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

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

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

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

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

Burritocrat

OK, this one is mostly an inside joke.

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

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

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

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

Married Men and Women Save More Together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class Beats Race - Hurrah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Black Downward Mobility" is Really a Marriage Decline

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presbyterian Terrorists Stand Down

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

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

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

Richie Farmer, Orator

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

Also, his name is farmer.

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

He has a bright future.

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

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

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

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

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

A Good Spouse Beats Good Cholesterol

From the Smartmarriages quote page:

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

George Valliant, MD, Harvard Medical School

The Marriage Gap Doubles the Gender Gap

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

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

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

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

Kentucky's Bellwether Election - Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antony Flew, Deist

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

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

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

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

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

Halloween Homage

My friend and colleague Phyllis and I were honored by two of our wonderful students, Kerri and Ezra, for Halloween.

Me:




Phyllis:



Kerri and Ezra:

Do "67% Favor Birth Control for Students"? Really?

The Associated Press and Ipsos did a poll of attitudes toward distributing birth control in schools. The headline in many papers, our local one included, was "67% Favor Birth Control for Students." Yet when you look at the actual poll, here is the result to the crucial first question:

Which would you prefer for the public schools in your community?

37% Provide birth control only to those students who have the consent of their parents
30% Provide birth control to all students who want it
30% Not provide birth control to any student

How would you report that? I think the most honest way to present this finding would be to say that there is a bell curve of sorts: 30% are against school birth control, 30% are for school birth control, and 37% are in the middle, favoring schools administering parent-authorized birth control.

I think it is misleading to say simply that two-thirds of American adults favor school birth control. And none of the articles publish this breakdown of the answer -- you have to go to the AP/Ipsos site and look at the detailed results.

There is another finding of this survey, not reported in the AP article, that I think is more interesting:

What do you think is the better way to reduce the number of pregnancies among teenagers?

51% By emphasizing sex education and birth control
46% By emphasizing morality and abstinence

That is, the country is evenly divided on whether sex education should focus on abstinence or on birth control. Moreover, the survey did not ask any more nuanced question, such as should sex education teach both abstinence (the best plan) and birth control (not as good, but better than nothing)?

Coffee in the High School Library? Heck yes! Gosh!

The AP has a fun story on high school libraries opening coffeehouses. Young people today are not in the library habit as previous generations (mine) were. The school gets more kids to come to the library, the business students learn to run a business, and the school makes money. And kids get their morning caffeine.

Some people think that kids getting morning caffeine is a bad idea. That ship has sailed. We have been running the field tests on caffeine for at least 500 years, and the results are pretty good. It is mildly addictive; it does stimulate the brain. Good enough.

The librarian at Hasting High in Houston reported some results on how the coffeehouse affected student use of the library:

Before the coffeehouse opened, "they were running about 6,000 visits per year to the library and checking out about 3,000 books," he said. Now, "we're running about 65,000 visits and checking out about 45,000 books."

Coffee and books go together.

Five-Year Itch + Cohabitation = Seven-Year Itch

A new study from the Max Planck Institute has found that married Europeans are showing a divorce spike after five years, rather than the old seven-year itch. They interpret this as showing that people today get bored with one another faster.

I disagree. The seven-year itch always made sense on sociobiological principles. Seven years after the wedding, many couples will have two kids, and the youngest one is likely to survive childhood. If he is going to leave, or if she has had enough of him, each can imagine that a divorce at that point would not imperil the children's survival. The adults might imagine that they are young enough to remarry, even have more children, if they leave then. They might even think that it would be better for the kids if they didn't remember life with the absent parent.

Most couples today cohabit for a year or two before marriage. They might even have kids in that state. In fact, it is often the pregnancy that pushes the cohabiters to marry in the first place. When we add in cohabiting years, the new five-year itch is pretty much the same as the old seven-year itch. All that has changed is where in the seven years the wedding occurs.

Diversity and the Homogeneous Unit Principle

The downside of diversity, as I noted yesterday, is that it reduces social capital and group trust. People are more likely to invest themselves deeply and give sacrificially to a group with which they share the deepest things in common.

Churches grow best and most explosively when they are based on cells of people who are like one another, who share the deepest levels of culture. Booming megachurches may be made of all kinds on Sunday morning, but they divide into cells of similar kinds on Wednesday night. This is called the homogeneous unit principle. It is the church-growth version of "birds of a feather flock together."

Churches are more like families than they are like workplaces. That is, they are more like primary groups than secondary groups. And the more a church works like a family, the stronger it will be and the more likely it is to grow.

Big denominations can be very diverse. Big congregations can be somewhat diverse. But strong church cells -- the ecclesiola in ecclesia, however constructed -- need to be similar in the most important ways.

Diversity is Bad in the Neighborhood, Good at Work

Robert Putnam, famous for Bowling Alone, has now published a study that shows that neighborhood diversity undermines social capital -- positive civic networks -- in a dozen ways. In a recent Scandinavian Political Studies journal, Putnam, very reluctantly, reports that people living in ethnically diverse communities tend to

distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

At the same time, Michigan political scientist Scott Page reports in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies that people from diverse cultures make good work teams because they approach the same problem in different ways.

These two findings make sense to me. At work, in "secondary groups," we bring to bear only the relevant parts of our cultural background, suppressing the parts that aren't appropriate to that setting. In our families and neighborhoods, on the other hand -- our "primary groups" -- we bring all of our culture to bear on everything. We need to be able to live with and trust the people in our house. Our lives are better if we can live with and trust the people on our street to share our values.

Some people, Putnam included, view his findings with alarm. I do not. I think his study shows that race is a bad proxy for culture, and is getting worse all the time. When people view different race as a sign of different culture, they have reason to be anxious every time someone of a different race appears in their primary group. In a family, we can get to know individuals, and make a more informed jugment about whether this individual relative is or is not like us, regardless of the other social groups they may be part of. In a neighborhood, on the other hand, it is harder to find out what the neighbors are like -- especially if we view each other with suspicion.

The solution, I think, is to realize that race does not tell us much about someone else's values. Really, class is a much better indicator of whether the new family on the block is like us or not, and the outward indicators of class and status are still pretty crude. If we start from the assumption that people who have the money and the desire to move into our neighborhood are going to be like us in their class values, we might face ethnic diversity -- and sheer change in the neighborhood -- with less anxiety.

Cultural diversity is good for the nation as a whole, and good for the secondary groups within it. Cultural diversity needs to give way, though, to shared values at home, or the family won't work very well. Families do absorb new cultural elements, but slowly and for personal reasons. Neighborhoods are the battleground between these two principles.

On the Evangelical Crackup

The New York Times Magazine today has an excellent article by David Kirkpatrick on the disillusionment of evangelical Christians with partisan Republican politics. Many of the old religious right warriors are becoming disenchanted with how little they have gotten for preaching the gospel of tax cuts and the Iraq war.

There are lots of people who do not really understand politics. If you think 9/11 changed everything, you weren't paying attention; worse, you didn't think you were supposed to.

Many evangelicals are serious about the gospel at the individual, moral, person-to-person level, but just don't see how it is relevant to the social, ethical, group-to-group level. For them, politics is an intrusion on normal life, and the objective of their political action is to fix the intrusion so they can get back to their normal, apolitical lives. The religious right became a mass movement when the school prayer decision and the abortion decision intruded on their lives. They wanted a moral majority to put things back the way they were.

The political operatives who invented the Moral Majority, Inc. saw an opportunity. Their agenda was lower taxes, especially on corporations and large estates, less regulation of business, and more military and diplomatic force to promote American business and state interests. School prayer and abortion were not really their issues, but they saw a way to turn temporarily politicized religious people into a useful voting block for their primary interests.

The key point here, I think, is that evangelicals were always going to be a temporary voting block, and they were never going to permanently mobilized by the issues that mattered most to business conservatives. I have seen many a conservative Christian tie themselves in knots trying to explain why the gospel required that were cut business taxes or the "death tax" or build a larger Navy.

When apolitical evangelicals figured out that politics is mostly about material interests and always requires compromise, they would lose interest. Unlike the secular left, the religious right always has the option of giving up on politics because it is too political. Politics is an inherently bad way to preach or enact the gospel. The evangelical crackup is mostly what happens when people who are Christians by conviction and political by necessity figure that out.