Lutheran Soda Conspiracy

In response to my previous post about the soda vs. pop/Coke map for soft drink terminology, faithful reader rbush offered this analysis of the mysterious soda pockets:

The St. Louis question mystifies me, so I've been mulling it over. Personally, I was raised in the pop half of Kentucky, but I now attend graduate school in St. Louis and am soon to be married to a St. Louisan.

I don't agree with ibn centre's hypothesis that St. Louis "soda" usage is dictated by the transient student/young professional population. Most of us are confined to St. Louis proper, and the map shows a pretty large circle of "soda" emanating out from St. Louis. Furthermore, for every "soda" person who moves here, I'm sure there's a "pop" or "coke" user such as myself.

So the question I've been pondering is...what does St. Louis have in common with Milwaukee (another soda bubble) that it doesn't have in common with other German areas such as Cincinnati? My answer (and yes, this is a stretch), is the Lutheran Church.

Two of the US's largest Lutheran populations reside in these two areas. In fact, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (2nd largest Lutheran denom in the US) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (3rd largest Lutheran denom in the US) are based squarely in these two soda circles. The other Midwestern German populations are either more heavily Catholic (Cincy) or far more transient and diverse (Chi-town).

Anyway, that's my incredibly far-fetched theory.... the Lutheran Soda Conspiracy.

I have been thinking about this ingenious hypothesis. If does run into some trouble with the fact that the whole upper Midwest is Lutheran, but not soda-speakers. This map from the Glenmary Research Center shows the Lutheran distribution. So I offer this possible refinement: the soda bubbles emanate from German Lutherans.

I hope you will treat this with all the seriousness that it deserves.

End the Marriage Penalty for the Poorest

David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, and Sam Brownback, Senator from Kansas, have a fine editorial this week in the Wall Street Journal. They note that the government has reduced the marriage penalty - the higher taxes paid by married people for filing together - for the higher classes. Now, they argue, it is time to end the marriage penalty for those on welfare.

Marriage, even if it joins very modest incomes, costs people on welfare up to a fifth of their income and benefits. This leads some on welfare to conclude that they would be better off not marrying. Yet marriage is the most likely route to lead poor women, men, and especially children out of poverty. Any policy that discourages parents from marrying is bad; discouraging marriage among the people it would help the most is tragic.

Religious Liberty vs. Religious Toleration

I have been reading John Pottenger's Reaping the Whirlwind: Liberal Democracy and the Religious Axis this week. Pottenger believes that modernity has produced a new "axis" which is reorienting the whole world. He calls this "the religious axis," which seems to me an odd name for a cultural foundation that restricts religion so much. I would call it "the modern axis." Whatever you call it, though, the idea is interesting.

Pottenger says these three factors form an interlocking foundation of modern cultures:

1) The world should be understood through rational and empirical examination;
2) Individuals should develop personal ethics, as through conscience;
3) Society should not simply grant religious toleration to non-favored religions, but religious liberty to all.

In this book the third point is the one he works the most with. He is argues that liberal democracy must fight against its tendency to institutionalize the majority faith. It would be easy to elevate the faith of the majority, and only tolerate the other faiths. It is particularly tempting to enshrine the founding faith of a society as the permanent basis of its culture, no matter what changes later in the composition of the population or the culture of the world.

What liberal democracies must do, he argues, is establish religious liberty for all, not just religious toleration. This is an interesting idea, and certainly has many consequences for politics. He considers Christian Reconstructionism, old-time Mormonism, and Uzbekistan's embrace of Islamic nationalism as all bad moves away from religious liberty toward mere toleration.

I think Pottenger makes some important mistakes. In particular, he does not credit the difference between changing the culture by religiously converting individuals, and changing the state by religiously changing the laws. He is right in criticizing the Christian Reconstructionism of Rousas Rushdoony as trying to do the latter. He is wrong in treating garden-variety evangelicals, who do aim at individual conversion within a secular state, as doing the same thing as the Reconstructionists.

Nonetheless, I think Pottenger does a service to the religion and politics discourse by making a clear distinction between religious liberty and religious toleration.

Is Happiness the Measure of Parenthood?

Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard "Professor Happiness" presented research at a conference in Sydney on Happiness and Its Causes. He reported that marriage makes people happier, which I have often noted here. He also reported some detailed research on the relationship between having kids and happiness.

Parents are happiest when they are anticipating having kids, and after the kids are grown. Parents are least happy, in general, when they have adolescents at home.

One of the useful warnings I can give students in my family class is that they need to have a strong marriage before they have children so that they can weather the "parental crisis" that coping with a baby brings. It does not surprise me that self-reported happiness for married couples goes down with the birth of children, and troughs in the adolescent years.

I think Gilbert errs, though, in how to weigh the whole cycle of parental happiness. He thinks expectant parents overestimate how happy children will make them. Reality sets in when actual demanding children take up your time. Then empty nesters overvalue how much happiness they got from parenting in order to retroactively justify the investment.

I think happiness is the wrong metric here. When we ask parents what is the most worthwhile or meaningful thing they have done in their lives, raising children consistently rates at the top. I think people rate happiness on a more self-oriented scale. Not necessarily selfish; but measured against how it makes me feel now. Meaningfulness, on the other hand, is measured against a broader standard. We are often willing to sacrifice short-term feelings of happiness for long-term value, good, meaning.

The same surveys that ask "Do you feel Very Happy, Somewhat Happy, or Not Too Happy" should add another question. They should ask something like "Do you think your life is Very Meaningful, Somewhat Meaningful, or Not Too Meaningful."

On that scale, I think parents would give higher ratings.

Talkative Toddlers Aren't Terrible

A student mentioned an experiment by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn in which young children were taught Baby Sign, a simplified version of sign language for children who have not learned to speak yet. The children learned to speak much faster than the control group. In passing, the student mentioned that the Baby Sign kids did not have "terrible twos" because they did not have the same frustration in communicating that other toddlers did.

Which gave me an insight about why the Gruntled kids did not go through terrible twos. The Gruntleds, you may not be surprised to learn, are a very talkative family. "Hypervocative" is the term we use at home. The children were talked to constantly and with a fairly grownup vocabulary from birth. The kids, given their mixture of nature and nurture, were perhaps over-determined to be big talkers and amusing conversationalists while still in diapers. Thus, if terrible twos are caused by an inability to communicate, talkative toddlers should skip it.

It is certainly worth a try.

A Soda Guy Living on the Pop/Coke Line

One of the most persistent differences in regional terminology is what we call soft drinks. I am a native of eastern Pennsylvania, which is deep in "soda" country. Central Kentucky, though, is where the midwestern "pop" meets the southern "Coke" (as a generic name).

The map is amazing.

I am particularly curious about the St. Louis Soda Circle. Any ideas?

On the Spahr Decision

I wrote a post on the Spahr decision in the Presbyterian Church courts a few days ago. I was saving it for posting today, since I usually write about religion on Sundays.

Now I know that saved posts get published as if they came out when they were drafted, not when I hit "Publish Post."

The entry,"Orwellian Decision in the Spahr Case Further Erodes Trust in the Church, is here.

Winkled Center

I am delighted to report that from now on I will be the Van Winkle Professor of Sociology. I promised the dean I would not become deadwood.

My mother pronounced it a Ripping development.

My beloved little sister, by contrast wrote: *snort* you said "winkle."

The dictionary says a winkle is any one of various marine spiral gastropods, especially, in the United States, either of two species of Fulgar (F. canaliculata and F. carica).

"To winkle out" is to get the truth out of someone without waterboarding (more or less).

Mr.Winkle.com claims he is the Cutest Dog in the Universe!

The most famous Van Winkle is a fictional character.

The most famous real Van Winkle is, alas, Vanilla Ice.

We have only begun to explore the comic possibilities of this title.
Suggestions welcome.

Cohabitation as Broken Window

James Q. Wilson is most famous for his "broken windows" theory of crime. He argues that communities should aggressively combat small quality-of-life crimes, such as broken windows and graffiti, to prevent larger ones. The theory is that if a neighborhood is visibly neglected, the criminals move in. The nest is unprotected, and the larger predators figure they can get away with anything. When a community lets the small disorders of broken windows multiply without resistance, the big disorders -- robbery, rape, murder - grow, too.

In my family life class we ended with another fine James Q. Wilson book, The Marriage Problem. He argues that the breakdown of marriage is at the root of the rest of our social disorders. One of the most widespread ways of undermining marriage is cohabitation. Many people cohabit before marriage, and some cohabit instead of marriage. Most college graduates -- always the most strategic group in adult social trends -- cohabit before marriage. They think it is a rational way to test the relationship before the big commitment.

Research over the past decade, though, has shown that cohabitation is not a good test drive for marriage. On the contrary, couples who cohabit before marriage have a higher divorce rate than couples who do not live together first. College graduates, being a smart and better informed group, have begun to change their habits as this research gets diffused more widely.

Putting these two ideas together yields an interesting insight: cohabitation is like broken windows in the neighborhood of relationships. A community that tolerates cohabitation indicates that its social neighborhood is unprotected. Marriage becomes just another personal choice, not the bedrock of social order. When a community lets the small disorders of cohabitation multiply without resistance, the big disorders -- divorce, illegitimacy, domestic violence - grow, too.

Losing Status Makes Our Brains Anxious

Caroline Zink and her team at the National Institutes of Mental Health have produced a nifty study of which brain regions get active when our place in a status hierarchy is threatened.

The subjects were given a simple test (note when a circle changes color in a particular way). They then did the task against competitors. When the subjects' position against the competitors did not change, they focused on doing the task better to move up. When the subjects' position did change, sometimes falling below the competitors' positions, the subjects' emotional centers fired up, too. Fear of losing position seemed to generate anxiety, even in as trivial a hierarchy as this one.

What is more, the competitors were actually imaginary, and their rank relative to the subject was manipulated by the researchers.

Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals (Religious Reason)

Arthur C. Brooks has been guest blogging on the Freakonomics blog about his new book, Gross National Happiness. The main point of the series is that conservatives are happier than liberals. Thus far, he has broken this down by religion. Religious people are more likely to be conservative, and religious people are much more likely to be happy. Half of religious conservatives are very happy, vs. less than a quarter of secular liberals. The other two cells of the table fall in between.

He has hinted that marriage is another big factor in conservatives' greater happiness. More on that hereafter.

Orwellian Decision in the Spahr Case Further Erodes Trust in the Church

Rev. Jane Spahr, self-styled lesbian evangelist, has been trying to get convicted by the church for marry same-sex couples for a decade. She even went to Canada to perform a gay wedding. But her cases kept getting thrown out on technicalities. It's tough to be a martyr and prophet when the judges keep dodging judgment.

It seemed, though, that she finally got her test case. She married a couple of women in California, and then for good measure married another couple of women. Her presbytery began a disciplinary case. The presbytery permanent judicial commission said she could do whatever her conscience called her to do. The case was appealed to the synod permanent judicial commission. The synod said that the presbytery PJC was wrong, Spahr had clearly violated church law and her vows to uphold church law. The synod PJC mildly rebuked her.

The inevitable appeal sent the case to the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the high court of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In the meantime, Spahr retired -- this was to be her last hurrah.

The GAPJC issued its decision this week. It is a marvel of doublespeak. The PJC ruled that since the church's constitution defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, no matter how many weddings Spahr performed for same-sex couples, and no matter how many times she called them marriages, they could not, by definition, actually be marriages under church law. Therefore, Spahr committed no violation.

Suppose you brought your baby to your pastor to be baptized. Before the church and all the world, your pastor splashed your infant with water from the font and pronounced "I baptize thee in the name of Moloch, Baal, and Asherah." The dumbfounded church brings disciplinary charges against the minister. Then, in the end, the GAPJC rules that your pastor committed no error in baptizing your baby, because baptism as defined in church law is done in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Case tidily closed? No.

It is this kind of doublespeak and disingenuous handling of the church's standards that has gutted church law and undermined trust and confidence in the church's leaders among ordinary Presbyterians. I would guess that this disheartening decision will push ten more alienated congregations to leave the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

YAWNS

There is a nifty new pop-soc term: Young And Wealthy, but Normal. YAWNS are Gen X and older Millennial men and women who work hard, are doing very well, and want to give back now. So they live simply, are charitable and green, and are basically decent people.

The term comes from the London Sunday Telegraph -- historically the conservative paper there -- noticing the trend among Britons. There is plenty of evidence of the phenomenon throughout the world's rich, including many in this country.

The Associated Press article, by Evelyn Nieves, cites Stanford sociologist David Grusky's view that an anti-materialist movement often follows a materialist one. One can see the Reagan era "I got mines" provoking a reaction today of "I give back."

I see the YAWN phenomenon as the private sector counterpart of the interesting Millenial finding I reported a few weeks ago that the most desirable employers for the high school class of 2006 were Google, Disney, the State Department, the FBI, and the CIA. To aging Boomers, these were the Enemy of their youth. To Millenials, though, they are agencies of building up the world.

YAWNS and future earnest Staties are both hopeful signs about the young generation of adults.

The "End of History" as a Means, Not an End

We have been considering Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in our theory class. Students get that Fukuyama, and Hegel before him, do not mean that we could ever come to the end of the succession of events. But they do think that the long search of human History for the best way to organize society can come to an end. Fukuyama even believes that it has.

Fukuyama's argument is that capitalism and liberal democracy are the best way to organize the political economy of society. We have tried all the other options, and found the one that works best, compared to the practical alternatives. Societies that have achieved stable capitalist democracies can seek their fulfillment in post-historical existence. Societies that have not achieved stable democratic capitalism are still mired in history. Where they should try to get, though, is now clear.

What struck me about this argument is like something I noticed about Marx. For all Marx' opposition to bourgeois liberalism, his tantalizing view of the end and aim of life is really the same as theirs: individuals can do what they choose to do. Marx does not have a higher conception of what realizing our species-being would mean.

In the same way, Fukuyama, another kind of Hegelian, identifies democracy and capitalism as the best ways of organizing society without having any vision of what the aim or end of human existence is beyond the End of History. Democracy and capitalism are both technologies for sorting our competing individual desires. Neither leads to the good life as such, only a life with less conflict and fewer transaction costs. To be sure, capitalism promises greater wealth for society, and if democracy reduces bloodshed that is a very great improvement over the alternatives.

Still, the End of History would not give any clue about the telos or meaning of human existence. Hegel could answer that question, at least in an abstract way. The Westminster catechism famously answers the question, What is the chief end of man? with To praise God and enjoy Him forever.

The End of History is, in the end, vacuous about the Ends of History.

"I Love the World" - Great Gruntled Song

The Discovery Channel has a wonderful news song.

Boom-di-yadda!

Rev. Wright Gets the Main Point Wrong

Rev. Jeremiah Wright continued to explain himself this week at the National Press Club. He gave a learned address on the prophetic ministry of the black church. He then answered questions about the controversial sound bites that have been looped in the press. His answers were, I think, plausible explanations of what he was and still is arguing.

When he quoted others saying that America's "chickens had come home to roost" on September 11, he meant that the U.S. government had committed terrorist acts around the world and on its citizens over its long history, and now terrorist acts were in turn committed on the United States.

When he said that the AIDS virus might be have been created by the U.S. government and might have been used on American citizens, he cited the Tuskegee syphilis experiments as precedent.

And when he said that God damns America, he meant that God condemns the government of the United States for its past unrepented-of bad actions, including slavery.

Each of these points one could hear from leftist pulpits, pundits, and press any week of the year. Jeremiah Wright is an old '60s university radical, and like many others of his generation he sees the current administration and today's political culture as not fundamentally different from what that generation railed against 40 years ago.

I don't agree with Rev. Wright. Senator Obama does not agree with Rev. Wright. Senator Obama has said so. That story should die now.

There is one important point that we should not let go. Rev. Wright's premise in his remarks to the National Press Club is that the criticism of his views was not an attack on Jeremiah Wright, nor was it an attack on Barack Obama. Wright maintains that the criticism of his views is really an attack on the black church.

That is just wrong. No one would be interested in the views of an old lefty if he were not pastor to a potential president. We can know this is true because we do not see obsessive coverage of all the other old lefties, even old prophetic black church radicals, who say the same sorts of things that Rev. Wright does.

The black church is not under attack. And the black church is not identical with leftist critiques of the U.S. government. By making this claim, Jeremiah Wright is claiming to be much bigger than he really is. He got his 15 minutes because he is pastor to a potential president. Wright could have poured oil on the waters. Instead, he made the controversy a fight about himself. As a result, Senator Obama had to denounce some of the more extreme views of his former pastor.

Let it go.

Do Women Who Baby Their Husbands Want Babies?

A light advice piece in CNN.com's Living section shows women nurturing their husbands too much, to the point of treating them as babies. The experts they cite note that while this can work for some couples, it is generally a bad idea as it makes the men helpless and incompetent, or resentful. Or both.

What surprised me about this account is that they did not indicate whether these couples had children. A wife who babies her husband (or dog, or the neighbor's kid) would seem to me to be sending signals that she is very ready for children. If she continued to baby her husband while also babying her baby, then I would worry.

Polygamist Sect Knocks Up the Girls, Dumps the Boys

The Texas Child Protective Services Department, which has charge of the hundreds of children taken in a raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist sect, said that 60% of the girls under 18 were either pregnant or had already had children.

Even more ominously, CPS does not know what the sect did with most of the teenage boys. While there are equivalent numbers of boys and girls under 13 - 196 and 197, respectively - the ratio of teenagers is very skewed. There are 53 girls aged 14 to 17, but only 17 boys.

It is typical in polygamist sects that many young men are expelled, so the older men can marry all the girls.

The coming weeks will no doubt bring bad stories of teenage boys born at the Yearning for Zion ranch living on the streets in Fort Worth - or worse.

Television News is an Oxymoron

Elizabeth Edwards had a fine editorial in the New York Times, "Bowling 1, Health Care 0," about the paucity of substance in the television news coverage of the presidential campaign. I agree with her entirely. I think, though, that she is a little off the mark in blaming the television journalists for this. I blame television as a medium.

Television is a good medium for showing pictures. It is best at fires, explosions, earthquake damage, and shooting. Most news is not well conveyed in pictures. The news is best conveyed in words about non-visual events. The best news show on television is Jim Lehrer talking to a few informed reporters and news makers, slowly and carefully. It is very boring television -- unless you want to find out what is going on.

Cable television does a bit better than the networks, because they can talk a long time. Most of the time they just have reporters spouting their opinions. But Chris Matthews can have a broader range of reporters than a network show can, and can take more time with newsmakers. The cable shows also keep reporting numbers whenever they have them, which is useful.

Really, though, even for numbers we are better off with print sources. As for analysis of complex propositions -- such as the competing health care proposals that Elizabeth Edwards wrote about -- only text sources will do.

I will go a little further. I think that television as a medium can only reach up to the upper-middle brow. Usually, of course, it aims much lower, where it dominates. Even public television confines itself to the limits of middle-brow convention, lest it offending its funders.

For my money, the most intellectual television network is C-SPAN. They put on powerful people talking, or smart people talking, and very occasionally a smart powerful person, talking. Their book show is the best because their host is the best informed and least self-promoting. Their coverage of events is the best because they do not insert themselves at all, aside from selecting the event. I wish C-SPAN covered every real event that I want to see. Wouldn't it be great to have C-SPAN cover the Olympics? No nationalism, no chauvinism, no human interest fluff, and they would show all the events, not just the ones the U.S. can win.

The most important television news show is "The Daily Show," which says volumes about how much real news television can convey.

Rev. Wright Defends Himself, Mostly Successfully

Rev. Jeremiah Wright was interviewed by Bill Moyers for the first time since the sound bites of his old sermons have been making news.

Wright noted, justly, that you can't understand any preacher's point from just a few seconds out of the middle of a sermon. The larger context of the "chickens coming home to roost" sermon after 9/11, for example, was not quoting Malcolm X, but rather a white ambassador who was quoting Malcolm X (and on Fox News, of all places, to Fox's discomfort). He was explaining that to the hijackers, the United States had engaged in a long string of violent acts against innocents -- a string that Wright enumerated. Some items on his list were more just than others. Wright got the biggest reaction from the congregation when he cited enslaving Africans, and the least when he named bombing Hiroshima. He did not say that the 9/11 attacks were just, but he did think that anyone who understood the dark side of American history could understand why our enemies might think they had a just cause.

As for the "God damn America" sermon, Moyers showed a longer clip leading up to the notorious soundbite. The theme of the sermon was that all governments lie, change, and fail. Wright gave examples from the Bible and the history of other nations, before listing the failings of America. He said these failings, which mostly concerned government violence against the innocent, could not be blessed by God, but condemned. Wright explicitly put himself in the tradition of the Biblical prophets who called God's condemnation down on Israel in order to get the nation to repent. In the interview, after seeing the clip, Moyers and Wright had this exchange:

BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?

REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people.

So the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a fiery preacher who roots himself and his congregation in the black liberation theology tradition. In a Christian context his incendiary comments make more sense. This context was left out of the clips. The clips were made by the political opponents of Barack Obama, not by people who cared one way or the other about Jeremiah Wright and his large, active, and successful church.

In the end, though, I think Obama was just in his overall assessment. Wright, now several years retired, formed his views and his preaching style at a time when things were much worse in America for African Americans. Wright has missed the way in which many things have changed for the better. Obama does not share Wright's views about America, and neither do I. I don't regard Wright's views as centrist, and I am sure he would not thank me if I did. But I think Rev. Wright, like each of us, should be judged by his full sermons and his own expressions of his views, not the attack clips assembled by enemies.