America is Doing Population Growth Right

The USA is the standout among industrialized populations. In the 1970s, our birthrate had drifted down to 1.7 kids per woman, as had happened in Europe. Europe kept going down, to the scary lows of 1.3 today. We, on the other hand, went back up. Currently the Total Fertility Rate of the United States is about 2.06 -- not quite replacement, but close.

In addition to having a respectable fertility rate, we do immigration right, as Ben Wattenberg writes in Fewer. We admit about 750,000 legal immigrants per year, and another quarter or half a million illegals. The illegal immigration is not, of course, "doing it right." Fixing that is a problem for another post. But the total number of immigrants we admit -- about a million a year, on a base of 300 million -- is a good number.

Alarmists claim we are being swamped by immigrants, but really we are absorbing the new Americans pretty well. Immigrants and their children make up a fifth of Americans today. In the 1920s, though, first and second generation immigrants made up a third of the U.S. population.

Immigrants have more kids than native-born Americans. Since our current TFR is a little low, this is a good thing. Yet the immigrants are not likely to bury the native-born demographically. Fertility rates fall to the national norm by the third generation. English speaking rises to national norms by the third generation. And intermarriage rates rise about 50% by the third generation for immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

The United States, alone among developed nations, is holding its population steady. It did so when world population was rising alarmingly, and is likely to do so now that world population may start to fall alarmingly.

Poor Country Population Decline

In the 1960s the Total Fertility Rate of the poor countries, the Third World in the terms of the day, was about 6 children per woman. Today, poor country fertility stands at 2.9. China has led the way with an aggressive one-child policy, which has pushed their TFR down to 1.8. India, with less coercion, has gone from about 5 children per woman down to 3, and falling. These are the world population leaders, the "population billionaires" as Ben Wattenberg calls them in Fewer. China and India have worked hardest to get control of their population growth as a matter of urgent national policy.

Yet many other developing nations have also seen their fertility drop dramatically. Brazil and Mexico have TFRs that are probably below the replacement level of 2.1. The rest of Latin America is not far behind. Several of the "-stans" of the former Soviet Union are down to replacement level. Black Africa is the standout in world fertility rates, but even there the TFRs are below their '60s peak. Moreover, because of AIDS and other endemic diseases, African mortality is actually increasing - the Malthusian dark side of population control.

Controlling poor country fertility is the single most important lever in controlling world population. Now that the rich countries are starting to grasp that their populations are likely to start falling, they look to the Third World for their future workers and parents. Yet if poor country populations drop, they will be sending fewer immigrants to the rich countries. Moreover, most poor countries are getting richer, especially the ones with more honest governments. This means that poor people who are willing to move to make a better life are more likely to move within their own country, rather than push on to a job-rich, population-poor country.

First-World Population Collapse

European fertility is down to 1.3 children per woman. That fact alone, if nothing else changes, means the population will be cut in half in two generations.

Fertility is not the only fact that determines population. People could have more babies. For Europe to maintain a stable population, the fertility rate would have to double right now. Think of every family you know. Their European equivalents would need to double their kids as quickly as possible. And the no-kid families - they need at least two right away. If the fertility rate changes by a tenth of a point in a decade that is big news. To double right away? Not gonna happen.

Perhaps many people could immigrate to Europe? Wattenberg, in Fewer, reports that the UN projected that Europe would need to increase its immigration rate 500% (and still up the birth rate a bit) to stay stable. Many European countries are already having riots about the immigrants they have. When the report came out with that helpful suggestion, the European Union told them never to write such a report again.

Things are no better in the Asian Tiger economies that have muscled into First World levels of development. Japan also has a 1.3 fertility rate, or worse, and they disdain immigrants even more than the Europeans do. South Korea is down to about 1.5. Singapore, 1.1. Macao, which is not a First World economy but is working on it, has the lowest Total Fertility Rate in the world: 1.0. One child per woman. For every two people now, only one will succeed them. That way lies social collapse.

The bright light in First World demography is the United States. With a fertility rate above 2 and immigration, legal and illegal, above 1 million per year, our population is likely to hold steady or even grow a bit by mid-century.

More Serious Data for the Polygamy Debate

From Graphjam:
more graph humor and song chart memes

1.85

Ben Wattenberg's Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, begins with a momentous observation. In 2002 the U.N. predicted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of the world would soon drop to 1.85 children per woman. The replacement rate - the average number of children that each woman has to have to keep the population numbers steady - is 2.1.

Wattenberg calls this a Copernican revolution in the history of demography. The entire field of demography has been built on the assumption of growing world population. In the 20th century alone, world population grew from 1 billion to 6 billion. Population alarmists were predicting for the past forty years that world population would reach 11, or 15, or even 20 billion by the end of the 21st century. They usually then predicted a catastrophe.

Instead, the fertility rate has been falling below replacement level in country after country. In all the industrialized world, the rate has fallen to an alarming low level - well below 1.85 in most European countries and Japan. The US, almost alone of rich countries, has a near-replacement level of fertility. Now, the poor countries are getting in the act, too. China, with its brutal one-child policy, is down to 1.7. Mexico and Brazil, two population powerhouses, are probably below replacement. India has cut its TFR in half in the past generation, and will probably go down past replacement, too. And many other countries, large and small, even the quite poor ones, are headed the same way.

If the world TFR is 1.85 for even a generation, it is inevitable that the world population will decline. Wattenberg predicts that after hitting a peak of perhaps 8 billion in mid-century, the population will fall back to 6 billion (the current number) by the end of the 21st century. And it could be much lower.

The last time world population declined was due to the Black Death.

Population in Poor World

One of the most remarkable facts about the past century is that the population of the poor countries went from about one billion to about five billion. We are used to taking for granted that poor countries have a population explosion. The "population bomb" fears have not really been that NATO was getting too big too fast, but that the world was going to be overrun with poor people.

We sometimes forget what an amazingly positive sign this is about the world. There is enough wealth in the modern world that even poor countries can support huge numbers of children, with gigantic increases in their numbers. Sure, many people in those countries are malnourished. In some places they even starve to death, though that is more the result of some government trying to kill them than it is from an absolute shortage of food. The gigantic increase in population in the 20th century, which is without precedent in the history of the world, is a great testimony to the new wealth that modernity has created.

Most of the increase came from better sanitation and medicine for kids. The next step is to get control of how many kids we have, given the new reality that most will survive. This happened in the first world long ago. It is happening in the poor nations now. Livi-Bacci, in The Concise History of World Population, says the single most important variable in regulating births is, not surprisingly, what percentage of women use birth control. In rich countries, about 70% of women in childbearing years use birth control. In Latin America the rate is 57%, in Asia as a whole about 50% do (with huge variations by country). Africa is the continent that has reduced its birth rate the least; not surprisingly, only about 23% of African women practice birth control.

At the beginning of the modern era, and even into the 20th century, the North Atlantic countries were population leaders as well as economic and political powers. In the 21st century, Asia and Africa will be the population leaders, and their economic power will rise. Their political power will probably rise, especially for certain countries. This power and growth is, in part, the fruit of the world miracle of massive population growth.

Big populations do create problems. But people are good things, and lots of them are mostly the source of good things for the world.

The Rationalization of the Life Course

Massimo Livi-Bacci's The Concise History of World Population talks about the "demographic transition" in modern societies, as all studies of population do. In pre-modern societies, most families had many children because quite a few of them would die before reaching adulthood. It was also common for women to die in childbirth, and the fathers to die before their children reached maturity. High fertility made sense in a world of high and uncertain mortality.

Modern societies made huge improvements in diet, sanitation, and, later in medicine. These improvements reduced deaths from infectious diseases, especially for children. As a result, the mortality rate at young ages went down, and life expectancy went up significantly. For a time, societies kept having lots of kids, but fewer of them died young. Thus, the population boomed. After a generation or so, culture caught up with the new facts of life, and people had fewer kids. The transition from high fertility/high mortality to low fertility/low mortality was complete.

All the rich societies made this transition a long time ago. Most poor societies are making this transition now. The massive population explosion of the 20th century is leveling off.

What interested me most about this familiar story was a second point that Livi-Bacci noted. Modern societies don't just live longer, they live more reliably. Modern societies have a more predictable life course. Not only is there a standard path (or several standard paths for different classes), but ordinary people were much more likely to actually live out that standard path.

The bedrock idea of Max Weber's sociology is that modern society has rationalized the world, has taken the disparate, organic, messy ways that people here and there did things and re-ordered them according to a rule. Weber famously connected the rationalization of religious life with the rationalization of economic life. Similar studies have been done about modern political rationalization, and rationalization in other cultural spheres, most notably in science.

What I saw in reading Livi-Bacci is that the modern world also rationalized the life course itself. When parents can expect their children to live, and can expect to live long enough themselves to see their grandchildren, their entire approach to life is changed. Hard work, savings, investment, planning, building up the rest of the social order all make more sense if most people can count on living out a rationalized life course.

And that is the greatest demographic transition of all.

The Living Will Live A Fifth of All the Years Ever Lived

I am working through an excellent book, Massimo Livi-Bacci's A Concise History of World Population. The long history of human populations were governed by natural limits that kept growth slow and exercised formidable checks on rapid deviations from the norm. Since the Industrial Revolution, though, the rules have changed dramatically. The world population is significantly larger than any premodern civilizations could have contemplated. The rate of growth today is enormously faster than any previous era.

One of the measures that Livi-Bacci uses to make this change apparent is this proportion:

There are about 6 billion people alive today. There have been about 82 billion people ever born in the world. That means that 7% of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. However, since people today live much longer than people in the past did, people born since 1950 (most of the people alive today) will live about one fifth of all the years that people have ever lived.

Creative Class vs. Knowledge Class

I am now studying the culture and way of life of the class that makes its living from the control of knowledge. The question arises: what shall we call it?

I have been using "knowledge class." There is a decent pedigree for this term. When scholars started talking about this class they simply called it the "new class." By the '70s they had started calling it the knowledge class. This term carried into the '80s or early '90s. Since then, though, it seems to have fallen into disfavor.

I think the main reason that it fell into a bad odor was that it became a term of abuse used by neo-conservative intellectuals to talk about liberal cultural producers, professors, and technocrats. (This was back when "neo-con" meant former liberals turned social conservatives on domestic policy, not foreign policy imperialists.) The irony of using knowledge class as a term of abuse is that the people hurling the insults were themselves members of the knowledge class.

I have had a Google alert for any use of "knowledge class" for the past half year. Most of what I get are false hits ("my Theory of Knowledge class met on Friday," or "I went to Bible Knowledge class Wednesday night"). The handful of references in the sense I mean have either been backwards-looking references to Peter Berger's work, one use of the term by neo-con columnist Charles Krauthammer (who read the same books I did 20 years ago), or citations of my own blog posts.

On the other hand, the term "creative class" seems to have some currency now. Richard Florida seems to publish a book each year with "creative class" in the title. Others are following the lead of his quite interesting research (including Bill Bishop in The Big Sort, which I wrote about last week). There are others tending the same grove, who have offered similar terms -- The Creatives, for example.

My mother doesn't like "knowledge class" as a term. She thinks it implies that other people have no knowledge. I have tried to make the case that sociologists start from Marx' criteria that a class is defined by its relations to the means of production. This cuts no ice with mom. And for similar reasons, I don't think she will like "creative class," for what it appears to imply about the creativity of those not in that class.

Nonetheless, there really is a class that makes its living from the control of knowledge. There really is a class that creates new stuff. And as our economy turns more and more on knowledge, this class, whatever we call it, grows in importance.

So, for the foreseeable, I will be studying "the creative class."

Twin Cities Tidbits

I am on the road in Minnesota, on my way to collect Gruntled Son from French camp. Spending the day in St. Paul and Minneapolis, I collected these fun small items, and one slightly serious one.

At Macalester College, the vegetarian cooperative dorm, with its own veggie kitchen and dining common, is under the bleachers of the football stadium. The tour guide said that the stadium was thick enough that the sound of the games did not come through. "It is just like a regular dorm," he said, "except the ceiling is slanted."

The funky business district serving the University of Minnesota is called Dinkytown. There is no agreed explanation.

In Dinkytown there was a hair salon called Hair Shaft. This might be a vulgar double entendre. I prefer to think it is a play on the German word for political domination, loved by Weberians, "Herrschaft."

Near the other half of the U of Minnesota campus, on the Minneapolis side of the river, is a coffee house that I commend to you, Mapps, in the middle of a student/Somali neighborhood. The hot tea dispenser is labeled "East African Tea," which is spiced with cardamom.

The one semi-serious observation I made was of how the Macalester tour guide spoke about the chapel. I have been to many small liberal arts colleges like Macalester, almost all of which were founded by churches. There is a significant division, I have noticed, in how tour guides account for this relation. At some schools, the normal guide rap includes explaining the college's specific church relation and how it helps support students' spiritual life. At other schools, the guide apologizes for the church relation and the chapel, and assures prospective students that nothing will be expected of them religiously. Macalester is in the latter category. Now, I think it is perfectly reasonable for colleges to loosen their church ties in order to treat a broader range of student faiths with equal seriousness. Centre has done so, and Swarthmore has gone even further. But this is not the same as treating faith as something the college should hide, merely accommodate, or even apologize for.

I have been to only one college in which the tour guide had no idea that his school had been founded by ministers with a religious mission. He was surprised to learn that the building he was pointing out to us was named for the famous evangelist who put the school on the map. But then, Oberlin has always been unusual ...

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

This is the title of G. K. Chesterton's 1904 novel, which I just listened to on a long car trip. I always enjoy Chesterton's humor. His later work, after his conversion, always makes me want to be a Catholic, at least while I am reading it. This book, pre-conversion, is quite muddled theologically.

The novel is set in the future, when big empires have conquered the world, government is all bureaucratic administration without the bother of elections, and the king is chosen by lot. A whimsical joker is chosen king, and sets about restoring separate governments in all the London boroughs, with romantic medieval pomp. The chosen head of Notting Hill -- which I think is meant to be the most inoffensive and inconsequential suburb -- takes it seriously. Warfare with the bureaucrats and merchants of neighboring boroughs ensues. The patriotism of (very) little nations is pitted against crushing, monotonous, soulless mechanism.

What Chesterton takes up here is the question of nationalism vs. imperialism. The novel was written at the time of the Boer War, in which the British extended their empire by crushing the Afrikaaners in South Africa, a war fought mostly for diamonds and gold. The war was intensely popular in Britain at the time -- this was the war that produced "jingoism" as a term for aggressive patriotism. Chesterton was part of a small group of "Little Englanders" who opposed the war and opposed imperialism. They were not pacifists. I think they could best be described as anti-imperialist nationalists.

I generally think that Chesterton is right until proven otherwise. I think he is not right on theology here, but that is not his main focus. The main point is that human greatness comes from attachment to the actual places and people of our ordinary organic life. We can't go wrong if we defend that from outside attack or assimilation. And we can go very wrong when we impose our ways on other people defending other places.

I am torn about this. On the one hand, imperialism has inevitably led to overreaching and creates, on the whole, more bad than good. On the other hand, I am a cosmopolitan in my daily life, and believe in national greatness. I think that it is possible to make a great nation that is expansive, generous, and exemplary without crossing the line into conquest and oppression. But I am chastened by the paucity of historical examples of great nations that have managed to consistently stay on the right side of the line.

The Big Sort and the Racial Divide

Bill Bishop's The Big Sort is primarily about how geographic segregation affects elections. More Democrats are living in overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods, and more Republicans are living in overwhelmingly Republican neighborhoods.

So how does the Big Sort relate to race? Most Americans would like to live in racially integrated neighborhoods. The fact that most people live in neighborhoods in which one race predominates is partly due to the fact that "racial groups" differ in what they think is the ideal mix, which makes it hard for a neighborhood to stabilize with a proportionate mix. The result is more racial segregation than most people want.

Race, though, is a crude proxy for beliefs, values, and way of life -- the very things, Bishop argues, that people are looking for when they choose a neighborhood. Moreover, race is becoming cruder as a proxy for way of life all the time. We can anticipate that as more people choose where to live based on their way of life, and their way of life is less constrained by their race, neighborhoods should get more mixed by race and less mixed by values.

African-Americans, at this moment in history, overwhelmingly share similar political values. Black Americans vote Democratic more than 90% of the time. That is a higher rate of Democratic voting than registered Democrats show. In this year's presidential election, it is likely that 95% of African-Americans will vote for Barack Obama. Given the high baseline of black Democratic voting, the fact that Obama is himself a child of the African diaspora probably does not add very many more votes than any Democrat would have gotten. What Obama will add, I think, are many people, especially young people, who would not have voted at all.

So how does race interact with the Big Sort? Bishop argues that people tend more and more to vote with their neighborhoods. This is partly due to the fact that they move to neighborhoods of like-minded people. It is also due to the fact that the neighborhood line on a candidate or an issue -- which in most neighborhoods is getting pretty easy to discern -- shapes how undecided voters choose. Thus, if most African-Americans live in overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods, the new voters, reluctant voters, and undecided voters (small though their numbers may be this time) are likely to fall in line with the neighborhood -- just as the Big Sort predicts.

The Big Sort vs. The Big Join

So how does The Big Sort affect marriage?

Bill Bishop, in the book of that name, is dealing with counties as his main unit of analysis, so it is hard to tell directly how marriage is affected by his finding. As a default, he takes couples with children as the unit that he assumes chooses neighborhoods. This is not a bias so much as a simplifying assumption. Since most people do marry and have kids, this is not a bad assumption. It does, though, obscure some important nuances.

In particular, many strongly Democratic neighborhoods are full of single people, while the Republican exurbs are very family-oriented. Other researchers have found that the famous "gender gap" in voting is mostly a marriage gap. Married people are more likely to vote Republican; singles, Democratic. Since there are more single women than single men, this looks like a gender gap.

Indeed, most marrieds have a stage in life when they are living single. At that stage, in the college-going class, anyway, they are more likely to live in an urban area where they worry less about protecting and educating little ones. At a later stage in life, with kids to worry about, they move someplace with more room and less danger. If they changed their voting habits with that move out, that would be a big part of the explanation of The Big Sort.

Which is a good start for the next research project.

So What to Do About the Big Sort?

The conclusion of our discussion with Bill Bishop about The Big Sort yesterday was, naturally, What can be done about it? That is, if Americans are increasingly likely to live politically segregated lives, what should we do with the awareness?

I noted the other day Bishop's finding that the most educated people are the least likely to talk to people who disagree with them. I can certainly confirm this finding from academic life. As those of us around the table considered our various workplaces, some were in overwhelmingly Democratic shops and others in overwhelmingly Republican workplaces, but no one worked in a place with anything like an even mix.

Churches and other religious institutions are not much more likely to be politically balanced. I suspect that the more balanced they are, the less likely people are to talk politics with their co-religionists.

The main point of the book is that neighborhoods are increasingly mono-political.

One point that those of us blessed to live in lovely Danville could make to the big-city dwellers is that cross-party communication is more likely in a small town just because there aren't enough different neighborhoods and institutions to for the different parties to live in all the time.

The larger conclusion we drew was that we should go out of our way to have regular conversations with those with whom we disagree on politics. This will not only help us break out of the echo chamber. Talking to our political counterparts will, I hope and believe, help us to be more civil and gruntled.

How Does the "Big Sort" Sort Catholics?

I have been writing about Bill Bishop's The Big Sort this week. Today our Centre College study group had the pleasure of meeting with Bishop, who was in Kentucky for a book signing.

One of the terms that Bishop uses to talk about the lifestyle divide that helps produce politically segregated neighborhoods is between "public Protestantism" and "private Protestantism." These are based on a distinction Martin Marty made between the way mainline Protestant churches in this country have lived their faith, and the approach taken by evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal churches. In surveys, those who view their faith as the basis for stewardship of the public realm tend to vote Democratic and live near other Democrats. Those who, by contrast, view faith as primarily about personal belief and morals tended to vote and live Republican. The former views don't actually entail liberal theology, and the latter don't entail conservative theology, but the correlations are pretty high.

I wondered how Catholics fared on these measures of public and private Protestantism. Bishop reported that Catholics with conservative theological views and an emphasis of their personal faith and morals tended to vote Republican, while liberal, socially oriented Catholics tended to vote Democratic. This is completely in line with Bishop's other findings.

What is odd is that Catholic social teaching is as traditional, papal, and "mainline" as "public Protestantism" is. Protestantism is more individually oriented than Catholicism is pretty much across the theological board. Bishop's sources were not, I think, refined enough to ask Catholic-specific questions that would let us tease out the nuance of how Catholics who are theologically traditional and publicly oriented vote. That is a good start for the next study.

Failblog

A hilarious captioned-pictures site, from the same universe as LOLCATS.

For example,


see more pwn and owned pictures

The More Educated You Are, the Less Diverse Your Political Conversations

Bill Bishop takes up the question of political segregation in The Big Sort. He reports on the work of Penn political scientist Diana Mutz. She found that only a quarter of Americans say they regularly discuss politics with people who disagree with them. This is more than in some countries, such as Britain, but less than others, notably Israel.

Even more interesting, I think, is Mutz' finding that this average varies quite a bit depending on your social class. The least educated people have the most diverse group of political discussion mates, whereas people with graduate degrees are the least likely to talk politics with people who disagree with them.

I can testify to how easy it is for conversation among academics, the most educated group of people, to turn into a one-position echo chamber. Liberalism is taken to be an IQ test, and the rare conservative is encouraged to be quiet or go elsewhere. For political disagreement I go to the coffee house, which in our town draws a broader range of people than the faculty club contains.

Strict Father vs. Nurturant Parent

Bill Bishop's The Big Sort considers Marc Heatherington and Jonathan Weiler's study of two contrasting views of childrearing as they correlate with political parties. The National Election Survey, a major University of Michigan study that is repeated periodically, asks whether is more important for children to have one positive quality versus another positive quality, such as being considerate or well behaved, or obedient of self-reliant? Heatherington and Weiler made a scale, with respectful, obedient, well-mannered, and well-behaved adding up to one view, while independent, self-reliant, curious, and considerate added up to another. They called the first view "strict father," and the latter, "nurturant parent."

The main finding of Heatherington and Weiler's study is that Republicans tend to be strict fathers, while Democrats tend to be nurturant parents. This is not so surprising now. It is fairly common to see the Republican and Democratic Parties contrasted as the Daddy Party and the Mommy Party.

What is most interesting is that as recently as 1992 there was not a partisan difference between the two views of childrearing. There is a clear difference only in 2000. Now the divide is so large that, at least among white voters, the strict father/nurturant parent contrast is a better predictor of political party than income is.

Going beyond what Heatherington and Weiler, or Bishop, talk about, there is one feature of this finding that bothers me as a sociologist. Society is not simply the individual writ large. Social structures have their own necessities and logic, beyond what any individual might do. Society is not a big family; the state is not really like mom, dad, or both. I don't fault the researchers -- they are describing reality. But I do worry that the normal human propensity to use social power as if it were personal power is growing.

The Big Sort

We are studying an interesting new book from Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Bishop, a reporter from Austin, has been writing about the increasing geographic polarization in America, especially as it shows up in politics. His particular unit of analysis: party votes per county.

One of his big findings is that the proportion of all counties that have lopsided election results - 20% or more - has grown from about a quarter 30 years ago to about half of all counties today. Many states have close elections, but that is because it way-Democratic cities are balanced by the way Republican-suburbs and rural areas.

Moreover, Bishop argues, many counties are becoming so lopsided because people are moving to areas where like-minded people live. There are fewer undecideds, and not much mind-changing. More tomorrow.

Tall-Steeple Pastor

This is the answer to the question, "What do you mean by a tall-steeple pastor?" from the Facebook group, "Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment"

The "senior pastor of a multi-pastor church" is a good rule of thumb definition. Lots of them will be at the Old First Presbyterian of a medium to large city, or a successful First (and possibly only) Presbyterian of a county seat town. They normally are not first-call positions, but one that a pastor works up to. In a well-functioning presbytery they are respected leaders, called to yeoman service on the major committees.

Sociologically they are the successful executives of congregations, and therefore are the natural reservoir of leadership for the higher bodies. In the denomination as a whole, the small group of pastors of very large congregations should provide a good reservoir of leadership for the national church.

Naturally, not every individual in a tall-steeple church will be good leadership material for the larger church. And one consequence of pushing them out of denominational leadership for nearly two generations is that the group of people who end up as a large church pastors may not be good team players anymore -- precisely because they have had to remake the whole presbytery, or even the whole denomination, within their congregation.

If the church routinely honored its tall-steeple pastors, the career path in the whole denomination would gradually fill most of these largest slots with the best denominational leaders, since that would be the normal path to denominational, as well as congregational, service and success.

Hollow Tree Felled! Elves Flee!

We had some unexpected holiday excitement yesterday. One of the trees in front of our house developed an alarming crack that made a ominous popping sounds in every breeze. The city decided they would take it down next week. To our surprise, though, they decided to send the crew out on the Fourth of July to get it down right away. Evidently the storm prediction changed their mind.


So all the Gruntleds pulled up chairs on the front porch and watched the pros do their stuff. And the neighbors all came out. And the dog-walkers stopped by, dogs and all. It really was marvelous to see the ballet of guys with cherry-picker, crane, chipper, and chain saws efficiently take down a 60-foot tree on a narrow street amidst all the wires of modern life.


The hollow space is big enough to put Endub, Gruntled child #2, inside (she took the pictures).

A spokesman for the residents said "It's a sad day for us. But it had to be. Life goes on."

Spend the Fourth of July with John Adams

The Gruntleds have just finished watching "John Adams," the excellent miniseries that ran on HBO, now rentable (thank you, Netflix). Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney do a superb job in the central roles of John and Abigail Adams, and the rest of the cast and script are really fine. I thought David Morse did a particularly good job in the hard role of making George Washington a man and not just an icon.

What I found especially gripping were the debates in Congress about independence. Watching that cranky bunch of localists debate whether it was just to make revolution, and whether it was wise to make this new thing, a republic, brought home to me that the choice of independence was not obvious, and the people who opposed it were not blind reactionaries. As a centrist and an institution builder, I would have been deeply torn about the wisdom of independence and revolutionary war. I suspect that I would have been working for a compromise and reconciliation to the end of June in 1776.

I think the larger picture is that Britain was always destined to bring the American colonies under tighter control just as soon as it was practical. American liberties, from Jamestown to the French and Indian War, were the result of sloth, distraction, and the sheer logistical challenge of governing people across an ocean in the age of sail. There was never a British constituency for the idea of American liberty.

Well, perhaps there was a covert constituency, at that. Burke, as an Irish MP, could sympathize with the idea that one People really did have a right to govern themselves. And I have a suspicion that the Howe brothers, admiral and general, deliberately held off from crushing the American army at its weakest point. Perhaps those free British gentlemen saw the point being made by those other free British gentlemen in Philadelphia 232 years ago.

At the Top of the Academic Heap, Academics Matter a Little Less

This is the seemingly paradoxical finding of Joseph Soares' The Privilege of Power. This study is primarily about Yale, but applies to other universities and colleges at the top of the status hierarchy. A kid with perfect SAT scores is more likely to get turned down at Yale than at a state university or a second tier private college.

There are several reasons for this. First, the SAT is not actually a very good predictor of how well kids will do in the top colleges anymore. The test was never a great predictor -- never as good as high school grades, for example. These days, the Yale pool is so chock full of super test takers, and Yale College is so saturated with grade inflation, that there is not enough variation between the two scores to predict anything. So it makes sense that the top schools use the SAT less.

Second, what the SAT is better at is indicating family wealth. Two thirds of Yale's students still come from rich families, even after the supposed meritocratic revolution. Yale could fill the entire college with rich kids with high SAT scores. Since it wants some diversity in its student body, and since it wants to get all kinds of leaders, not just the rich ones, it makes sense that Yale bumps some high scorers to get lower scorers who bring something else to the table. This includes athletes (who get the most preference) and legacies (alumni relatives).

Third, the top schools have so many more fantastic applicants than they have spaces that they could apply all sorts of selection criteria besides academic achievement, and still end up with an academically stellar class. The admissions dean at my alma mater, Swarthmore, has said that he could pick five first-year classes out of each applicant pool, with no overlap, and each one would make a great class. Yale, in response to this overwhelming demand, has recently announced that it will create a new undergraduate college.

The seeming paradox is that the most "academically selective" schools are actually less likely to select solely on academics than the somewhat less academically selective tier below them. Most of this "paradox" is really just the crudity of the standards and terminology of college rankings. What the top colleges say they are trying to pick are not the best students -- all their students are above a high threshold. What the elite schools say they are trying to pick are future leaders. And future leaders are not all high test scorers.

Why Admitting Women Raised Test Scores

Several men's colleges found that their test scores went up significantly when they admitted women. The readiest explanation is that women are just better students than men. In many respects this is true.

Joseph Soares, in The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges, treats the story of the supposed displacement of the old boys' network by meritocracy at Yale and other elite colleges. I will consider the major conclusion of his work tomorrow. Today I want to lift up an illuminating detail of that process.

Yale has always admitted men of the northeastern Protestant establishment who showed promise of turning into leaders. In the early 20th century increasing numbers of smart, promising men who were not of the northeastern Protestant establishment also wanted in. Most challenging to Yale and the other elite colleges were the Jews, known in Yale euphemism of the '30s as "Brooklyn boys." The Ivies and other elite colleges invented the College Board and its standardized tests as a way of screening all applicants in a common way. At first they expected that the northeastern Protestant rich boys would win on that test, too, as they had on other selection criteria. It soon became clear that non-WASPs, especially Jews, were doing quite well on the standardized tests. It also became clear that the SAT and other standardized tests didn't predict school performance very well, anyway.

Thus, Yale and the other elite colleges scaled back the weight they put on standardized tests in the '50s and '60s. They developed many other measures of leadership potential for the young men they considered for admission. Test scores counted to some extent, but the "character" and "culture" measures, though less quantitative, counted for a great deal.

When Yale decided, in a hurry, in the late '60s to admit women, the men who had always run admissions felt at a loss to know how to weigh the character, culture, and leadership potential of women. So for the pioneering classes of "co-eds," Yale relied almost exclusively on test scores. As a result, 1970, the first full year of women's admission to Yale College, Yale posted its highest average test scores.

The median SAT verbal score for the class admitted
in 1952: 634
in 1970: 699
in 1992: 660

By the end of the '70s Yale had figured out how to weigh women's character, too -- which meant they admitted women with lower average test scores, just as they had always done for men.

Admitting women to Yale -- and probably at other former men's colleges -- temporarily raised standardized test scores significantly because that was all they had to go on. When the rudiments of an old girls' network began to be constructed, Yale women could have lower test scores, "gentlewoman's Cs," and leadership potential. Just like the men.

Gross Happiness 3

Arthur Brooks is an economist, so it is not surprising that the latter half of Gross National Happiness is devoted to the correlation of different economic conditions with happiness.

His main finding is that happiness correlates most with your view of mobility, not with actual inequality.

The United States has a high level of income inequality compared to other industrialized nations. However, how happy people are does not correlate well with what income they have. Instead, the happiest people are the ones who believe that you can change your income if you want to - regardless of what your income is now or of how much it has actually changed. Likewise, the least happy people are the ones who believe that it is hard to change your income - regardless of what your income is now or how much it has actually changed.

Brooks is a free marketeer, though not an all-out libertarian (he is, after all, a practicing Catholic). He thinks that free markets promote mobility, and they promote the belief in mobility. Both of these things -- actual mobility, and the belief in mobility -- add to gross national happiness.

Mrs. G. thinks Brooks should have made a much stronger case for the Catholic social teaching that promotes property ownership for all. I agree, though I think this is more a difference of emphasis in Brooks' argument than of his actually rejecting Catholic social teaching.

The summary number that Brooks gives us is a comparison of two measures of inequality (the Gini coefficient). On a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning everyone is the same and 1 means they are all different, the income inequality measure for the United States is .44, which is fairly high. On the other hand, when we compare how people think about mobility, the difference among Americans is only .18. The gloomy end of the distribution, who think that it is hard to change class position, is a pretty small -- and unhappy - minority.

Gross Happiness 2

I wrote earlier about Arthur Brooks' Gross National Happiness. There I was reporting his headline finding that conservatives are happier than liberals. We read the whole book in our summer study group, so now I can report a bit more fully.

The first part of the book looks at marriage, parenthood, religion, and political ideology as they affect long-term happiness. Here is the summary contrast:

Married, conservative, religious parents who say they are very happy: 52%

Single, liberal, secular, childless people who say they are very happy: 14%

Form of Government is Still The Most Important Issue at the General Assembly

All this week I have been blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The FOG has been somewhat overshadowed in the last few days of the Assembly by the usual sex fights. In the long run, though, the proposed revisions of the Form of Government are a better way to deal with divisive issues, such as sex. The genius of the presbyterian, connectional system is that we trust our own presbyteries to justly discern the essential tenets of the Reformed faith and our constitution. This has always meant that some presbyteries are more liberal, and some presbyteries are more conservative, and most are in the middle. This has always meant that if a minister moved from one presbytery to another, he or she ran the risk of a tough examination and a no vote.

The Peace, Unity, and Purity report adopted at the last GA started the process by restoring the Adopting Act of 1729. The intent of the nFOG is to return the Book of Order to a framework guiding the detail work of presbyteries, rather than a rulebook through which one end of the church punishes another. We can complete the process with Book of Confessions revision to restore one authoritative confessional standard to the church, which would also be a framework for the detail work of the presbyteries.

Now, more than ever, we need to discuss the new Form of Government, modifying it if necessary, and adopt it at the next Assembly. Our current plan of division, dilution, and schism is clearly not working.

My Advice to Conservative Presbyterians: Stay and Compete

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The General Assembly approved three out of four liberal measures on sex. They voted to amend the constitution to drop the "chastity and fidelity" requirement of church officers. They voted to replace the previous "authoritative interpretations" of the constitution that prohibited acknowledged, active homosexuals from being officers of the church. They voted to retranslate one of the confessions so that it no longer condemns "the homosexual perversion." Late last night they stopped short of redefining marriage away from "one man and one woman."

The coalition of conservative groups sent out a very disheartened message. A dozen congregations were dismissed to other denominations last year, mostly to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and there were some harsh words about the EPC at the Assembly. One of the last things that happened at the end of last night's grueling session was a proposal to deal with pastoral kindness with congregations that want to leave the denomination. It passed overwhelmingly. "Good bye and good luck," seems to be the liberal strategy, which is matched by the conservative mood.

I say to conservatives: stay and compete. The vast majority of Presbyterians do themselves believe the essential tenets of the Reformed faith. Almost all the growing congregations in the PC(USA) are conservative. Conservatives are more likely to marry, have kids, and be optimistic about the future. There aren't really many liberals in the church. What we see in the Assembly year after year are majorities of commissioners who personally have a traditional faith, but also believe in tolerating deviants (in both directions from the center). The future is actually pretty bright for traditional Presbyterian faith. It is just the rules that are getting loosened, not so many of the people.

So stay and compete. How people vote with their feet matters the most in the end.

FOG Goes to the Hustings

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

As expected, the General Assembly sent the new Form of Government to the presbyteries for discussion. They fended off several attempts to mess with it, including an anarchic proposal to let everyone suggest their own new FOG.

I have volunteered to my General Presbyter to help organize our presbytery's discussion. I think that a concerted effort should be made to get the ministers and elders most involved in the life of the presbytery to get together at a special meeting to hash it out. I am hoping for food, serious homework, and an outcome.

I urge all readers of this blog in a position to do so to volunteer for similar service. By my estimate, perhaps two dozen people really understand what nFOG says, and I am not counting myself in that number. The only way to get informed enough to have a real opinion is to read the thing and talk it over with other informed, concerned people.

That, I believe, is to build up the denomination from the grass tops.

Belhar: Good Confession, Bad Constitution

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The Theological Issues and Institutions Committee recommended that the Belhar Confession be studied for possible inclusion in the Book of Confessions. The Belhar Confession is one of the great anti-apartheid documents in South Africa. It should be read and studied by Reformed Christians.

But it does not belong in the Book of Confessions.

My concern is not with the specific substance of the confession. It makes as much sense to put Belhar in the compendium of great confessions as it does Barmen. They should be understood and honored.

The Book of Confessions is supposed to be the first part of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It is supposed to be the answer to the question "what do Presbyterians believe?" For ministers and elders, it is supposed to be the legal standard of belief in the church.

Instead, the Book of Confessions has become The Museum of Pretty Words That We Honor Whenever it is Convenient. We don't confess the confessions. We have literally turned them into banners. Their names function as symbols, but their contents are not in any way binding. Indeed, most officers of the church could not even name all the confessions -- go ahead, ask some.

Adding the Belhar Confession to the Book of Confessions will just add to the erosion of the confessions from working rule to wallpaper.

Schism Acceleration Act of 2008 Passes Committee

All this week I will be blogging the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The Church Orders Committee voted to delete the "chastity and fidelity" amendment from the Book of Order.

In its place the committee proposes this new standard:

Those who are called to ordained service in the church, by their assent to the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003), pledge themselves to live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures, and to understand the Scriptures through the instruction of the Confessions. In so doing, they declare their fidelity to the standards of the church. Each governing body charged with examination for ordination and/or installation (G-14.0240 and G-14.0450) establishes the candidate’s sincere efforts to adhere to these standards.

The vote was 41 - 11. Many on the losing conservative side did not return after dinner for the voting.

Liberals have tried to delete the chastity and fidelity standard twice before. One of the liberal proponents of this current deletion attempt, Rev. Sue Fisher, said “One day this will be deleted,if not today then some day and I want to give the Assembly the opportunity to determine if this is the day.”

I have found that many liberals have a sense that history is on their side. At the same time, they are more pessimistic about the future of the church than the conservatives tend to be.

There may come a time when the presbyteries trust one another to judge justly enough, without having to spell out a national standard. That time has clearly not come. I think the only effect of yet another attempt to delete the sexual behavior standard from the constitution will be to drive out more congregations that are sick of having to re-fight this fight.

Heidelberg Revisions

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

Last night the Committee on Theological Issues and Institutions voted 33 - 26 to change the Heidelberg Catechism in our Book of Confessions so that it no longer would condemn "homosexual perversion."

Question 87 now reads:

Q. 87. Can those who do not turn to God from their ungrateful,
impenitent life be saved?
A. Certainly not! Scripture says, “Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake: no fornicator or idolater, none who are guilty either of adultery or of homosexual perversion, no thieves or grabbers or drunkards or slanderers or swindlers, will possess the kingdom of God.”

This translation from German was made in 1962, and was adopted along with many other documents into the Book of Confessions in 1967. It is the only place in the church's constitution in which homosexuality is mentioned. People who want to change the translation (that is, the winning side in last night's committee vote) say it is a bad translation. People who want to leave it the way it is say it is a better representation of the intent of the catechism, and of current church understanding, since it more directly quotes scripture. Specifically, in the King James Version, I Cor. 6: 9-10 reads:

9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

10Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

I don't know enough German to speak to the merits of the translation question.

I can say, though, that the only time I have ever heard this passage discussed is in debates like this one. That is, in all the debates about homosexual orientation, homosexual practice, gay ordination, and same-sex marriage in the Presbyterian Church -- a debate I have followed pretty closely -- I cannot recall anyone saying that their position on this issue was swayed by what the Heidelberg Catechism said. All discussions about Question 87 have been pre-emptive attempts to change/preserve the wording of the current translation in case someone wanted to make something of it later.

And yet, no one does make anything serious of what the Heidelberg Catechism says, or pretty much what anything in the Book of Confessions says. We have made all the confessions merely advisory, and ignore them at will. That is, we do not confess the confessions.

The whole Heidelberg translation issue is not really about changing a serious or effective part of the Presbyterian constitution. It is a symbolic feint in the ideological struggle over normalizing homosexual practice.

What the church really needs is a confession it actually confesses. Then we can have a serious discussion of how, exactly, it is worded.

Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment

On this slow day of the GA, let me introduce my latest contribution to building up the Presbyterian Church. My pamphlet, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, has just been published by the Re-Forming Ministry project of the church. You can download the pamphlet here, or order a hardcopy (with a nice, stained-glass cover) from the same site. There is also a Facebook group to sponsor discussion of the pamphlet here.

In a nutshell, I think that the Presbyterian Church used to have an establishment of leading pastors and elders who we honored and trusted. This was a great asset in times of conflict. The Special Commission of 1925 was such an establishment group. The church turned to them to settle the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s. However, in "the Sixties," we deliberately unmade our establishment in the church, as in society at large, and made structural changes to prevent a new establishment from arising. And now when we need one, we don't have one.

I expect that most of the people most interested in my analysis are tied up with the General Assembly now. I had thought that the discussion of the Presbyterian Establishment idea will begin in earnest after the dust settles from the GA.

I was gratified to see, though, that there are two commissioner's resolutions that seem to promote two structural changes I also support. One would grant presbytery staff advisory vote. This has been referred to committee. Another would phase out the advisory committees. This one was declined. Still, I believe in incremental change, and these proposals seem a step in the right direction.

"Presbyterian 2.0 has been seriously unleashed"

These are the words of Bruce Reyes-Chow, the newly elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He won on the second ballot. He almost won outright on the first ballot, in which he had 48% in a field of four. Bill Teng, the most conservative candidate, showed a respectable second with 36%. (As an aside, it is a great day for a church when the serious race is between a Reyes-Chow and a Teng. Come on, honey-colored nation!)

I do not read this election as primarily liberal vs. conservative, though Reyes-Chow is clearly left of center in the church. What he really is is a full-on Gen-X. And what I really like about Gen-X is that they like to get things done. Boomers tend to talk about "I'll fight for you" or "I'll push for change." Xers just do it. Reyes-Chow is actually building a new church in San Francisco, one of the most secular cities in America, and he is doing it with other under-40s.

He pushes my buttons on a personal level too. He blogs everything. He and his wife have three little kids, who figure prominently in the narrative. He describes himself on his personal blog as "pastor/geek/dad/follower of Christ." He describes his blog as "Just an idiot with a Mac." The disclaimer frees his church, family, pet, imaginary friend, and "Rufus, the thirteenth disciple" from responsibility (the Gruntleds are big "Dogma" fans). My kind of guy.

Several years ago, when some well-meaning but ineffectual Boomer was gassing on about our good intentions in church, I turned to Mrs. G. and asked (quietly), "Can't we just pay the Xers to take over now?"

I believe the General Assembly has answered that question in the affirmative.

GA: Form of Government is the Primary Issue

The proposed new Form of Government (FOG) is the single most important issue before the Presbyterian General Assembly. The idea behind the proposed revision is to make the government section of the Book of Order less of a regulatory manual and more of a constitution made of basic principles. More choice and responsibility would be shifted to the presbyteries and congregations, less set by the church's central bodies. The main motivation, I think, was to keep the General Assembly from becoming a continuous constitutional convention, with each Assembly producing new constitutional amendments.

I applaud the idea behind the new FOG and most of their suggested revisions. However, I am a polity wonk. Few other people are, nor should they be. So it is normal for most commissioners to the Assembly to feel unprepared to decide about a whole new form of government.

It is possible that the committee charged with FOG will feel that they are masters of the situation after a few days of testimony and discussion. It is possible that the Assembly will trust the committee's judgment. But it is not likely.

The more likely outcome is delay for study. This would not be terrible, but it increases the odds that Nothing Will Happen.

One interesting idea on the table is a proposal from Detroit Presbytery to authorize six presbyteries to try out the new FOG for two years and report back to the next GA. This proposal is the brainchild of Ed Koster, the most serious challenger for the Stated Clerk's job. I would favor this over sheer delay.

One of the main reasons for the general ambivalence about the new FOG is sheer distrust of all the central institutions of the denomination. The nFOG Task Force did not, I think, deserve this mistrust, and it isn't really directed at then. Even critics of the proposal have generally praised the task force. The mistrust comes from a fear that if presbyteries and congregations are given more freedom, more local option in applying general church principles, some of them (especially the most liberal) will use this freedom as license to evade the standards of the church's majority.

Some safeguards have been built in to prevent local option on the most contentious issues. The property trust and chastity and fidelity provisions of the current Book of Order were specifically preserved by order of the previous GA. And there is good reason for this mistrust, as the recent PJC decision in the Spahr case demonstrates.

Still, I think the revised Form of Government proposal is a good one. I hope the Assembly gives it the attention it deserves, and that it is not overshadowed by lesser issues.

10 Days of G.A.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) begins on Saturday in San Jose. In our house, though, GA began today. Gruntled Child #2, the wonderful Endub, is a Youth Advisory Delegate, a YAD. YADs represent each of the 175 or so presbyteries. They have pretty big job -- they have voice and vote in committees, and voice in the plenary sessions of the Assembly, where they also give an advisory vote.

I have been on record for some time that YADs are a bad idea, a '70s democratization that should be undone as soon as possible. Nonetheless, I believe that if we are going to have YADs, we should have good ones. Thus, Endub, a well-informed daughter of the church, flew off to California early this morning. The YADs get a few days of intensive training before the Assembly.

I will be blogging on the Assembly each day for the next week and a half. I know this is not everyone's cup of tea, so if you have already had your fill of internal Presbyterian politics, enjoy your summer vacation :-)

Obama's Fathers' Day Sermon

Barack Obama gave a great sermon on Fathers' Day calling fathers to responsibility for their children. He aimed at black fathers especially, for whom this problem is particularly acute. All fathers, though, were the subject of his comments. Some have read this argument, and his calls for personal responsibility along with government programs, as an attempt to appeal to white religious conservatives.

I hope Obama does appeal to religious people, conservative and otherwise, of all races. I believe that the message that fathers should be responsible for their children is not especially conservative. Parental responsibility is about as centrist a message as they come, being a subset of "mom, the flag, and apple pie."

What I would like to see is for Sen. Obama, and others promoting responsible fatherhood, to ground that message in the larger understanding that marriage is the most effective, most natural, happiest, and easiest way for fathers to be responsible for and to their children.

Not Selfish Genes

Bodies are not just instruments for carrying genes around; genes are recipes for making bodies. Bodies are the point. Genes are the tools.

This is the upshot of a fine lecture by Oxford theologian Keith Ward. I have thought something like this as a rebuttal to the "selfish genes" view, but he put it much better. This lecture is available from the Gresham College online service. (For that matter, I highly commend Gresham College, an ancient adult education foundation in London.)

Golf Is Gone

Senator McCain has apparently given up his attempt to prove that he is a country club Republican. Last week his website looked like this:


Now on his website, "Golf Gear" has given way to the more prosaic "Strategy."


(Thanks to Talking Points Memo for the screen capture of the old website.)

Hurrah! Habeas Corpus is Back!

The Supreme Court made a very welcome and long-overdue decision yesterday restoring the most fundamental legal right to all American prisoners. I have felt that the worst scandal of the lawlessness of the past few years has been the way our government has imprisoned people they don't like without charge or trial for years and years. These prisons were deliberately placed where American lawyers could not get, to prevent them from even meeting with their clients or petitioning for a charge. And U.S. citizens were tossed in along with foreigners, with no more protection than Soviet prisoners used to have.

To my mind this is a disgrace worse than our tortures, and that is saying a great deal.

A majority of the court had the legal sense and the courage to make the right call. The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has to have courage to defend habeas corpus is a sorry commentary on how low things have sunk.

Let the healing begin.

Evangelical Centrists

Michael Luo's politics blog The Caucus carried an interesting story about a new group, Matthew 25, working to connect Obama to evangelicals. This is an interesting and, I think, very worthwhile effort. The official Democratic Party tends to be a bit paranoid about doing anything official with evangelicals, so it makes sense to have a semi-independent group making the connections.

What interested me especially in this story was a report from John Green, one of the best quantitative religion-and-politics scholars in the country, on the specific kind of evangelical that the Obama campaign could reach.

Green estimates that of the quarter of Americans who are evangelicals, perhaps 10% are on the left, and about 40% are of the Religious Right that has been tied to the Republican Party for a generation. In the middle, though, are a centrist group making up about half the total. This is a group that has often been politically uninvolved in the past. Now, though, centrist evangelicals have been becoming more active in a new range of social issues, especially AIDS, global warming, and, most importantly, global poverty. These issues are a natural path to Democratic candidates.

Green says the centrist evangelical group is growing.

The Core Business of Social Science

C. Wright Mills, in his classic introduction to sociology, The Sociological Imagination, makes this fascinating aside: The social science movement was born in the mid-19th century to “turn the troubles of lower-class people into issues for middle-class publics” (84).

Social science was invented by middle class reformers as a tool to convince other middle class people of the need for reform. The problems they wanted to reform were not primarily middle class problems, and definitely not upper class problems. The middle class wanted to reform the lower class. The instruments of social science were devised to give a name and a number to these problems, and to give reformers tools to fix them.

Each of the social sciences had developed more general theories, general tools, and some capacity to examine other classes and facts that are just facts without being problems.

The bread and butter of the social sciences, especially sociology, though, remains finding middle-class solutions to poor-peoples' problems.

Upper-Middle-Brow Television Show

Fareed Zakaria is a pretty smart guy. His new show, "Global Public Square" on CNN, brings together a pretty smart bunch of people who know about the rest of the world. In the second half, he interviews someone who makes things happen in the rest of the world. This is very encouraging. On the first show he interview Tony Blair. Today, on the second, he had Henry Kissenger. The panel this week consisted of CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, former Israeli deputy prime minister Natan Sharansky, and a Muslim woman working in Canada whose name I missed (help here would be welcome).

I have argued before that TV is a middle-brow medium at best. This show pushes the bar up a bit. I predict that it will have only a tiny American audience, even among political junkies. Nonetheless, if CNN can stick with it, I think they will be performing a public service.

Hillary's Checkers Speech

Hillary Clinton gave the gracious, positive, upbuilding endorsement speech today that was needed to help heal the Democratic Party.

This speech, like Nixon's "Checkers" speech, will also save her place as a valued leader in the future of the party and the government.

Whatever Obama and Clinton talked about at Senator Feinstein's house, it worked.

Kumbaya.

Let's build.

McCain, Clinton, Obama: Three Forms of Authority

Laurie Fendrich, a Hofstra art professor, has blogged for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the three main presidential candidates of the moment representing Max Weber's three forms of legitimate authority. As a sociologist, I am obliged to work Max Weber into all conversations, and am glad for this opening.

Weber argued that for most of human history, the main form of legitimate authority in society has been tradition -- that is, the fact that "our ancestors did it" and "we have always done it this way" was the best reason to act one way rather than another. He noted, though, that the main achievement of the political economy of modern societies was to develop a quite different theory of legitimate authority, the rational/legal. Society was supposed to act upon laws that applied to all, which were created by a rational process of elections and executed by a rationally administered bureaucracy. The other kind of authority is the wild card of the charismatic leader. Weber thought a charismatic leader, or prophet, was the main way traditional societies changed; Weber also thought that the periodic appearance of a charismatic leader could save modern rational societies from stultifying into an iron cage of bureaucracy.

Fendrich, and her colleague sociologist Mark Landis, saw the three candidates as representing the three types of authority:
McCain represent tradition;
Clinton represents rational bureaucracy;
Obama represents charisma.

The impending McCain/Obama race will represent a straight competition between tradition and charisma.

I think there is something to this idea. Obama is clearly charismatic, and McCain is clearly the most past-oriented of the three. And Clinton's strength has, more or less, been in her mastery of the machinery of government execution.

Still, Weber himself argued that the United States was born a rational/legal country, without an established traditional authority. All serious American politicians are vying to lead a rational, bureaucratic legal machinery. This is the foundation of the great stability of American government.

That said, I can see the value in seeing the upcoming election as a contest between two rational, legal, bureaucracy-respecting Senators. One wants to lead by continuing the (recent) traditions of his party; the other by transcending the recent divisions of the parties by using his personal charisma to inspire others to act in untraditional ways.

French Annul Fake Virgin's Marriage, Then Regret It.

A French judge annulled a marriage because the bride lied about being a virgin. The annulment happened two months ago. When the story recently came out in a legal journal, the French Justice Minister shrugged it off. No big deal. This is to be expected if marriage is just a private contract. One party lies in a contract, the court can abrogate the agreement.

And then the details came out. The bride and groom are Muslims. The wedding reception was still going on in the immigrant neighborhood when the groom came back downstairs to announce that the bride had not bloodied the sheets.

The hue and cry has been enormous. The Justice Minister, herself the daughter of North African immigrants, was forced to reverse her initial reaction and appeal the annulment.

The French, like many Western Europeans, want marriage to be a private choice if the couple uses secular and middle class standards of who can be involved, of what sexes, for how long, perhaps how many to include. On the other hand, they want marriage to be publicly regulated if the couple uses religious or working class standards of what makes a proper marriage.

Marriage became a public institution when the church and the state regulated and celebrated the couple's vow to one another, their children, their community, and, for the vast majority of people on earth, to God. Marriage became a public institution to protect the vulnerable -- usually the woman, often the poor, always the children. It is a great civilizational step forward that marriage is a public institution. Society rediscovers this when the state is asked to back a private marriage contract that undermines that protection.

President Obama Will Make Black Republicans Possible

In 1964, E. Digby Baltzell saw that

Kennedy’s victory in 1960 will, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable Catholic leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment. (The Protestant Establishment, p. 315)

Baltzell saw that once the caste exclusions of Catholics were broken, they would be free to sort into their natural class affiliations. Richer people, other things equal, tend to become Republicans. Events have proven Baltzell right, and today Catholics tend to sort along class lines when they vote. There is no "Catholic vote."

Today there is a "black vote." African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. In fact, African Americans are more reliable Democratic voters than registered Democrats are. The vast majority of black elected officials are Democrats. Rich African Americans - including billionaire Oprah Winfrey - are strong Democrats.

I believe that the 2008 presidential election will resemble the 1960 election in many ways. Many people have drawn the parallel between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, not least the members of the Kennedy family. I think the election will be a squeaker either way, and I am not predicting an Obama victory.

I think the parallel can be drawn in the way Baltzell suggests:
An Obama victory in 2008 would, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable black leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment.

Baltzell's Vision of the Ethnically Mixed Establishment

E. Digby Baltzell, in The Protestant Establishment (1964), gives this rare personal clue to the origin of his vision of an aristocratic establishment:

In fact, I visualized the possibility of an ethnically mixed establishment, which underlies the theory of American leadership developed in this book, during my own experiences in the ward rooms and officers clubs of the South Pacific. At any rate, the American ideal of equality of opportunity in a hierarchically organized social structure had never been so nearly realized as in the selection of reserve officers who led our armed forces during the Second World War. (301)

He goes on to say that he thinks John F. Kennedy forged an ethnically mixed "best and the brightest" administration out of his experiences in the war, as well as his life in Boston. He was an outsider as an Irish Catholic, but he was also an aristocratic insider as a rich man's son, a famous mayor's grandson, a Choate and Harvard man. The New Frontier does not seem so daringly mixed to us today -- they look like privileged white men. But at the time the pulling together on terms of equality by Northern WASPs, Southern Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from all corners of Europe was a great achievement.

It falls to today's rising generation to make the honey-colored establishment drawn from all races and corners of the earth a reality.

What Presbyterian Bishops Do

Presbyterians do not, of course, have bishops. We are very decidedly non-episcopal. The presbytery is an ingenious republican arrangement to accomplish most of the functions of a bishop, without the authoritarian dangers.

However, there are a few things that bishops do, when they are functioning well, that presbyteries cannot accomplish. A good bishop knows the people in the diocese and has a personal relationship with at least the leaders of the congregations. The presbytery is not well-designed for the person-to-person actions of bishops.

A presbytery, as a republican organization, always needs to be finding the right person for the next job. This is especially important in getting the right mix of pastors and elders to staff the crucial committees and oversee the vital ministries of the presbytery. What a presbytery needs is someone in a position to have a wide range of contacts over the several congregations of the body.

The Presbyterian bishop needs to be chief talent-spotter.

Since the presbytery needs someone to accomplish this function, we keep growing some kind of talent spotting system. This is often jury-rigged and haphazard, depending on the personal contacts of the chair of the nominating committee as much as anything else.

I believe presbyteries should be smaller and more organically connected than they now are. This would go a long way to bringing the people doing the calling in touch with the people who should be called.

At the same time, I think a modest Executive Presbyter role is a useful one to the presbytery. Small presbyteries may not be able to afford full time executives. In that case, I think right-sized presbyteries trump the need for a dedicated executive. Even a small presbytery, though, should be able to afford part of someone's time -- perhaps the pastor of a smaller church, or a mostly retired person, or someone with a well-employed spouse -- to be the connector.

Perhaps what we need is not a Presbytery Executive, but a Presbytery Maven. Or Presbytery Magpie.

Stomp, Girl! Stomp!

Another delightful anecdote from my sister about my niece, now six:

She was given a box of 4,500 wildflower seeds by a friend, which we planted this weekend. After putting them on the ground, the instructions said to walk on the seeds to push them into the earth, over an area of about 100 square feet.

An hour later, she's still tip-toeing through the tulips (so to speak) because a) she has tiny feet and b) she believes she, I don't know, needs to sneak up on the seeds by walking very slowly and silently.

Stomp, Girl! Stomp!

The Ministry Can Adapt to Returning Moms Better Than Other Professions Can

All working mothers juggle work and family. For professionals the problem is usually worse. Professionals normally work longer hours than wage-workers or most white-collar workers. Professions that directly provide service to clients can be particularly demanding, both in expecting long hours and in being available to clients at odd hours. Many moms trained for professions are not practicing at all at any given moment. Some drop out and never come back. One study found that only 7% of mothers aged 25-49 with children under the age of 18 work more than 49 hours per week outside of the home. 50+ hours per week is normal for professionals.

Moms in ministry face the same kinds of challenges that other professional-career mothers do. In some respects, ministry is worse, because most women pastors work alone or with very few colleagues, so it is difficult to share the load when family duties make unexpected demands. On the other hand, pastors have more control of their hours than most professionals do, so in principle their jobs could be more flexible about motherhood.

More than any other profession, the ministry has gotten used to the idea of second-career pastors. Seminaries and hiring committees are used to seeing middle-aged adults, often married and with kids, starting their careers, even just starting their professional schooling. This poses some problems for churches, and especially for seminaries. Still, they have learned to cope, and to see some advantages of fully mature grown-ups entering the profession.

I see a further opportunity in the fact that the ministry is used to gray-headed beginners: the pastorate should be an easier career for mothers with older children to return to after a child-rearing break.

If we are ever to really adapt the professions to motherhood, we have to institutionalize easier off-ramps and on-ramps. The ministry has already developed the late on-ramps for late-bloomers. Now we can explicitly incorporate these same late-start career structures to minister moms, so that they, and their families, can have a saner life.

Are Aesthetes the Same as Other Members of the Knowledge Class?

Is taste a kind of knowledge like other kinds of knowledge? More exactly, are people who make their living from their taste members of the knowledge class, as people who make their living from more cognitive kinds of knowledge are members of the knowledge class?

George W. Bush, Flower of the Upper Class - Sort of

I have been working through E. Digby Baltzell's substantial body of work on the sociology of America's upper class. His great books were published 30 to 50 years ago, using material from earlier eras. Some have said that the old WASP upper class was done in by the Sixties. In many ways this is true -- the monied elite was already very ethnically diverse when Baltzell was writing, and since then the happy process of intermarriage and assimilation of new money into old money has moved the upper class far from the WASP bastion it was in, say, 1940. And a good thing, too.

As I read about the old WASP upper class, I have been thinking about who their contemporary remainders are. Which brings us naturally to George W. Bush.

George Bush the younger has the WASPiest pedigree of any prominent political figure today. Andover and Yale. Skull and Bones. His dad was Andover and Yale, and Skull and Bones. His grandfather was St. George's and Yale, and Skull and Bones. Did I mention that that sequence is also President, President, Senator? But there is plenty more. His grandfather was a founding partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. The Walker Cup golf trophy is named for his great-grandfather, from whom George gets his "W." His mom, daughter of the McCalls and Redbook publisher, of President Franklin Pierce's family, product of a northern country day school and a southern boarding school, dropped out of Smith to marry her naval aviator. And his brothers. And his kids. On and on.

And yet ...

Baltzell makes the point that the old WASP upper class was primarily a business aristocracy. The Bushes do keep coming back to business -- banking, then oil. George W. has a Harvard MBA, though that degree was regarded as a comedown by the old business elite. His administration has certainly been business friendly, and largely hands-off about everything else (we may debate the business significance of the Iraq war).

Still, in important ways George W. Bush resisted the Old Money prep school curriculum. George H. W. Bush so exemplified the WASP ideal - sports at Andover, volunteer naval pilot in the war, Bonesman at Yale, business entrepreneur, Congress, CIA, Republican Party, Episcopal Church, loyal Vice-President, President - that a former staffer, Richard Brookhiser, wrote The Way of the WASP: How it Made America, and How it Can Save It, So to Speak about the 41st president.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, did the whole Old Money curriculum, but grudgingly. Where the father was a baseball star at Andover, the son was "stickball commissioner." Where his father volunteered for military service and was shot down, the son used his pull to avoid overseas service, and skipped half of his U.S. obligations. The father was Yale all the way. The son was a reluctant student in college -- the football players used him as the standard of whether a course was easy -- and had to be talked into Skull and Bones. He was an indifferent businessman, a reluctant politician, a "Bushican" more than a Republican, a Methodist.

On the other hand, George W. Bush is a real Texan in a way that his father never was. He clearly likes working on the ranch more than affairs of state. His greatest success outside of politics was as cheerleader and frontman for the Texas Rangers baseball team. I think history will judge him a greater success as Governor of Texas than as President of the United States.

I think I understand President Bush's famous smirk. It means "you can make me go through the motions of this role, but you can't change me inside." I expect he had that look the first day he had to leave Texas for boarding school, and he will have it until he can leave the White House and go back, at long last, to Texas.

Is the Upper Class the One Class-for-Itself?

Marx spent his life trying to get the working class to see itself as a real social group with a common destiny. In his terms, they were a class-in-itself, an objective social unit. They were hampered from acting together to advance their common interest, though, because they were divided by a dozen other identities. The workers of the world were not united because they didn't have a class consciousness. The working class was a class-in-itself, but not a class-for-itself.

Peter Laslett was a great British demographer who wrote The World We Have Lost, the definitive quantitative study of late medieval society. There he argued that in late medieval and early modern society, the aristocracy -- that infinitesimal slice of the top of the social structure -- was the only group in society with a class consciousness. Everyone else lived in such a tiny social world that their consciousness only extended to the limits of people they knew personally. He went so far as to call the world we have lost a "one-class" society, since no one else but the aristocrats were a class-for-themselves.

I mention all this because E. Digby Baltzell, whose work I wrote about yesterday, makes an interestingly parallel argument. In Philadelphia Gentleman, he notes that the community studies that were so prominent in mid-20th century sociology -- especially Middletown, the Yankee City studies, and the Elmtown studies -- erred in seeing each class as a class-for-itself. Such studies found that people knew which side of the tracks you were from, and never let you really cross them. Ambitious young people from the lower classes often left town to advance.

The error, Baltzell says, is that these studies took small cities as representative of national class cultures as a whole. Muncie, IN (Middletown), Newburyport, MA (Yankee City), and New Haven, CT (Elmtown) did have a ruling class whose members knew one another and were tied to one another in a dozen ways. The same was true, more of less, of the several classes below the top in these small cities. In a big city like Philadelphia, though, the upper class likewise knew one another and were connected in a dozen ways. But the several fractions of the middle class, and the many fractions of the working class, and the endless fragments of the poor were not unified, not tied together by many interwoven social ties. This was why ambitious rising men and women of the small cities moved to the big city - no one knew which side of the tracks they came from, or really cared.

In Philadelphia, only the upper class could be a class-for-itself.

Knowledge Class Social Register

This month I am working my way through the writings of one of my favorite sociologists, E. Digby Baltzell. In all of his work, Baltzell argued that a nation is best led when its elite of individuals is molded into a socially responsible "establishment" by a well-functioning upper class of families.

In his first book, Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class, Baltzell explores the overlap between the elite and the upper class. To find the elite of the day he turned to Who's Who. To find the upper class, he turned to The Social Register. A crucial question for him is how much overlap there is between the two - that is, what proportion of the elite who run things now come from the intermarried descendants of elites who ran things before. The answer in 1940, the critical year of his book is about 25%.

My concern is with the knowledge class, the class of people who make their living from control of the knowledge necessary to run the social system. Many knowledge class people are in the elite, and thus in Who's Who. This got me to wondering, though: could there be a Social Register for the knowledge class?

There are two obstacles to making a knowledge class social register. One is that there just isn't much of a market for it. The descendants of various monied families make social institutions that bring them together, help them intermarry, and form a social class with a real organic unity. Thus the value of a social register, sometimes called "the stud book" for the upper class. In the knowledge class, though, there is not the same call to keep "old books" families together in the way that there is for "old money" families.

The second is that the knowledge class does not expect that it can produce a distinctive class and way of life by "breeding" (in the sense of nurture), the way the settled upper class does. Most knowledge class individuals rise through a meritocracy that selects an elite. They do not expect that their families will remain in the knowledge elite over generations.

I think this last point is an empirical question well worth pursuing. And if, in fact, significant portions of the knowledge class do keep turning up in the elite generation after generation, then perhaps there could be a market for a Knowledge Class Social Register.

"Well" in the Black Church

I was reading Jonathan Rieder's very interesting account of Martin Luther King's different kinds of rhetoric, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me. One nice feature of the book is that when he quotes portions of King's recorded sermons, Rieder includes the responses and interjections from the congregation. Rieder comments on several of these, including one I had not paid attention to before: "Well." Rieder notes that this word can carry many meanings, depending on its inflection, from "well said" to "it it is well with my soul" to "well, what do you mean?"

This morning I was listening to a recording of Tony Campolo's sermon for Bill Clinton's second inauguration. Much of his sermon turned on the rich expressive style of his black church which Campolo, who is white, was explaining to a predominantly white audience. He, too, talked about the importance of "Well" as a key congregational response to his preaching. He added a nuance that Rieder had not explored: that it is the women who say "well."

I don't know if Campolo was just making a rhetorical flourish, of if he was reporting a general sociological fact. Informed comment would be most welcome.

Marry Our Daughter - SALE!

A friend showed me a wonderful, terrible prank site, MarryOurDaughter.com. On it teenage girls are offered for sale by their parents for brideprices ranging from a few thousand dollars to just under $100,000. The higher priced ones seem to be blondes who want to be good Christian wives and mothers. The cheap ones "wrestle with unchristian urges."

The thing is probably meant as a dig at Christians as well as "inconsistent marriage laws" (this according to Snopes.com).

Nonetheless, as an artifact of relative values, or what are thought to be relative values, it is pretty intriguing.