningful to you, we share the same religion.

Jackson and Cromwell

As a democrat and Presbyterian, I have long tried to admire Oliver Cromwell. I once had an argument with his statue outside the Parliament building, going over his pros and cons. I think he did assist the cause of Reformation of the Church of England. On the other hand, his suppression of Parliament was a setback to the cause of republicanism in Britain for centuries, and his brutal treatment of Catholics is just unpardonable.

As a Democrat and Presbyterian, I have long tried to admire Andrew Jackson. I believe he is mostly a positive figure, and his refounding of the Democratic Party has been a hugely beneficial gift to the nation. On the other hand, his destruction of the Bank set back the national economy for generations, and his brutal treatment of the Indians is just unpardonable.

Still, Jackson's excesses were constrained by the presidency, which he respected and left voluntarily. Cromwell's excesses just grew and grew and were constrained by nothing but death.

So here is one cheer for Andrew Jackson. Cromwell will have to be content with his statue.

Paris Hilton, the New Princess Margaret

Two decades ago Maryln Schwartz published A Southern Belle Primer: Or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma. Like The Official Preppy Handbook, though not quite as informative, the Primer was a decent piece of pop sociology.

Princess Margaret is five years dead, and I imagine most Southern belles have never heard of her. So a slightly updated version of the original has been released: A Southern Belle Primer: Or Why Paris Hilton Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma.

The reason Princess Margaret could not have been a KKG in the early 1960s was that she could be seen (often) walking and smoking at the same time. Belles of that era did smoke, but not while moving. That particular rule has been relaxed quite a bit, and belles are much less likely to smoke now in any case.

Of all of Paris Hilton's many transgressions against bellehood I am not sure which one was thought to keep her out of Kappa Kappa Gamma. The fact that she never finished high school, much less attended college, would surely have made it difficult.

Hindus Beat Buddhists in the Personal Networks of My College Students

In the world there are almost three times as many Hindus as Buddhists. But when I asked my class how many knew Hindus personally and how many knew Buddhists personally, Hindus beat Buddhists about 9 to 1. I think this means professionals who immigrated from India are much more likely to have kids in mid-USA college-track high schools than are Buddhist immigrants.

Does French Fertility Rest on an Overseas Foundation?

European fertility has declined to scary levels -- well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The average fertility in the European Union is 1.52. The one exception has been France, where the fertility level rose to 1.98 last year, surpassing Ireland as the most fertile country in Europe.

However, France, unlike other European countries, includes significant overseas territories in its official population. Among these are French Guiana, an official department (state) of France located on the north coast of South America. I have not been able to find separate fertility figures for French Guiana. I did find, though, that from 1990 to 2000, of all nations with above-replacement fertility rates, only Israel and Suriname had a fertility increase. Suriname is a neighbor and cultural cousin of French Guiana.

My guess is that the fertility rate in continental France is not actually rising. They face the same scenario of population decline that all the other EU nations do.

We're Having a Baby (Boomlet)

The United States had enough of a surge in baby-having last year to reach the magic number of 2.1 babies per woman, the average needed to keep the population steady. No other industrialized nation is near that number and some, especially Japan and Italy with fertility rates of 1.3, are scarily low. Mike Stobbe's Associated Press story reaches first for the "babies are bad" story line -- poor, uneducated people had babies because they couldn't get abortions or didn't have sense enough for birth control, or immigrants come to have babies so their kids can be citizens. If only were were Europeans, the story runs, then we could have better family support -- and fewer kids.

Buried in the story, though, is a happier suggestion: we are having more babies because we want to. We like babies. We are more optimistic and more religious. Mexican women in Mexico have 2.4 children, but when they come here they see a brighter future, and have 3.2. The most religious regions of the country, the South and Midwest, have the highest fertility rates. And "white American women have more children than white European -- even though many nations in Europe have more family-friendly government policies on parental leave and child care."

We are now having the same number of babies per year that we did in the Baby Boom years (about four million annually), despite having more than a million abortions a year.

We have had boomlets before -- we had a couple of years in the early '90s that matched this number of births. If we have the predicted recession, the birth rate will probably go down a bit. Still, NATO demography is a doom and gloom story. Except for us.

It Could Have Said, "Smart Parents Have Kids Young"

Another upside down story from yuppieland. The Washington Post has "Bringing up babies, and defying the norm: some young college grads embrace parenthood as their peers postpone it." The mere striplings interviewed for the story were a dewy 27 and 28 when they had kids, and their husbands were older. The interesting statistics with the story is that about a third of college-graduate moms are under 30, vs. about two-thirds of less-educated moms.

By any world-historical norm, having your first child in your late twenties is about a decade later than average for women, so the lamentations over the youth of these aberrant moms should be muted. Still, they are doing something unusual in their social class, which makes them feel odd. In the world of 40-somethings with toddlers, they felt like kids themselves.

I thought the better response came from Amir and Luma Eftekhari, who had their first child at 29. When they take their kids to tot soccer, the older mothers "sometimes seem envious about the Fairfax County couple's head start on child-rearing."

The Gruntled kids were born when we were 28, 29, and 34. Starting earlier meant we could have more kids than most of my colleagues, who wait longer. We had more energy when they were little. We will be in the prime of our careers when the last tuition is paid and the nest is empty. We should be able to get to know our grandchildren for a long time.

I don't feel the least foolish for being among the first in our group to have kids. I feel as if I bought McDonalds or Microsoft at $10 a share, and now am enjoying the fruits of being ready to take the plunge.

The Electoral Difference Between the Religious Right and the Secular Left

The difference is that the the religious right might not vote, whereas the secular left almost always does. The religious right has another hope for the world besides politics. Before Jimmy Carter in 1976 fundamentalists and evangelicals commonly did not vote, especially at the national level. Jimmy Carter created a wedge between evangelicals, who tended to vote for him, and fundamentalists, who still did not vote. In response, Republican activists created the Moral Majority, and found a fundamentalist minister to be their public face, to create a fundamentalist voting bloc.

But the Christian right, and the broader religious right, is still prone to take elections one at a time. They not only decide who to vote for for religious reasons, they decide whether or not to vote at all based on who is running. In 2004 there were 7 million evangelicals who did not vote, according to evangelical pollster George Barna. I thought at the beginning of this endless election that there would be even more this time. With Giuliani, Romney, and McCain the leaders on the Republican side, and no evangelicals of note of the Democratic side, I could see how the most religious voters might just sit out the 2008 election. When Pat Robertson endorsed Giuliani, it was clear that the old Christian right leadership had been absorbed into normal party politics.

And then came Huckabee. Mike Huckabee won Iowa by mobilizing evangelical voters to actually go to the caucuses. If he can do it twice -- say, in South Carolina, or make a big showing in Michigan, where Robertson Christianized the local GOP in the '80s, those 7 million missing voters might come back and vote after all.

Very Happy Wedding for Mature People

I had the honor of participating in a wedding today of an old friend. After decades, she was reunited with her first love. Everyone has happy, including children from one of the first marriages. Bride and groom were delighted and humorous, which set the tone for everyone.

The groom's brother, who was inadvertent midwife to this union by keeping each informed of the other's life through the years, was the minister who married them. He gave an excellent charge to the couple, including a serious recognition of their maturity in life. He said they came to the union now with a lack of innocence. This was not at all a dig. He noted for all that they knew about life and love and marriage much that young newlyweds do not. This was good food for thought, for me at least.

Oh, and if you are going to have a January wedding, may I commend Texas, where it was 67 degrees and sunny? There is a lovely wedding chapel in Salado.

Birds of a Feather Go Too Far

The British House of Lords has annulled the marriage of a pair of twins, separated at birth, who had married one another -- unaware of their relationship.

This says to me that nature is a strong part of who we are, and who we are attracted to.

Who Will Unite the Country?

A central question for centrists in any political year is, which candidate is most likely to unite the country?

In the New Hampshire primary, MSNBC exit polls report some useful results for this question. Voters were asked, "Regardless of how you voted today, which one of these candidates would be most likely to unite the country if elected president?" Among those who voted in the Democratic primary, 51% thought that Barack Obama would, while only 28% thought Hillary Clinton was a uniter.

Strangely, they did not ask this question of Republican voters.

Hillary Clinton's Tears and the Gender Gap

Like any good political junkies, Mrs. G. and I were glued to New Hampshire election analysis last night. In the empty hours when the talking heads were blithering on, the guys chewed and re-chewed Hillary Clinton's show of emotion the day before. To them, it was a dangerous display of weakness or loss of control. They were dumbfounded, therefore, when at the end of the day (literally) she won, on the strength of independent women voters.

I think Hillary's tears played differently with women than with men. There were only a couple of women among the talking heads, and they said nothing distinctive on this topic. The press interviews with late-deciding Clinton voters this morning, though, told a different story. The women who chose Clinton in the last day before the election said that seeing her womanly side made the difference.

The news story in the Clinton vs. Obama race focused on the gender gap. This is true: among men, the split was Clinton 29%, Obama 40, while among women it was Clinton 46, Obama 34. I know from earlier elections that the gender gap is often really a marriage gap - married people vote one way, and single people another, but since there are more single women, the single vote looks like a women's vote. This is partly true in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. The married women split much more evenly. Married women with children split 42-34 for Clinton, whereas single childless women went 49-31 for Clinton. The gap among married parents exactly matched the final tally (39-36 for Clinton). Still, there is clearly a gender factor favoring Clinton here.

One more notable factor in the New Hampshire primary is that there are many independent voters, and they can vote in either primary. I think that at the last minute, many independent women voted in the Democratic primary to vote for Clinton, and many independent men voted in the Republican primary to vote for McCain.

I am glad that race is not over yet. We will stay tuned.

We'll Always Have Paris - Run!

New York magazine has a fine story about rich parents fearing that their children will end up spoiled. A whole industry has grown up to advise the parents on how best to not support their children too much -- not the problem that most kids have. The main advice of these experts is that rich kids need to be obliged to do real work when they are young, or they will be undone by meaninglessness by their 20s and 30s.

And what is the name and the face of what these rich parents fear the most? Paris Hilton.

Everyone serves some purpose - if only as a bad example.

"Juno" is a Fine Teen Preg Movie

The buzz movie in the pro-marriage circuit for the past six months has been "Juno," which finally opened during Christmas week. I went to see it with my daughter Endub and her friend. They thought it great -- they sang along with the Kimya Dawson soundtrack, repeated the jokes, and liked the title character. At the end they said they both felt "very indie." I am a little too old and was always too bourgeois to be indie, but I did appreciate Juno as a smart kid who did a dumb thing, but then handled it well. What is even rarer in popular fiction these days, her parents handled it well, too. This is a movie with a competent father -- a standout feature all by itself.

The acting is great, the dialogue is artistically heightened in a funny way, and the soundtrack is really good, especially for the target demographic. Most reviewers think it is excellent.

There are critics, of course. I was interested in what they criticized. They thought Juno was too hardened in her view of adult relationships, too mature, wise-cracking, and self-directed for her age. Yet I think a smart girl in her situation would just assume she could not really depend on the permanence of marital love. Juno is 16, and knows from the outset she is not ready to raise a child. Her teen boyfriend isn't either. Her parents are divorced and remarried (Juno's mom is off with her new husband and her "replacement kids.") Her step-mother is very helpful, but is still not her mom. Juno finds a child-hungry yuppie wife and her ambivalent husband to give the baby to. Juno's real crisis does not come from the baby so much as from the fact that none of the relationships is solid. I will not spoil anything to say the movie resolves the crisis sweetly and well.

God on Both Sides of Charlie Wilson's War

"Charlie Wilson's War" is an excellent film. I hope Aaron Sorkin keeps writing great scripts about current politics. He has some grasp of complexity.

One of the key complexities was that evangelical Christians were rallying political support to pay Israelis to arm Muslim fundamentalists to fight communists. Joanne Herring, the Houston socialiate who pushes Congressman Wilson to arm the Afghan mujaheddin does so as a Christian crusader for religious freedom -- that is why she is anti-communist. Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent brokering the deal, urges her to tone down the religion, lest the latent religious contradictions of the whole house of cards be fatally exposed. Mrs. Herring argues that she is persuasive because God is on her side. Avrakotos counters that that works until God is on both sides.

"Charlie Wilson's War" is an ironic film, but it doesn't hit you over the head with it. Politically informed viewers know that those same weapons that we gave the mujaheddin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan later armed the Taliban. The political conclusion of the film -- and this is a political film much more than it is a religious one -- is that our semi-secret proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan was a great war, and was instrumental in ending the Soviet empire and winning the Cold War. But then we allowed Afghanistan to fall to the crazies because we didn't follow through with rebuilding the country when we could have.

The religious point, though, is equally important. Sometimes we need to fight wars to oppose great evils. But when we clothe our wars in God's mantle, we invite our enemies to do the same -- to the great corruption of their faith as well as our own.

Bibliomulas

This may be a "plow/gown" collaboration. The University of Momboy, a mountain school in Venezuela, is sending books to rural kids on mules. Makes me proud to be an academic.

Meritocracy Delivers: The Clintons and the Obamas

Good Things for the New Year 4

There few institutions more intensely meritocratic these days than the Ivy League law schools. The applicant pool of any of those institutions contains perhaps half the people who will be running the country, and the world, a generation later. Those who make it in are awesomely talented. (Full disclosure: I am married to one).

I have found the story of the Clintons' courtship a wonderful tale of knowledge-class romance. Their eyes met in the Yale Law School library. Their first date was a private viewing of the Yale Art Gallery collection, which they earned by picking up the gallery's trash together during a garbage strike. Her Wellesley-graduation-speaker was brought together with his poor-boy/Georgetown/Rhodes-Scholar. A match made in meritocratic heaven.

And now their successors as the great Democratic couple -- and truly possibly as President and First Lady -- are two Harvard Law School graduates. OK, the Obamas did not meet at law school, but rather at a fancy law firm. They nonetheless were winnowed by the sorting machine. His Hawaii-prep-school/Occidental-College/Columbia-University/Harvard-Law-Review was joined to her Princeton (sociology major, by the way)/Harvard Law/Sidley & Austin.

The meritocratic sorting is not confined to Democrats - Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife Jane have an equally impressive dual c.v. Ever since the Ivies started downplaying social credentials and raising the bar on personal achievement in the 1960s, the entire ruling class has been drawn more and more from couples with what David Brooks appreciates as "titanic resumes."

And it is working. To be sure, we will still have powerful people with rough-and-tumble backgrounds, especially in business. And we still have quite a few "gentleman's C" students carried to power by social connections. But the drift of the ruling class, more and more, I think, will be to power couples sorted and brought together by the great American meritocratic schooling machine.

The Primary Finally Begins

Good Things for the New Year 3

To the ten percent of the nation who are concerned with national politics, today is an exciting day: the Iowa caucuses have finally come.

Yes, it is ridiculous that our presidential primaries will probably be effectively decided in February, nine months before the election. Still, I am glad that after a year of overkill campaigning with almost no substance, we will finally start winnowing out the second tier, and the third tier. And maybe Kucinich.

If I had my druthers we would have one national primary on the Fourth of July. Then we could celebrate the end of the primary season with fireworks.

Support Free Elections - No Matter Who Wins

Good Things for the New Year 2

The government of the United States usually accepts the results of free elections elsewhere, even if we don't like who got elected. This is a good thing. The deep centrist wisdom of a pro-democracy policy is that democracy moderates extremists. Even when a majority of the electorate is worked up to back the hot-heads, eventually they will cool down. And then the extremists in office will have to moderate their position in order to get re-elected. Even when anti-democratic extremists get elected democratically, a pro-democracy world pushes them to hold free elections again.

So-called realists are always ready to stop other people's democratic elections if it appears that people we don't like will win. Worse, they are willing to overthrow democratically elected governments to install more pliant juntas. Sometimes there is a short-term advantage to this, to a company if not to the USA as a whole.

But preventing free elections always comes back to bite us. The realists only see the short-run benefits of imposing our regime, and not the long-run damage it does to us as well as to the countries whose democracy we subvert. We overthrew Diem, and lost Vietnam. We overthrew Mossadeq and lost Iran. We overthrew Allende and fed the communists throughout Latin America.

Supporting elections is very centrist and very American. We should support the electoral process of Venezuela, because what brought Hugo Chavez will take him away again. We should support the electoral process of Pakistan, because military dictatorship fuels the Taliban. We should support the electoral process of Iran, because the more elections they have, the more the Islamic Republic will evolve into a real, multiparty, multi-opinion republic.

And as to our own electoral process, I thank the Lord and the Founding Fathers each day for 1/20/09.

The Democrats' Deep Bench

Good Things for the New Year 1

The Gruntleds spent New Year's Eve in the traditional nerdy way: watching CSPAN. The highlight of the evening was a speech by Michelle Obama at a senior citizen center in Iowa. She was just magnificent, and her account of her husband as a smart, decent leader was inspiring. I have had an Obama sticker on the van with the GRUNTL plates since last summer. Michelle Obama would make a great first lady. And Barack Obama, young though he is, would make a fine president of the United States.

Obama is not the only candidate on my van. I put three stickers on at the same time, and they form my favored ticket: John Edwards for president, Barack Obama for vice-president (for now), and Gen. Wesley Clark for Secretary of State. Edwards is at the top because he is most insistent on building a safety net for the poor, which should always be the top domestic priority of a Democrat. I would be happy to have Wes Clark as president -- I voted for him in the primary in 2004.

What is most remarkable to me is that I could crowd my whole van's rear with the names of Democrats I would be happy to vote for. I think Hillary Clinton would make a fine president, even if she maintains the Clinton policy of unnecessary trimming of principle. Bill Richardson is great -- I expect that he will be our vice-presidential nominee, regardless of who is at the top of the ticket. How often do we have a governor of New Mexico with the foreign policy experience to be Secretary of State? Joe Biden is a real statesman. Chris Dodd has turned into a fine legislator. And looking to the future, I am still hopeful about former Virginia governor Mark Warner, who was My Guy in the shadow race a year ago. And Jim Webb, the leading Fightin' Dem elected to the Congress in 2006, will be a force for good.

The Democratic Party [note to faux hicks: that's Democratic Party, not Democrat Party] has the deepest bench. This is good for the Republic, now and in the future.

Worth A Thousand Words

A friend sent me this gem. I am not sure who these folks are, but I wish them a prosperous marriage.

The Gruntled Center will close for Christmas now. See you in the New Year!

Mid-Century Educational Homogamy Squeeze

Robert Mare is the leading quantitative researcher on educational homogamy, the tendency of people with the same level of education to marry one another. His review of five decades of "educational assortative mating" in 1991 found that there was a significant increase in educational homogamy in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s, then the rate went down a bit. He concluded that the key variable is how close graduation and marriage are. People who marry right out of school are much more likely to marry someone with the same amount of education. From 1930 to about 1970, graduation was getting later and marriage was getting earlier, which pushed the educational homogamy rate up. Since 1970, marriage age has been rising again, so educational homogamy has declined.

Educational Homogamy Matters More Than Ever

Hans-Peter Blossfeld and the other authors of Who Marries Whom? draw some general conclusions about educational homogamy today:

Schooling matters more now to your subsequent occupation and income than ever before.

Not having a degree closes you out of the next highest social world (though more so in Europe than in the U.S.).

Age-graded schooling, for long years, means that the marriage market for most people is much more age-bound than it used to be.

Schooling is so intensive that it prevents marriage. Graduation from final schooling (or at least from college) marks you as socially fit to marry.

In an era of dual-earner families, for college-educated women marrying an educational equal may be the best strategy to have both a professional career and motherhood.

If You Want Educational Homogamy, Marry Right After School

The second main finding of Blossfeld and Timm's Who Marries Whom? is that educationally homogamous marriages are most likely in the years after school ends, then tapers off – especially for women. For high school women, there is a rounded spike of marriages to high school men in the late teens/early twenties. For college women there is a sharp spike in marrying college men right after college, then falling off. The college women seem to be catching up on the marriages they postponed because they were in school. For men, the pattern is similar, but not as pronounced.

The longer you wait to marry after graduation, the less likely you are to marry someone with your same level of education.

Half of American Wives Are Educationally Homogamous

Hans-Peter Blossfeld & Andreas Timm edited an interesting volume a few years ago, Who Marries Whom? Educational Systems as Marriage Markets in Modern Societies. Educational homogamy measures what proportion of married people have spouses with the same level of education that they do.

The main finding is that homogamy rates have increased significantly over the 20th century. Women are more educated than they used to be. This evens out the pool at each educational level, makes it less likely that women would marry up (what Blossfeld calls the traditional pattern) and more likely that women would marry down. And the inverse for men.

For the 40-something cohort in the United States, about 27% of the women married up, 21% married down, and 51% married someone with the same school degree.

In the U.S., women have been more equal to men in primary and secondary education, and high school education is predominant, way ahead of Europe. Homogamy rates are lower than in Europe, but still much higher than the predicted value. This seems to be because women are spread across more educational credentials, so the odds of them marrying within any one of them is lower.

End of the Spear

"The End of the Spear" is a movie of the true story of a fierce and suspicious tribe who martyr the first missionaries who come to them, only to be won over to Christ in the end. The heart of the evangelical struggle is convincing the tribe that God does not want them to live by the code of vengeance that is destroying them.

The famous story behind this film is of Nate Saint and four other missionary men making contact with a band of Waodani in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956. The men were speared to death. The rest of the missionaries, including the widows and children of the martyrs, continued to try to reach the Waodani. Eventually they broke through and won them over with Christ's love. Steve Saint, son of Nate, came back as an adult to establish a friendship with his father's killers. Eventually Steve and his family moved back from the United States to live with the Waodani as family. The "end of the spear" is not only how the martyrs died, but ending the way of spearing and vengeance.

The best part of the film for me, though, was not the dramatic reconciliation of the killer and the son who would not avenge his father's death. Rather, it was the moment when the gospel was first conveyed to a member of the tribe, who saw the possibility of a better way of life. A woman, who had fled to the Christians as a child after her family had been slaughtered in intratribal warfare, later became the crucial interpreter between the two groups. One of the men of the tribe, spear in hand, asked her why they should trust the Christians not to kill them in revenge. She said that the creator God of the Waodani had a son who was speared, but he did not spear back, so that the people who speared him could have a better life. As a result, his life is changed, and he helps change the rest of the Waodani to a new way. This, I think, is the main point.

The movie has been panned by most critics for wooden acting, and attacked by some anti-missionaries for obscuring the "real" motive of the missionaries as tools of the rapacious oil company. Audiences, though, have liked it better, and the film has been among the most successful of Christian movies. All of which is beside the point to me.

"The End of the Spear" gets the moment of evangelical contact right, when the gospel changes a life.

Pandora Radio is Great

I have been in my office all morning, catching up on recommendation letters and the like. My labors have been aided by Pandora Radio, part of the wonderfully named Radio Genome Project. You tell them what kind of music you like, and they make a station for you. They find music like that, and you tell them if you want to add the new one or not. That judgment, in turn, generates more connections. This morning I have been listening to Allison Krauss Radio. This is becoming a large collection of my favorite genre, what my wife calls "whiny white chicks." At the moment I am listening to Neko Case.

For physical activity, like cleaning my desk and moving furniture, there is Bruce Springsteen Radio.

And its free.

Pretty nifty.

Marriage Choice is Narrower for the Most Educated

Schooling plays a bigger and bigger role in mate selection. As the most educated people spend longer years in school, and with a more homogeneous pool of people, the most educated couples are likely to get more similar to one another in education, age, and status level.

Something I had not thought about until reading Who Marries Whom, which I will be blogging on for the next few posts, is that the least educated couples will be less similar to one another in education, background, age, and status level, than the most educated couples will. There is more variety at the bottom than at the top of the educational ladder, and more time and social locations to choose in. The biological clock is not ticking so loudly for high school women as it is for professional school women, so they are less likely to marry the person they were dating when they finished school.

Educational homogamy is not uniform throughout the social ladder.

Ingenious Design #487: Pregnant Women's Backs

A new study in Nature shows that women have backs and hips that help them carry the weight of a growing baby without falling over. They have another vertebra that helps them lean back more to balance the growing baby's weight. They have wedge-shaped vertebra in the crucial spot, rather than square ones, to help bear the weight like a keystone. And women's wider hip joints let them bear the torque of walking with a big weight in their abdomens with less strain. Pregnant women are still subject to more back problems than other people, but they would hurt even more, and even more often, if they were built like men. The scientists who did the study report these nifty bones are found in ancient australopithecine women as well as modern women.

However you think people got that way, this is a fine piece of engineering. I myself think this is further evidence of providentially guided evolution, but even if you think people were designed this way from the get-go, or evolved this way by random mutation and natural selection, we end up in the same place: pregnant women are ingeniously configured to walk with babies.

Another Good Reason to Fight the Taliban: They Want the Kids to Freeze

The U.S. military is helping the Afghan government push back the Taliban along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. The two sides trade villages. When the Americans go in, they treat the sick kids with medicine. The Taliban have driven out all but a few doctors, and those are only allowed to treat the Taliban. According to C.J. Chivers' story in the New York Times,

Whenever the military or the government distributed aid,... including blankets, children’s notebooks or winter clothes, the Taliban entered the village, collected the aid and set it on fire.

We have to win the war on the Taliban. Would that the administration had stuck to that necessary war after 9/11, and not spent most of our military substance on an elective war that has bogged down.

Opposing Torture is a Centrist Issue

49 retired generals and admirals are trying to explain why torture is a bad idea, doesn't work enough to be worth it, violates international conventions that serve U.S. interests, and is just un-American. They are surprised that they even have to make this case. The officer corps is traditionally overwhelmingly Republican. So far they have met with the Democratic presidential candidates. The generals and admirals are frustrated that, so far, the Republican candidates won't meet with them. The only Republican candidate who has met with them is Mike Huckabee, the Baptist minister turned politician. Baptist ministers know why torture is bad -- just read Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

Mormons are Fine People, But Not Christians

Mormonism is a practical religion that produces strong families and responsible citizens. They are not polygamists anymore, and have no more tolerance for polygamist Mormon sects than the average American does. They promote hard work, practical help to others, and respect for social institutions. Mormon evangelism is the envy of many other churches, and could offer a lesson or three to the declining Protestant mainline.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has been putting on a charm offensive lately to be accepted as just another Christian Church. The Book of Mormon has been republished with a new subtitle, "Another Testament of Jesus Christ." Mitt Romney gave his big religion speech this week to show that his faith should be just as acceptable in a president as that of any previous president. He even proclaimed his belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God.

But when Mormons say that Jesus is the son of God, they mean something different than when Christians say it. Official Mormon theology teaches that God (and the shadowy Mrs. God) were once human beings who worked their way up to divinity. They believe Jesus was a man who did the same. And so can each of us, if we become Mormons. The Book of Mormon is "another testament of Jesus Christ" in the same way that the Koran is. Both books take the Jesus of the Christian New Testament and re-imagine him as a prophet with a specific exalted task. Exalted, but not divine.

The theological conflict between Mormonism and Christianity doesn't come up much in everyday life because most Mormons don't really know Mormon theology. When Mormon evangelists make a convert, they talk to people about living a new life, strengthening their families now and in the afterlife, and get them quickly to baptism. Then, in the years following, they get around to the theology -- if the convert wants to know.

Now, in fairness, most Christians couldn't get far in explaining Christian theology, either. But their clergy could. And if there were Mormon clergy in every town with a Mormon congregation, then the two kinds of ministers would have to have it out at the local level. However, Mormons don't have clergy. Most believing men are "priests," and can lead the local rituals, but the content of the services come directly from Salt Lake City. You don't have to know theology to be a Mormon priest any more than you have to know Christian theology to be a Baptist deacon. The important thing is not know the talk, but to walk the walk, to live the practical requirements of the religion.

I think Mitt Romney is right that his faith does not disqualify him from being president any more than the previous presidents' faith does. But I don't think it is Christian.

Alternate Version of "Oh, Holy Night"

This one is from my sister, Mrs. Meliorist:

"You know, once you start singing 'long lay the world in sin and pointless whining,' it's hard to stop."

Push Present? Put it in the College Fund

I appreciate the ingenuity of capitalism in turning every event, no matter how intimate or sacred, into an occasion to buy things. But even I find the idea of giving your wife a "push present" as a reward for giving birth to your child, um, repulsive. Evidently, a large number of women would rather get diamonds in the delivery room than, say, a good start on a college fund. My wife says the best "push present" I gave her was the chance to stay with my helpful mother when the kids were born.

Men should, of course, be very appreciative of their wives for bearing their children, and show that appreciation in a hundred ways, especially during and just after your baby's birth. But giving jewelry seems to me a way of letting the market into your nursery in an unwholesome way.

I do appreciate that Mrs. G. pushed our kids out into the world. And I have been pushing them ever since. That is part of our joint project.

Deep Voiced Men Have More Kids

This is a nifty, small study, reported today in the New York Times by Nicholas Bakalar. Researchers at Harvard, McMaster, and Florida State studied a group of 100 Hadza men and women. Fertility researchers like studying the Hadza because they pick their own partners and don't use birth control. The main finding:

After controlling for age, voice pitch was a highly accurate predictor of the number of children a man fathered, and those with deeper voices fathered significantly more. The researchers estimated that voice quality alone could account for 42 percent of the variance in men’s reproductive success. The quality of women’s voices was unrelated to how many children they had.

This research fits with other findings that women are drawn to more masculine men, other things being equal -- taller, stronger, square-jawed, high testosterone, and smelling of more male hormones.

It happens that we were watching "Capote" last night. Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his portrayal of the very gay Truman Capote, including his distinctive, high-pitched voice. Research on "sounding gay" has found suggestive evidence for a "gay voice" among some gay men. Most of this research has focussed on lisping, but one of the features of the gay voice is its higher-pitched, nasal tone -- like Truman Capote's.

Putting these two bodies of research together suggests -- but only suggests -- that how masculine men's voices sound probably correlates with how many children they produce.

[In case you are wondering: low bass, three kids. Not that anecdotes prove anything.]

George Washington, Centrist

The more I see of world leaders, the more I appreciate George Washington. Washington, the permanent Greatest American in my book, understood that power is necessary for a leader. Even more importantly, he understood that giving up power is a great virtue in a leader.

I am reminded of this by Vladimir Putin. It is important for the world that Russia become truly democratic. The fall of the Stalinist Soviet Union -- the worst government ever, in my estimation -- was a great victory for humanity. The idea of free elections in Russia still lifts my spirits. But it appears that Russia is sinking back into strong-man rule. Putin thinks he is indispensable, and he will twist the constitution out of recognition to stay in power. This is sad, and is likely to turn tragic.

Africa is full of independence leaders -- the "George Washingtons of their country" -- who couldn't let go of power. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is currently the worst of this breed, but by no means the last or the only one. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela tried to amend the constitution to make himself president for life. The voters rejected this ploy and, so far, he has said he will accept their verdict.

One of the most George Washington-like figures on the world stage now is King Juan Carlos of Spain. I don't like monarchy, and rarely find myself praising kings, but I like this man. When the fascist dictator Franco died in 1975, he left power to the young king, whom he had tried to groom. Juan Carlos, however, backed the movement to create a democratic constitution for a parliamentary monarchy, which the Spanish voters approved on this day in 1978. In 1981 a group of dissident Spanish colonels seized the parliament and attempted a coup, which they called on the king to ratify. Instead, Juan Carlos gave a national television address condemning the coup and supporting democracy. The coup collapsed that day. Recently, Juan Carlos had to listen to Hugo Chavez rail against a former Spanish prime minister as a fascist. The king had enough of the would-be president-for-life, and suggested that he shut up.

Washington would probably not have told even Hugo Chavez to shut up. He would have fixed him with his steely gaze and firm jaw and ultimately overwhelmed the lesser man with superior self control.

We need more Washingtons, now and always.

Eco-hostile Divorce

A new study by environmental scientists Jianguo Liu and Eunice Yu argues that divorce has bad environmental effects. Divorce means duplication of household consumption and lots of extra travel to see separated family members. They estimate that there are 6 million extra households in the United States due to divorce.

Those are only the extra households created directly by splitting up marriages. Indirectly there are many more extra households from divorced kids who live on their own because they are afraid to marry and risk divorce.

Whada Ya Gonna Do?

We caught up with the conclusion of "The Sopranos" this week. I thought the whole series was a great depiction of the moral universe of consistently vile people. Tony Soprano and the people around him never become better. They sometimes feel some remorse for the terrible things they do. Then they crush it with this dismissal:

"Whada ya gonna do?"
"What can ya do?"

And that closes the matter. Seeing a whole season of the series in one week really brings home how often the characters say this to one another. It is essential to their moral universe that they are creatures of fate. Nothing can be done to make up for their horrible acts, nor to prevent the next one.

The initial hook of the series was that if the mafia boss went to a therapist, the therapist would give the world of decent people an unusual window into the moral view of the underworld. I never thought the shrink plot worked, and it became a minor theme. The mobsters' world was self-explaining. It remained as ugly and selfish at the end as at the beginning. Indeed, in the last season, the psychiatrists have a debate among themselves over whether talk therapy actually helps sociopaths become more effective at conning other people, by helping them fake empathy, feign remorse, and use all the therapeutic excuses for bad action.

The world of the psychiatrists is not nearly as immoral as that of the mafia, but it doesn't come off as a shining moral example, either. Mostly they seem weak and ineffectual.

Television has actually had some real high points in the last decade. The duel between "The Sopranos" and "The West Wing" for the best drama Emmy helped both shows. They also make an excellent contrast of two views of how to use power. Neither is very effective. But Tony Soprano makes clear that Jed Bartlett represents an ethical universe that is infinitely superior -- and worth fighting for.

That said, I thought the famous black-screen/"Don't Stop Believing" ending of the final Sopranos episode was perfect.

Blogging Cosby (5 of 5)

Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's Come on People is a necessary sermon to African Americans promoting black self-help. Their core message, contained in the subtitle, is that it is both possible and necessary for black Americans to change their attitude from victims to victors.

The meatiest chapters reflect the particular interests of the authors. Medical doctor Poussaint goes into detail about the particular health problems of African Americans, most of which are the direct result of lifestyle choices. TV star Cosby makes the case that media portrayals of black people were bad for a long time, got better when Bill Cosby was on TV (from I Spy to The Cosby Show) -- and then got worse. The book is shot through with laments about the self-inflicted wound of gangsta rap. I suspect that a major motivation for writing this book in the first place was when these two grandpas saw children their grandchildren's age singing along with horrible rap songs.

I noted before that Cosby and Poussaint pull their punches on marriage. This is even more notable, and consequential, in the concluding sections of the book. In the chapter on black health, they urge black women to make their "regular sex partners" wear condoms, because there is no telling who else they have been with. Marriage does not even appear in that chapter, and even the presumption of sexual fidelity is not on their radar. And these are the conservative old guys, who lavishly thank their wives in the acknowledgments!

The final chapter, "From Poverty to Prosperity," lists some of the main causes of black poverty in this country. "institutional racism, limited job opportunities, low minimum wage, mental illness, physical disabilities, drug and alcohol abuse, lack of a high school diploma, incarceration, and a criminal record." Their main solution: "education is the key for poor people."

On both points -- the main causes of poverty, and the main solution to the problem -- I have to disagree with Drs. Cosby and Poussaint. I think marriage is the fundamental human institution that helps people work out of poverty -- and makes them have the will to stick to it. As Cosby and Poussaint note in the opening chapter, in 1950, black and white marriage rates were the same. Now, when all of the external structural obstacles to black success are much less powerful than they were in 1950, the low black marriage rate is, I think, the main internal structural obstacle to black success.

Cosby and Poussaint have written a timely and necessary call to African American uplift. But they miss the single most important element of that call.

Navigon Progeny

Navigon is a spiffy new GPS device for your car.

I think they should come out with a smaller, pedestrian version.

Son Navigon.

(Say it out loud).

Blogging Cosby (4 of 5)

"Thank God for the community college!"

Most of Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's Come on People is a familiar sermon. This is not an academic book; there are almost no numbers in it, and little that is new. The main self-help themes of the Booker T. Washington school of black self-help are repeated, updated for the times.

One important updating is their extensive praise for community colleges as a second chance for people who blew off high school (or even elementary school). They talk about the many kinds of vocational training that community colleges offer. Beyond those offerings, Cosby and Poussaint point out the community colleges are a discrete way for those who got socially promoted through high school but can't really read a chance to actually learn the skills they missed. Likewise, students can often "go to college" to get their GED.

Cosby and Poussaint's main message is that black people with no guidance and no goals will lead destructive and self-destructive lives. Community college offers some human guidance and many reachable goals for people who missed all that growing up in stunted families.

Blogging Cosby (3 of 5)

Cosby and Poussaint pull their punches on marriage.

After starting off strong pushing African-American men to step and be good fathers and role models, they wimp out on pushing them to be husbands.

In the crucial chapter on raising children, they let Dr. Xylina Bean, a neonatologist in Compton, CA, do the heavy lifting. She calls "each and every one of you" to be responsible for raising kids. Her list, though, betrays the reality that she doesn't really expect married parents to be the core of the childrearing team, nor does she really expect men to carry half the load. She specifically calls on grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, "play aunts" and "God aunts." Dr. Bean speaks bluntly to young black women to choose their baby daddies carefully. Not their husbands. No mention of husbands.

Cosby and Poussaint open the book with a strong condemnation of the huge decline in black marriages, and the bad consequences this has for kids. Their positive program, though, only calls on everyone to rebuild childrearing. They shy away from the most effective childrearing program: rebuilding marriage.

Blogging Cosby (2 of 5)

On "The Cosby Show," Bill Cosby played Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, a loving and involved, if somewhat bumbling, husband and father. In Come on People, Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint make the fascinating claim that people who don't like Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable "don't like -- or don't know -- their own fathers."

They make this claim in the course of an important opening chapter about the estrangement of most black Americans from their fathers. I agree with them on the main point. I am still chewing on this secondary "Cosby Show" illustration.

I did like and watch the "Cosby Show" when it was on because it showed a happy, functional family. I did not like Cliff Huxtable, though, because he was so often incompetent. The family worked well because Claire Huxtable was wise and all-knowing, and corrected her husband's mistakes with the children. I have noticed the trend that there are almost no competent married fathers on television. It seems as if the current generation of television writers take it as a fixed point of TV writing that father never knows best.

Cosby and Poussaint, who both also worked on the "Cosby Show," are quite right that Cliff Huxtable was very much better than the absent father, or the inconsistent father, or the domineering father, or, worse, the baby daddy that so many families, know -- including most black families. But Dr. Huxtable is still not the wise, firm, demanding-but-responsive father that all fathers should aspire to be.

I can see why Bill Cosby would not cast himself as Father Knows Best. But it is important to bear in mind that the media images that he deplores in Come on People also limit even his best efforts to set a higher standard for family life.

Blogging Cosby (1 of 5)

Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint have published Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors to promote a cultural revolution among black Americans. They haven't just written a book -- they have been going around the country issuing the call, listening to responses, pushing African Americans to stop being victims, stop blaming racism as the cause of all the distinctive problems of black people in this country, and get on with the business of taking responsibility for their own conditions and success. I blogged about this movement when the book first came out as "Cosby is Right Again." One of the innovative ways in which Cosby and Toussaint are promoting their cause is to give a copy of the book to 100 bloggers to write about it. That is what I will be doing all this week.

Cosby and Toussaint are old. They are of the Civil Rights generation that fought for legal equality in the '50s and '60s. They remember when racism in this country was much, much worse than it is now. And when the behavior of black individuals and black families was much better than it is now. The fact that they open the book with is this: in 1950, 5 out of 6 black children were born in a two-parent household. Today that number is less than 2 out of 6.

So where do these two old black men start in making their cultural revolution? By addressing young black men. And their main message to young black men is "claim your children." "You can run the biggest drug cartel in America or win the Super Bowl,"they argue, "but if you haven't claimed your children, you are not a man." No matter how much you may have screwed up your life, no matter how much your other problems or goals may claim your attention, black fathers have to reset their values to this standard: "I am more interested in raising my child than any issue I had before. I am going to behave or get help, but it is about the child."

In his excellent business book, Good to Great, Jim Collins says that one of the bedrock principles of any great organization is a willingness to face the brutal facts. Cosby and Toussaint are willing to face the brutal facts about black families and black actions today. And try to rebuild from there.

The Seventh Seal

The Gruntleds had a wonderfully nerdy Thanksgiving evening. After the guests had left, we settled in to watch Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." Mrs. G. and I had seen it in college, but we wanted to show it to Endub, who had been studying Kierkegaard.

The film is a fantastically made movie. Scene after scene is framed iconically. The serious moral quest of the knight to know God, the counterpoint of his cynical, worldly squire, and the terrible blankness of Death, are worth wresting with. For a Christian, the film is disturbingly ambiguous. The last word seems to go to Death and the squire - that beyond this life there is nothing and unknowing.

When we had seen it through, we did something I have not done before: immediately saw it again with the commentary on - in this case by British film historian Peter Cowie. Cowie brought out a helpful point. Bergman was surprised at the huge impact of "The Seventh Seal." He described it as a little movie that he and some friends made one summer. Bergman himself rejected the faith of his minister father, and became a hedonistic atheist. In the film, the director identified with the squire.

Endub and I agreed, though, that the film has its power because viewers identify with the knight. The knight does sacrifice himself to do a meaningful good act in this life. And the ending does not settle the knight's question about God -- whatever the director might think.

Appropriate Christmas Card

From my brother-in-law.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'll be off enjoying family for a couple of days. I hope you can do the same.

Split Vote on Rethinking Divorce

Christianity Today has an article on evangelicals rethinking divorce. The key issue is whether Jesus rejected divorce for any cause, or whether he rejected the strict "any cause" standard being debated in his day, and instead accepted the more lenient Old Testament grounds. British evangelical scholar David Instone-Brewer argues for the more liberal interpretation, contending that there are invisible quotation marks that would have been understood in Jesus' day.

My interest here is not in the main argument, but the response to it. David van Biema, writing in Time, reports that reader response to the Christianity Today article was initially highly negative, but leveled off at 60% opposed to the more liberal reading, 40% for.

Letters to the editor are never a scientific survey. But this split strikes me as about the likely proportion of traditional and more liberal views on divorce among evangelicals.

Warren Jeffs' Sentence is the Best of a Bad Deal

Warren Jeffs, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, was sentenced to five years for conspiring to rape a minor. His part in the conspiracy was to order a 14-year-old girl in the sect to marry her 19-year-old cousin. Such is the nature of cults that his order, backed by a threat of damnation, was enough to make her do it. She later left the cult and has helped prosecutors make the case.

This is an iffy use of the rape law, as I have argued before. Still, the guy needed to be stopped. In prison he has tried to kill himself. He says he is not worthy of the Mormon priesthood. Perhaps some of the members of the cult who were on the edge of leaving may be freed of their thrall.

The history of extreme oppositional cults, though, suggests that most members will see this sentence as confirmation that the forces of evil, including the government, are conspiring against them.

Perhaps Jeffs himself will have a prison repentance.

The Garcias are Here; Can the Nguyens Be Far Behind?

The Census Bureau has released the most common surnames from the 2000 Census. This brought a wave of stories about the appearance of Hispanic surnames -- Garcia and Rodriguez -- in the top ten for the first time.

I think the Americanization of Spanish names is a great thing -- proof of the great assimilative power of America. And I know that the WASP names that make up the rest of the top ten include the most wonderful mix of ethnic backgrounds. The list would already appear much more diverse if it had not been common for immigrants to Anglicize their names a century ago. My ancestors Sherstinki, for example, chose to become Sherry at Ellis Island. Immigrants these days are less likely to change their family names.

The Hispanic names are only likely to rise on the common name list, given the massive and continuing immigration from Spanish speaking lands. Just outside the top ten are Martinez (12), Hernandez (16), Lopez (22), and Gonzalez (24).

I wondered where the Asian names are on the list. This is trickier, since transliteration means that some Asian names are written in the English way, obscuring which heritage is represented. This is most important on this list for Lee (23), which is both a common English name (Robert E. Lee) and a very common Chinese name, often written Li; in fact, with all its variants, Li/Lee is the most common surname in the world.

The first clearly Asian name on the list is the leading Vietnamese surname, Nguyen (58). The next is the dominant Korean name Kim (110). The Indian Patel (158) and the Vietnamese Tran (189)round out the top 200. Whether these names will ever reach the top ten American surnames depends on the vagaries on immigration. We probably will not have another wave of Vietnamese boat people; we probably will have a steady stream of Indian and Chinese students and high tech workers.

I think the diversification of American surnames is all to the good. Go Melting Pot! E Pluribus Unum!

Only 45% of Kentucky Southern Baptists Say Jesus is the Only Way

A new survey of Southern Baptists in Kentucky found that most are pretty strong in orthodox Christian beliefs, somewhat likely to work through the church, and about even in the likelihood of having actually evangelized recently. Southern Baptists are the largest denomination in the state, making up about a fifth of the population. Louisville is home to Southern Baptist Seminary, traditionally the flagship seminary of the denomination and notably conservative under its current president, Al Mohler. In the broad spectrum of Southern Baptists in the United States (which, despite the name, is a nationwide denomination), Kentucky Baptists are probably in the middle.

So it is particularly interesting that when Kentucky Baptists were asked if a person sincerely seeking God could obtain eternal life through a non-Christian religion, only 45% disagreed. That is, less than half clearly took the official Baptist position that salvation is only possible through Jesus. The article does not make clear how many of the remaining 55% actually embrace the pluralist position, and how many didn't know what they thought. Lifeway Research, which conducted the study, has not yet posted the results.

Still, it is remarkable that this key claim of orthodox Christianity can't muster even half the respondents' assent in a conservative evangelical denomination.

I live among Kentucky Baptists. They are nice people. They are Southern people. They don't want to be mean or make a scene in public. So I take these survey results with a grain of salt. I am confident that most Kentucky Baptists are sure in their own minds that Jesus is the Way. They are also sure that it might seem mean to say so in public.

Burritocrat

OK, this one is mostly an inside joke.

My wife is an education consultant. Her ability to influence events consists of her vast brain and her ability to analyze and re-analyze mind-numbing datasets about education. And write clear statements of what's what. This often disconcerts other outside agitators who are not as good at analyzing what is going on. They think she has an inside track because she is quoted often.

Recently, one of the way-outside education bloggers called her a "bureaucrat." Given that her bureau consists of an iBook and our dining room table, this struck us as funny.

Years ago we got a buffet for the dining room. Our young son couldn't remember "buffet," so he jokingly called it the "burrito." This name stuck.

Mrs. G. is not a bureaucrat. She is a burritocrat.

Married Men and Women Save More Together

The Fawcett Society, a British women's advocacy organization, has just released a study about how men and women differ in how, and how much, they save money.

The main finding is that women save for others, but find it harder to save for themselves. They save for short-term goals more than long-term objectives. Women are more averse to taking on debt. Men, by contrast, are a little more likely than women to save in general, to save for the long term, and to take on debt. The biggest savers are married men. Unmarried men and all women save at about the same average rate: about $200 per month. Married men, by contrast, save about $300 per month.

Putting these facts together, it seems to me that the crucial variable in the savings rate is whether the men and women in question are married, and especially married parents, or not. We would expect that married moms would save the most for others, married fathers would save the most for the long term. Mothers probably have less income to save from than they did before they had kids, but married mothers can rely on their husbands to save more for the whole family.

The Fawcett Society, though, does not want to treat married parents as a unit for savings. Instead, they argue that it is a great advance to treat men and women as separate, regardless of their family situation. They do not want to factor marriage in to household savings decisions because "households change." They argue, correctly I think, that savings needs to be analyzed over the life course, but then assert that "a lifecourse by definition must focus on the individual." Yet in a deep sense this is wrong. Marriage makes two people one flesh, and they make their savings decisions, short-term and long-term, together and on the assumption that they will be working together. Sometimes, as we all know, this assumption turns out not to be true, but this does not mean that most married people do not make it, nor that they should not make it. The Fawcett Society, in an effort to treat "women" equally, distort the life experience of most women, and most men, who marry and save together.

Want to See More Economic Mobility? Put More Rungs in Your Ladder

Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution has released a study of family economic mobility. This is a companion to the study on racial disparities in economic mobility that I wrote about a couple of days ago. Isaacs' main finding in the new study is that two thirds of families have higher income than their parents did, but only half of them have moved up a rung on the income ladder. A rising tide has lifted nearly all boats; some have then risen even higher than average beyond the rising tide.

Isaacs makes an important point -- most people are better off than their parents were, but that is not entirely due to their own efforts. The entire society is richer, so many people are absolutely better off even if they have stayed relatively the same. For example, if you compare a hypothetical family in the exact middle of the income spectrum a generation ago and now, our middle family today will be absolutely richer and have a higher standard of living than the middle family a generation ago, but will still be in the middle of the income spectrum.

Still, there is a bit of statistical mystification here. Isaacs compares quintiles (equal fifths) of the income distribution. 2/3rds of families moved up in income, but only half of them - 1/3rd of all families - moved up enough to change quintiles compared to their parents. This one third is what Isaacs calls true upward mobility. But suppose she had been comparing not quintiles, but deciles? That is, suppose her income ladder had twice as many rungs in it? We can't tell for sure without real data, but it is likely that with twice as many rungs, we would see twice as much mobility (down as well as up). Likewise, I have seen studies by mobility pessimists who use quartiles. Not surprisingly, such studies show less mobility than Isaacs' quintile study does.

The main conclusion that I draw from this is not that "you can make statistics say anything," but that the income distribution is not a very helpful quantity to describe social reality. Only sociologists think of people in quintiles. The real rungs of the social ladder don't match the income distribution very well. It is helpful to know if people have more of less money than they grew up with. But knowing that they have changed quintiles (or quartiles, or deciles, or percentiles) doesn't really tell you if they have changed classes.

Class Beats Race - Hurrah!

The Pew Research Center has released a wonderful study showing a strong convergence among the white, black, and hispanic middle class. For the first time, a majority of African-Americans agree with the rest of the country that the main thing keeping poor blacks down is their own behavior, rather than racism.

Likewise, most black Americans think that the gap between middle class and poor blacks is widening, a view long held by most other Americans. The belief that the class gap is widening within the African-American community is shared by both ends of the black education and income spectrum. The Pew study made headlines with a peculiar version of this point: they asked

Blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse OR Blacks can still be thought of as a single race because they have so much in common.

Most African-American agreed with the peculiar contention that blacks are not one race today.

All races agree that people in the same class are more similar than are people in the same race.

In the long run, this is hopeful in the fight against racism.

"Black Downward Mobility" is Really a Marriage Decline

The Associated Press has a story across the country today by Stephen Ohlemacher with headlines like "Income Gap Between Families Grows." They are reporting on a series of studies by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution on economic mobility. The news hook is that the black/white gap in family income is growing. The scariest finding is that nearly half of black children who grew up in middle class homes have moved down economically compared to the family they grew up in.

The main explanation extracted from the Isaacs studies is that black men's real earnings, on average, declined since the late 1960s, whereas white men's average earnings went up.

When we look inside the report, though, I think the more striking and more explanatory fact is what happened to black married families. In 1969, most black families (58%) were married-with-kids families. By 1998 that had fallen to a mere third. Single-with-kids families, meanwhile, had risen from a fifth of all black families to nearly a third (29%). It is reasonable to assume that most black children in the top two quintiles in 1969 were in married-parent homes. By 1998, as Isaacs notes, most American families needed two incomes to be middle class. Black marriages, and the income advantages that come with them, were declining at exactly the time when they were most needed for the kids to match the middle class lives of their parents.

I think the decline in black men's income is also an effect of the marriage decline. Men work the hardest and the most when they are married fathers. In 1969, two thirds of black men were married; today not even half of black men are married.

To be sure, the white married-with-kids rate has fallen, too. But most white families are still married-with-kids families, and two thirds of white men are still married.

I think the main cause of the black/white gap in income and mobility is the marriage gap.

Presbyterian Terrorists Stand Down

As a Presbyterian I celebrate the proclamation by the (Protestant) Ulster Defense Association that is will stand down its assassination arm, the Ulster Freedom Fighters. While they have not quite disarmed (and neither, in fairness, has their Catholic counterparts, the Irish Republican Army), the UDA said they have put their arms "beyond use."

The largely Presbyterian loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have been an enduring embarrassment and reproach to Calvinists everywhere. The Presbyterian Church in this country has promoted an exchange between Ulster and American Presbyterian colleges and universities that send pairs of Catholic and Protestant Irish students to the U.S., and Americans back to Northern Ireland. Centre College has happily participated in this exchange. We have long tried to help end the intra-Christian Troubles there.

With the Ulster Defense Association declaring that "the war is over," we may finally be ending the worst case of sectarian violence involving Protestants.

Richie Farmer, Orator

Richie Farmer was a famous basketball player at the University of Kentucky. That seems to have been why he was recruited to run for Agriculture Commissioner four years ago. His campaign posters still show a basketball going through a hoop, which is larger on the sign than the office he is running for.

Also, his name is farmer.

He was re-elected this week. In his victory speech, he proclaimed that he won because his message "resignated" across the Commonwealth.

He has a bright future.

Diversity is Bad in the Neighborhood, Part Two (Muslim Britain)

I noted recently Robert Putnam's finding that the more ethnically diverse a neighborhood is, the less social capital it has. He was not too happy to be reporting this.

A new study of British Muslims (by an NYU-led team reporting for a German research institute) has found that Muslims living in integrated neighborhoods had a stronger Muslim identity than Muslims living in segregated Muslim neighborhoods. The team, led by Alberto Bisin, found that Muslim religious and communal identity was stronger where Muslims lived together with non-Muslims.

Muslims have a stronger oppositional identity when faced with the daily contrast of non-Muslims. British Muslims are significantly more religious and fertile than their non-Muslim neighbors. For them, assimilation would mean losing two of the most important things in life. Muslims in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, by contrast, don't feel as threatened by British norms and are less likely to develop an oppositional identity.

The main point, I think, is not that ethnic or religious neighborhood integration is bad or good. Rather, integrated neighborhoods are less likely to have strong neighborhood institutions and identities, even if they do develop stronger ethnic institutions and identities.

A Good Spouse Beats Good Cholesterol

From the Smartmarriages quote page:

A good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at 80. But, surprisingly, low cholesterol levels did not.

George Valliant, MD, Harvard Medical School

The Marriage Gap Doubles the Gender Gap

The gender gap is the tendency of women to favor Democrats. In the 2000 election there was a 22 point gender gap. Less noted at the time was another gap, the marriage gap. This is the tendency of married people to favor Republicans. In the 2000 election the marriage gap was 28 points -- already larger than the gender gap.

A fascinating new study by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has found that the gender gap has declined, while the marriage gap has gone up. In fact, they project that in the 2008 election, the gender gap will be 15 points, but the marriage gap will be 35 points. The main conclusion that GQR draws is that if the Democrats can mobilize unmarried women, they will win hugely. Unmarried women are the backbone of the Democratic electorate, second only to African-Americans as a reliable bloc. In fact, since African-American voters are so much more likely to be unmarried women, there is a big overlap. Unmarried women are to the Democratic vote what white evangelicals are to the Republican vote. And, unlike African-Americans, the unmarried women bloc is as big as the white evangelical bloc, if not bigger.

The problem for Democrats in taking advantage of the huge advantage they have among unmarried women is that unmarried women have been much less likely to vote than married women. Until, GQR argue, now. Now, unmarried women are so mad at the Bush administration and the Republican Party in general that they say they are going to vote in 2008 at much higher rates than in the past. Unmarried women in general favor Democrats over Republicans by almost 50 points, and young unmarried women favor Democrats by nearly 70 points.

Unmarried women, say GQR, are the "Democrats' evangelicals." Now all the Democrats need to do is mobilize them.

Kentucky's Bellwether Election - Today

It is election day in Kentucky, and it appears, in these early hours, that the voters will remove the incumbent Republican governor for incompetence and ethical obtuseness.

I may have to eat these words by the end of the day, but the polls suggest I am on solid ground.

Kentucky elects its governor the year before the country elects its president. It is tempting to see this election as a bellwether of the next one. Sometimes it looks that way. Four years ago, when a Republican evangelical replaced a Democrat with a zipper problem, our race looked like a preview of the presidential race. Of course, Democrats had won for three decades before that, which did not at all presage Democratic presidential victories since Johnson.

Ernie Fletcher came in promising to "clean up the mess in Frankfort." He promptly committed exactly the same mess as his predecessors. And then denied it, on the grounds, I think, that "we are the good guys" and by definition can't do wrong. Then, when it was proven that two dozen of his guys had indeed done wrong -- led, I am sorry to say, by a former Centre College student body president -- Gov. Fletcher pardoned them all.

I thought he lost the election right there, years before it was held.

Then, when forced to admit that they had been guilty after all, he fired them, though they were still pre-emptively pardoned.

I suggested that he make a campaign pledge to pre-pardon his second administration for all their future crimes. He did not take me up on it. It appears not to have helped him anyway.

Antony Flew, Deist

There was a stir in religious circles a few years ago when Antony Flew, a famous British academic atheist, changed his mind about God. The New York Times Magazine today has an article suggesting a semi-senile Flew was led astray by religious scientists.

I read the evidence in Mark Oppenheimer's story a bit differently. As Flew tells the story, Christians who believed in reconciling faith and science befriended Flew more than two decades ago. They brought him to conferences, corresponded with him, and listened to his arguments. And Flew returned the favor, taking seriously the arguments made and the relationships that he was developing.

In the end, years before Flew's current aphasia, he publicly proclaimed several times that he was an Aristotelian deist. He was not a biblical believer, but he did accept the idea that the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence. He was not hostile to more specific scientific supports for a theistic worldview, but as a philosopher he did not claim to be current on the science behind them. Flew's religious audiences accepted that he was not a biblical believer, as they were. That he had changed his mind about atheism for intellectual reasons was the main point.

Flew's story reminds me somewhat of Norma McCorvey's. McCorvey was the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade, who in the early years after the Supreme Court decision became a crusader for abortion rights. However, she found that the evangelical Christian pro-lifers were nice to her and related to her as a person, including sympathizing with the sad conditions in her life that led her to seek the famous abortion of the case. The pro-choicers with whom she worked, on the other hand, were glad to have her as a symbol, but were, she said, personally condescending and uninterested in her as a person. McCorvey was herself born again, and is now a pro-life activist.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer quotes Richard Dawkins, a crusading atheist of our day, on Flew's changed mind. "He once was a great philosopher. It's very sad."