Obama Names Wright's Error

Barak Obama has taken some heat for things his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. I think Obama's previous repudiations of Wright's crazy comments should have been more than enough to put the issue to rest.

Today in Philadelphia Sen. Obama gave a great speech on race. He reiterated his repudiation of Wright's crazy talk. Then he went beyond that repudiation, and named the underlying error that his pastor made. In this statement I hear the Joshua generation giving the right answer to a disappointed member of the Moses generation:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation.

Amen.

Deport Polygamist Illegal Aliens

There is a growing subculture of West African illegal immigrants in this country who sneak in, then buy wives from home to serve as rightless free domestic labor. They make a bunch of kids at once, on the public nickel, to be US citizens who will retroactively make the whole thing legal. And create a voting bloc for polygamy. No thanks. Nip it in the bud. European nations that have given up on monogamy are already reaping the whirlwind these days, with the women doing most of the suffering.

Biting the Bullet About Women in Church Leadership

I am working on a larger project to restore the Establishment in the Presbyterian Church. By Presbyterian Establishment I mean an informal but real group that can lead the church and heal its divisions with recognized authority. Some readers have worried that my comments about the role of women in such an Establishment might be contested to the point of closing some readers' minds to the rest of my argument. I want to try a draft of this section on you, my helpful readers, for your comments. This is just one snippet from a much larger document in which I lay out the rest of what I mean by a Presbyterian Establishment.

The case of women in the Presbyterian Establishment is both the easiest and the hardest to resolve. It is the easiest, because there are so many devoted women in the church, many of whom have significant leadership experience and potential. It is hardest because, at every higher level of power, there are fewer women who are willing to take the job than there are men.

As a sociologist who has taught and studied family life, sex, and gender, I have become convinced over the years that the differences between men and women in their approach to power is deep. To be sure, women have been excluded from the opportunity to achieve power and to be part of the establishment in the past. Changing sexist structures that excluded women is a great gain and something we should always be vigilant about. But I believe that assuring women equal opportunity to be part of the Presbyterian Establishment will not result in an equal outcome of women being half of that Establishment.

I have been convinced that women, as a group, are less likely than men to sacrifice their families for positions of power. Moreover, women tend to be less likely to want to rule over others than men are; likewise, women tend to be less likely to accept other women ruling over them than they are men. To be sure, there will always be some women who would make good leaders and who are willing to do the job, even at the cost of being separated from others. But I think it is simply a fact of our complementary sexes that women will never voluntarily take up a proportionate share of positions of power, in the church or any other organization.

So if your main goal is equal representation of men and women in all positions of power and authority in the church, then the Presbyterian Establishment project is probably not for you. The more effective the Establishment is, the less likely it is to simply reflect the raw demographic diversity of the church. I say, so be it. The church needs an Establishment that works with real effect and authority.

I Am as Cool as I Have Ever Been

I was listening to the interview on NPR with Dan Kennedy about his days working in the record business. He tells a rueful tale of being a middle-aged guy who thinks he is still as cool as he was at 17.

This got me thinking: was I ever cool? Certainly not at 17, nor college, graduate school, early married life, making a career. Nope, nerd all the way. So now - as a professor who looks so much like a professor that I am on college billboards, a dad whose children gave him a bumper sticker reading "I [heart] embarrassing my teenage children in front of their friends," a fat guy pushing 50 who holds hands with his wife in public -- now I am as cool as I have ever been.

Spitzer's Wife

I agree with Maggie Gallagher: the innocent wives of guilty adulterers should not be expected to stand by their men during the public confession of guilt. That should be his humiliation, not hers. If she chooses to keep him afterwards, that should be credited to her moral heroism. And if she stands by him when he denies the charges, that is honorable marital loyalty.

Adulterers should do the perp walk and press talk alone.

Spitzer

Susan Estrich, a smart politico who taught Elliot Spitzer in law school, concludes that this is why a man so smart could do something so stupid:

"There is only one obvious explanation for why a smart man would commit such a totally self-destructive act: He didn't think he would be caught."

This could be so. Still, my inclination is to think that it is something else. He is a sometimes sanctimonious, sometimes bullying crusader. I think such a man might do something so wrong, catchable, career-ending, and humiliating because he thinks, subconsciously, that he is a fraud.

Half of Teens Girls Are Sexually Active, and Half of Them Have a Sexually Transmitted Infection

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their major study of teen girls and sex. The headline of this post contains the main finding.

The news story, and many variants on it, goes on to attack abstinence-based sex ed curricula. This strikes me as a non sequitur, at best. The report does not indicate what sort of sex education these girls might have had. One might look at the raw finding and conclude that we need much more education in abstinence.

The secondary finding is that half of African-American girls have sexually transmitted infections. The rate for white and Hispanic teens is 20%. This is just a disaster. My expectation is that the sexual activity of girls directly correlates with whether their fathers are active in their homes, but that is not provided in the news articles. This would account for the enormous racial disparity in the STI rate, though.

Vasectomies for March Madness

Yes, this is a serious suggestion. The University of Oregon suggests that men get a vasectomy before the NCAA tournament begins, so they can sit around healing while they sit around watching basketball.

What a wonderful idea.

Catholics Come Home

A Catholic ministry (apostolate) run by American lay people, called Catholics Come Home, has produced some fine commercials now running on television. I particularly commend the one called "Epic." It does, indeed, present the epic sweep of the Catholic Church, both now and historically. They make some astounding claims -- astounding because they are true -- such as "we are the largest charitable organization on the planet"; "we invented the college system"; "we developed the scientific method"; and my favorite, "with the help of the Holy Spirit, we compiled the Bible."

Beat that, proddies.

Stuff White People Like

The blog "Stuff White People Like" is a self-parody of yuppie culture that is pretty funny. As is quickly apparent, it is not about all white people -- in fact, the current item on the blog, #84 Tee-Shirts, cites "Getting Lucky in Kentucky" as unacceptable because it is worn by the "wrong kind of white people." But that, itself, is part of the parody -- the kind of white people who are self-conscious about being white, and parody themselves because of it, are drawn from the yuppie end of Anglo culture.

And the #1 thing white people like? Coffee.

Why Are There So Many Useless Young Men? Easy Sex

Kay Hymowitz has an excellent article in the current City Journal, "Child-Man in the Promised Land," on the spread of educated, employed, socially retarded young men. These are the men that society has made a huge investment in, in hopes that they would become responsible husbands, fathers, and citizens. But they remain in gadget-strewn arrested development. Hymowitz notes that these guys, with the resources to make a social contribution, spend their time and money on proudly immature self-indulgence.

The punchline, though, is that all this self-pleasuring doesn't fill them with pleasure. It makes them numb and apathetic.

Hymowitz cites two successful "lad lit" authors, Nick Hornsby and Benjamin Kunkel, in naming the source of slacker apathy: the easy availability of sex.

I think Hymowitz buries the lead. She set out to chronicle this new social type, the happily immature Single Young Man. As a sociobiologist and a Calvinist, I do not need any convincing that most men, left to their own devices, would live for the sense pleasures of the moment.

I am more interested in what turns boys into men. The great lever that civilization has is the intense, passionate interest of most men in sex with women. I think Hymowitz, and other promoters of civilization, should put that in the lead of each marriage article. If men could only get sex in marriage, the vast majority of SYMs would straighten up within a year.

It is a free country. Men don't have to be responsible. Neither do women. But there is great wisdom in the near-universal social custom of women strictly limiting sex outside of marriage. And without some responsible men, society itself will fall apart. Women can't do everything by themselves.

The Richest Families Are Having More Kids

I have previously reported the good news that the marriage rate and the birth rate among the most educated women has risen recently. I attribute this to more study of good sociology. :-)

Now there is evidence that the richest families are bigger. Among the top 1.5% of families by income, the proportion of 40-something women with three or more kids has risen over the past decade from 29% to 41%.

This group is too small to affect the overall birthrate very much directly. Indirectly, though, trends among the rich do tend to affect patterns among the upper middles, at least. And the rich are the people who can best afford more kids. This is a hopeful small development.

57% of Pakistani Britons are Married to Their First Cousins

Birth defects follow. Altogether, 70% of Pakistani Britons are married to relatives.

The West is in a race between the dangerous social patterns that immigrants bring with them, and the assimilation to our social patterns. We are hampered by the fact that some of our social patterns are also dangerous. Pakistani Britons rightly fear that if their children do not marry safely within their own families, they may assimilate to the British pattern of illegitimacy, which is now becoming the norm among the native British population.

I am not for either wholesale assimilation or wholesale rejection of the host culture. And I am certainly not for restricting immigration just because the immigrants, if there are enough of them and have a strong enough culture, resist assimilation. I think each case of assimilation or not should be judged on its merits.

Mark Steyn, who publishes these scary facts, is worried that the relativism of elite culture in the West gives us no grounds to resist the bad practices that immigrants might bring. I think he is right about that. Things are worse in Europe and Canada than they are in the United States. But we also have a problem with spineless relativism. It is worth practicing vertebrate enhancement of our culture, in anticipation of similar problems.

Low-Sex Marriage is Only a Problem if it Is.

CNN has an article on the reliably titillating subject of the "sexless marriage," which their experts describe as having intercourse less than ten times a year. One of their experts, Marty Klein, a licensed marriage counselor and certified sex therapist in Palo Alto, California, says that one cause of the problem of sexless marriages is "America's obsession with marriage."

I think this is exactly backwards. I think one cause of the problem of unhappy marriages is America's obsession with sex. Sure, sex is a fun, and is one of the many channels through which married people build up their ties with one another. Human beings are built for strong sexual desire at times, especially men. And you can't beat sex as a way to make babies.

Still, there are many more important things in life than sex. Sex is a normal good of marriage, but its good is not best measured in quantity. The more educated people are, the less often they have sex. This doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. It more likely means that they have other good things to do.

If a couple doesn't have sex much, that could be a symptom of a problem in their marriage. But a low-sex marriage is not a problem in itself.

Divorce Cuts Close Ties With Fathers in Half

Penn State researchers Alan Booth, Valarie King, and David Johnson,and Mindy Scott of Child Trends, studied how close adolescents felt to their fathers before and after divorce. The great majority (70+ percent) felt close to their mothers early and late in adolescence, regardless of whether their parents divorced.

With their fathers, most -- 57% -- felt close when asked in early adolescence. In later adolescence nearly half (48%) of the kids with married parents still felt close to their fathers. For the divorced kids, though, those feeling close to their fathers dropped to a paltry 25%.

Who Tortures? The Loyal. Who Won't Torture? Those with a Higher Loyalty

This week Centre College was visited by Darius Rejali, one of the leading experts on torture in the world. In his public lecture, he said that torturers are not chosen for their intelligence, but for their loyalty. One consequence of this fact is that torturers often can't tell when their victims have told them the truth. Their cruelty is for nothing.

In private remarks to another group at the college, Prof. Rejali was talking about the whistleblower at the Abu Ghraib military prison scandal, as well as in some other cases of torture. The whistleblower is usually someone just like the torturers in rank, in class background, in authority at the torture site. What they differ on is their commitment to a higher standard that gives them the courage to say "this is wrong, even if my superior says it isn't." Among Americans, the whistleblower is usually an evangelical Christian.

I think all of us have the capacity of be torturers if we thought it was the only way to protect our loved ones. Scholars like Prof. Rejali can convince our heads that torture does not work to do that, and creates worse harm to society. To move our hearts and guts to say no and stop torture usually requires an additional conviction, from a more spiritual source.

Religious Churning is Good

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 4 (and last)

The headline on most articles about the Pew survey of the religious landscape have emphasized how much denominational switching Americans do. A quarter of American adults have made a biggish change from their childhood faith -- mostly Protestant-Catholic swaps, or vice-versa, but also switching across the Christian/non-Christian divide. When we include people who have switched from one Protestant denomination to another, the percent of religious switchers among American adults rises to 44%.

On the whole, I think religious switching is a good sign. This is what a free market looks like. Choice normally increases commitment. Converts are more intense members, as a rule. To pick a number out of the air, we might expect that nature plus nurture would make, say, 2/3rds of kids choose the same denomination as their parents. Even the groups with much higher retention rates now -- such as the 90% Hindu retention rate -- will likely drop closer to the two-thirds mark as subsequent generations get more Americanized.

Moreover, one of the critical requirements of a religious free market is the willingness to evangelize. Catholics and evangelicals can have significant switching out and still hold their market share because they evangelize. Jews and Episcopalians, to take just two of many examples, have significant losses but do not evangelize, and are slipping.

Religious change is a sign of a religiously vibrant society.

Catholic Lose Big, Hold Steady

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 3

The Roman Catholic Church has been the largest denomination in the United States for five generations. Catholics make up about a quarter of the population. Yet the Catholic Church shows huge losses over a lifetime in the new Pew survey. Asking adults what religion they are now, and what they claimed as a child, the RCs show a 24% loss. Yet they remain nearly a quarter of the population. How is that possible?

Part of the answer is conversion. While 7.5% of the population reports that they once were Catholics but now are not, another 2.9% of the population made the shift the other way, making up almost 40% of the loss.

The other part of the answer is immigration. Almost half of all immigrants are Catholic. Immigrants make up nearly a quarter of the Catholic membership in this country - double the percentage of Americans who are foreign-born.

The Pew survey does not tell us when the exiting Catholics departed. It seems likely to me that there was a spike of departures in the wake of the recent priestly pedophilia scandals. If so, then the rate of departures is likely to slow down soon.

Still, for a group with such massive losses, the Roman Catholic Church is surprisingly and steadily robust in the United States.

Deconstructing the Religiously Unaffiliated

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2

One of the big findings of the Pew survey is that the "religiously unaffiliated" are now 16% of the adult population - making them the fourth largest "religious family." However, Pew also added a nuance to their questions that most surveys miss. They had the usual categories of atheists and agnostics, and then a catch-all category of "nothing in particular." The nuance comes in the next step: they let people within the nothing in particular category further defined themselves as "secular unaffiliated" and "religious unaffiliated."

So how do the religiously unaffiliated break down? The 16% of the total falls out:
Atheist 1.6% (of the total adult population)
Agnostic 2.4
Secular unaffiliated 6.3

Thus, the truly not religious population of the U.S. at the moment is 10.3% of the total. Another 5.8% of the total are not affiliated with a religious institution, but nonetheless think of themselves as religious.

Moreover, the unaffiliated are a changeable group. While 16% are unaffiliated now, only 7% were raised that way. And they are young - 31% are under 30, vs. only 20% of the whole population. And they are less likely to be married - 46% vs 54% of the total. They are more likely to be men - 59 vs. 48. Interestingly, the education and income profiles of the unaffiliated are the same as the population as a whole.

What this suggests to me is that the core of the religiously unaffiliated are unmarried young men. If we check in with them later in the life course, a significant portion of them will have become affiliated.

The Big Lumps of American Denominations

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 1

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new survey on the landscape of American religion that will be the benchmark study of this subject for a decade. It is big enough, at 36,000+ respondents, and diverse enough to give a picture of denominational groups down to .3 of the population.

I want to start with the big lumps of denominational families that it reveals. Americans are

1/4th Catholic
1/4th Evangelical Protestant
1/4th Mainline + Black Protestant
1/4th Everything else

Of the Everything else, about half are "nothing in particular" - but half of them say that religion is important in their lives.

All the non-Christian religions add up to about 5% of the total U.S. population.

58% of American Kids Live with Their Married Parents

The latest good news from the Census Bureau finds that a solid majority of kids live with their married parents. Another couple percent live with their unmarried parents -- and a significant hunk of those parents will marry. Being raised by their own married parents is the best situation for kids. That doesn't mean that the other options are terrible, or that all married parents are great. But most kids get the best option. And since most parents want to stay married and raise their kids together, most parents get the best option, too.

The Thin Religious Coalition Against Gambling

Kentucky is considering casinos. A broad coalition of religious groups oppose them. The surprise is that the liberal churches, starting with the Kentucky Council of Churches, have been strong leaders in the anti-gambling coalition. Many mainline churches, my Presbyterian Church included, have firm teachings against gambling going back to the days when we strictly regulated our own conduct.

I believe, though, that the mainline churches are more worried about other people's gambling than our own. Sure, gambling can ruin people in all classes, but it is far more likely to ruin the lives of poor people -- just like all the other regulated vices. Sure, everyone who is tempted to an addiction is helped if the temptation is forbidden. But ruinous gambling hasn't been a big item in the moral agenda of most mainline members for a long time. You can get a bigger mandate to limit smoking from mainline Christians than to hit the streets to fight gambling. Even the limited kind of gambling, such as the lottery and bingo, that are permitted here, involve the Other Danville and the Other Kentucky. On those rare occasions when I have seen lines of people purchasing lottery tickets or playing commercial bingo, I didn't know anyone there. In a small town, it is hard to go into any social setting and know no one.

The Louisville Courier-Journal had a good piece on this debate today (in which yours truly is quoted). I think Peter Smith, the journalist covering the religious angle of this story, is right that this debate has created some "strange pew-fellows."

Witty Prank of the Year: Frozen Grand Central

On Stridency in Bipartisan Marriages

The New York Times has a light piece in their "Modern Marriage" feature, "I Married a Republican." The author, Ann Hood, is of the all-good-people-are-Democrats school, yet she falls for and marries a man who "votes for the best candidates" - who almost always happen to be Republicans. Her friends are appalled. She finds his friends to be very nice people, yet she ends up ranting at them whenever politics comes up.

The moral turning point in the story comes when she realized that "it was not his stridency that was causing this rift in our marriage, but mine."

The story has a happy ending from Hood's (and the Times') perspective. Her husband decides Obama is the best candidate. As an Obama supporter myself, I applaud that outcome. I enjoy her suggestion that there should be a bumper sticker: "Barak Obama: Uniting America, One Bipartisan Marriage at a Time."

What struck me as odd about the story, though, was that the author never describes her political choices, or his, or anyone's as based on reasons. The whole frame of the story is that blind loyalty on our side is good, blind loyalty on the other side is bad. Stridency comes in for some muted criticism, because it creates marital rifts. But she does not make a case for choosing the best candidate. She is not won over by her husband's apparent calm and reasoned judgment. Only that she won.

Now, I appreciate that Ann Hood is employing a common women's conversational ploy of presenting herself as strident and unreasonable -- she is starting in the one-down position in relation to the reader -- so that the reader can invite her up to an equal position. I imagine that many of the women that she tells this story to respond with their own tales of realizing they were being unreasonable. This restores equality. It is a species of "troubles talk." Nonetheless, it seems to me that she missed the point of her own story. It is not just stridency that creates the rift. If we don't think critically about our own positions, and give others credit for thinking critically about theirs, we cannot reasonably heal the rifts created by our stridency.

She Is Ready for the Question Four Months Before He Pops It

The British program The National Wedding Show commissioned a survey of married couples in that country. They found that, on average, a couple got engaged nearly three years after they met: two years, eleven months, and eight days, to be exact.

The survey also found that she wished that he had proposed sooner -- four months sooner, on average.

I have met many couples in which she was waiting, with decreasing patience, for the proposal that she knew was coming. In fact, he often delays the proposal just because she is expecting it. He wants to surprise her. And he doesn't want to feel like he is following orders.

Still, if four months of grief can be avoided, or even cut back to two, many couples might have a happier life.

What Anger is For

Steven Stosny was the keynote speaker at the Bluegrass Healthy Marriages conference. Stosny is a marriage therapist and researcher, and co-author of the wonderfully titled How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It (which must be aimed at men).

Stosny had a fascinating sociobiological tidbit in his talk. He said the portion of the brain that is given over to anger is more than twice as large as the portion concerned with self-preservation. His reading of this: we developed anger to get us to protect our loved ones. We need to protect our loved ones because humans are more dependent on other people than most species are, especially during our long childhood. It is to our long-term advantage to protect our loved ones, especially our genetic relatives. But protecting our loved ones to the extent of endangering our own self-preservation is a hard and biologically costly choice. Thus we need to devote big brain resources to overcome our short-term individual interest in order to realize our long-term social interest. And anger makes us mad enough to override our higher calculations of interest and just do what needs to be done to protect our own.

Two Military Dictatorships Crumble

This is a great moment for democracy: Pakistan had an election displacing the military dictator, and Cuba announced the retirement of its military dictator. The Pakistani election has been marred by many things, yet it promises to bring to power multi-party democracy in a Muslim state, which is extremely rare. Cuba's announcement that Fidel Castro is retiring is even further from bringing in multi-party democracy, since he is likely to replaced by his brother.

Still, if the military (theirs and ours) can keep their hands off, I think we will see functioning democracies in both countries within a few years. It would also help if we had normal trade with both countries -- if we had ended our foolish embargo of Cuba 40 years ago, I think we would have brought Cuba into the club of American democracies long ago.

I am hopeful. Building democracy builds centrism.

Fraternities Fighting Casual Sex Face Challenges, Too

Fraternity parties are notorious sites for casual "hook ups." Recently I got another view of this issue from an officer of one fraternity that is trying to change that story in their own house.

"being respectful of women [is] a key element among our brothers, and even brothers [will be] called out for any disrespectful actions (such as groping, or any action that may make a woman uncomfortable).

[In our house, at least,] I believe the general statement that “fraternity parties are places where people hook up” to be especially true with non-fraternity male members. I believe the dance floor of a fraternity party provides a certain degree of anonymity in which males can “make a move” on a female, and if the female is willing, she can be taken back to a dorm without anyone noticing. I am frustrated by such occurrences because men who take women home anonymously will not have the criticism from the entire chapter to motivate them to choose the right decision."

Fraternities have the power to partly regulate their members' actions -- for good or ill. If, as sometimes happens, fraternity means that brothers assist one another in taking advantage of women, as in "Animal House," then the group makes things worse. On the other hand, a "good guy" fraternity can help one another uphold a higher standard of treating women respectfully. In that case it is the independent men who take advantage of the fraternity's open parties to meet incautious women, without the fraternity having any leverage to regulate the men's behavior.

The fraternity is, in this case, a help to women and the moral order; it is the independence of independents that leaves women and the moral order without protection.

The Adopting Act Holds

The General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the "supreme court" of the Presbyterian Church (USA), released a major decision this week on the Pittsburgh case. This case is the first of several heading to the GAPJC to test the real meaning of the church's adoption of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report in 2006, on which I have blogged quite a bit.

At issue in the Pittsburgh Presbytery case were two related points:
can a candidate for ordination in the church scruple behavior, as opposed to belief? and
can an ordaining body make a blanket determination of what the essential and necessary standards for ordination are?

In both cases the GAPJC said no.

Specifically, the court said that ministers and elders may declare that they disagree with the church's interpretation of scripture as requiring that all officers must “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or in chastity in singleness” (Book of Order, G-6.0106b) - but they must still act within that standard of behavior until and unless the whole church constitutionally changes that interpretation.

Second, the court said that the presbytery must take each case for ordination individually and not issue a blanket interpretation of church rules that go beyond what the constitution itself explicitly says. Each candidate's confession and scruples must be considered individually and as a whole.

In other words, the middle way that PUP promoted, and the Adopting Act of 1729 standard that it revived, were upheld by the court.

Yes We Can vs. Like Hope, But Different

The "Yes We Can" video that will.i.am made of Barack Obama's speech is just great.



The parody reply for(?) John McCain is hilarious.

Thank God for Evolution, Conclusion

I have been reading Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! in the hopes that it would help me put together the Biblical view of God as creator of heaven and earth with the evolutionary view of the long, slow development of the universe. I appreciate Dowd's commitment to seeing the development of the universe as a meaningful Great Story. In the end, though, he doesn't engage the science enough to help me clarify a biblical understanding of evolution. More frustrating to me, his reinterpretation of Christian language is so ambiguous that I can't tell if he could deliver the faith/science connection that he promises, even if he did have more detail on the science.

Dowd does have an interesting theory of the connection between brain development and sin, which I wrote about earlier. And he does have a useful timeline of cosmic evolution. Ultimately, though, he says he is not trying to coordinate religious views and scientific ones. He even seems to reject the project, though he does in fact do a bit of that himself. He is, as he says, a popularizer and evangelist for the view that evolution is itself a religious worldview. So if there is not as much science as I would like, that is more my problem than his.

Dowd's ambiguity and reinterpretation of Biblical language is more of a problem even within his own project. He distinguishes between the "night language" of religion and the "day language" of science. Here he gives a translation from one to the other:

Our purpose, individually, is to grow in Christ and to support one another in staying true to God's Word and God's will. Collectively, we are here to create Christ-centered institutions that glorify God and embody the values of the Kingdom.

He continues, "A day language way of saying the same thing might be:"

Our purpose, individually, is to grow in trust, authenticity, responsibility, and service to the Whole, and to support others in doing the same. Collectively, we are here to celebrate and steward what Life has been doing for billions of years and to devise systems of governance and economics that align the self-interest of individuals and groups with the wellbeing of the larger communities of which we are a part.

The latter might be a worthy ethical view, but I don't see how it is simply a translation of the former view. He articulates at some length his theory of Evolutionary Christianity, Evolutionary Islam, Evolutionary Judaism, Evolutionary Buddhism, etc., which re-interprets all faiths into one - the same one that he sees in evolution. Dowd even contends that all faiths will evolve into his version of cosmopolitan unitarianism when everyone faces up to "reality." Sociologically, it seems very unlikely to me that all the world's faiths will give up their tradition and what he calls "flat earth" Scriptures to embrace scientific unitarianism.

What has been hardest for me to pin down in reading this book is what Dowd means by God. On the one hand, he uses God talk all the time, starting with the title. On the other hand, he says:

God was active at every moment, at every critical juncture. God, as I have been using the term, is no less than a holy name for Supreme Wholeness, that Ultimate Creative Reality that brought everything, step-by-step, into existence.

On the other hand, he denies that God designed anything. Everything evolved by natural selection. In his final credo, Dowd asserts

I believe that God is creator and ruler of the Universe. And I know that this statement is metaphorical, not literal, in what it says about the nature of reality.

I can't tell what Dowd's God is - if he thinks God is real. If you take Dowd to mean exactly what he says, then God is a metaphor we use to describe whatever it is that happens to emerge from evolution. He believes that evolution is leading the universe toward greater complexity. Moreover, he thinks the fact that human beings understand the universe means that they evolved in order to be the universe's way of understanding itself. This is a pretty vision, but I don't see how he can derive that either from his science or his theology.

Valentine's Day Reflections on "Marry Him!"

We in the marriage-promoting world have been all atwitter about an article in The Atlantic recently, Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough." Gottlieb, a liberal feminist writer who had in the past written against settling, decided to have a child on her own before 40. Now, she wishes she had married when she was younger. She held out for Mr. Right, and now she is alone and regrets it.

I mostly applaud Ms. Gottlieb's sentiment. I think most young people have a distorted view of marriage. They think it is about someone who will make you happy. The core of marriage as a social institution, though, is to form a partnership that is good for your children. (And yes, of course, there are many fine and socially useful childless marriages. I am talking about marriage as a social institution, the marriages that most people have.) I think it is healthy for women to look to marry the fathers of their children before they think about finding their own soulmate.

What disturbs me a bit in all this talk of "settling" is that is leaves out how marriage transforms people -- especially men. Marriage reliably makes people more responsible. Very often, it also makes us better people -- more concerned about others, more interested in how the big world affects our own, even more loving.

Moreover, it is helpful and humbling to remember that our spouse settled in marrying us. We are all imperfect. Knowing that your mate settled in marrying you can be a strong motivator be the person she or he deserved to marry.

What I Learned at the Evolutionists' Testimony Service

Last night I went to a talk at the local Unitarian-Universalist Church. The talk was sponsored by the Kentucky Association of Science Educators and Skeptics, a debunking organization focusing on paranormal and creationist claims. One of their number, a geologist, had visited the Creation Museum. His talk was mostly a simple slide show of what he saw at the museum. His commentary was, of course, critical, and he was preaching to the choir in this setting to this audience.

I was dissatisfied, though, because the criticism didn't really engage the substance of what the museum offered. The sheer fact that they taught young earth creationism and rejected evolution was reason enough to bemoan their ignorance. In the Q and A session I sent up a written question, asking for a good specific example of what was wrong with young earth creationist geology. The speaker offered the example of Kentucky limestone. He said that limestone is made in clear coastal seabeds piling up sediment over a long time.

Here, I think, is where we can see the disconnection between the creationist and evolutionist arguments. The creationist can readily concede that one way limestone can be made is by sediments piling up in clear coastal seabeds over a long time. But they also contend that another way would be in a sudden calamitous flood. In the museum they show pictures of major geological changes made by the Mt. Saint Helens eruption in a matter of weeks.

What the creationists object to is the flat, unreflective assertion that the evolutionists' proposed theory is the only possible way to explain what we see in nature. Until the evolutionists offer a rebuttal to that critique, they have not answered the creationists' objection.

The event at the UU church was mostly a testimonial among believers. In addition to the geologist and the KASES organizer, two biology professors had been recruited for the panel. With their usual fair-mindedness, though, the UU panel also included a Presbyterian minister, head of the local interfaith alliance, as the token theist. He made what I thought was the most penetrating comment of the night. He thought that lying behind the passion on each side of the creation/evolution debate was a deep emotion: each side feared the other. One of the scientists objected to this characterization, contending that he didn't fear the creationists, just their ignorance. I can't help but think that this attitude -- that the other side disagrees with us only because they are ignorant, fearful, and dogmatic -- will not help.

Indeed, attending an evolutionist testimonial service shows the knowledge class -- which thinks of itself as the embodiment of reason, logic, and open-mindedness -- at its most fearful, dogmatic, and close-minded.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 5

A comment on yesterday's post brings out an important point. Virginia wrote,

As a liberal Christian, I think it is possible to accept the Biblical account of Creation as a metaphorical narrative and see God's hand in the truly amazing process of evolution. A few degrees warmer or cooler, a few cells that split in different directions, a percentage less of one kind of gas and a percentage more of another and this would be a completely different world.

I agree with Virginia that the universe does seem amazingly well designed for life. I think that insight is a very promising way to go in reconciling faith and evolution. Science cannot, of course, prove the "anthropic principle," or any theory that the universe is designed and created. But it can't disprove it, either. So you and I are left to judge on some other basis than empirical science why the universe works so marvelously.

In one way, that is what Michael Dowd is doing in Thanks God for Evolution! The amazing wonder of the Great Story of evolution is the whole motive of his ministry. Surprisingly, though, Dowd denies that any aspect of the universe is designed. It all just evolved. He is not arguing that evolution is evidence of the divine; rather, he says that evolution is divine. We are meant to take the book's title more literally than readers like Virginia and me might have thought.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 4

I am halfway through Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! The expected parting between his view and Christianity has begun. Dowd preserves the core language of Christianity, including salvation. He says, though, that for the doctrine of salvation to make sense, "our theology of salvation must be freed from otherworldly and unnatural interpretations." Dowd contends that "we" and "people today" just can't believe in an otherworldly God -- though, in fact, that is exactly what most people do believe.

Dowd's reinterpretation of Christian salvation means having "Christ-like evolutionary integrity." I read this as mostly the traditional liberal Christian strategy of re-interpreting "faith in Christ" as "being a good guy like Jesus." I think C.S. Lewis answered this in Mere Christianity, when he pointed out that Jesus definitely believed God was otherworldly, and that he himself was (and is) the son of God in an otherworldly way. Either Jesus is God, or he is a mad-man.

One thing that is new in Dowd's language: believing that Christ really died, was resurrected, and ascended -- that is, believing what the Bible says -- is "unnatural." And I am not sure what evolutionary integrity is.

Huckabee Quiz

1. In November, as Mike Huckabee surged in the polls, a student at Liberty University asked him what was driving his startling success. Huckabee responded, "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."

2. "Sometimes," the former Arkansas governor told his supporters, "one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor."

3. "We've also seen that the widow's mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world."

4. "It's almost like when the prophet was looking for a king. He came down, looked through all of Jesse's sons, went through a whole bunch of them, and said, 'Is this all you got?'"

So, how many allusions did you get?

NPR listeners thought Huckabee was speaking a secret, mysterious dialect. They didn't know what he was talking about, and neither did most of the Christians they found on the Mall in Washington. Fortunately they found Vickie Frey, a member of an evangelical megachurch in Omaha. She supported the hope that there is some biblical literacy left in the church, and got them all right.

Bury the Hairy

Another gem from my sister and her kindergartener son.

The boy and I were discussing transplanting bushes. We agreed you need to dig them up carefully so you get all the roots, even the small ones. Then, said he, the bush "holds its breath" until you put it in the new hole. After that, you "bury the hairy" and put the dirt back around the bush's roots so it can stop holding its breath.

I also liked the "bury the hairy" dance, which is a sort of hunched shoulder, arm swinging, gorilla-esque shovelling dance, while singing the dirge-like "Bury the Hairy" song.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 3

Michael Dowd has found an intriguing way to understand Original Sin and the Fall in evolutionary terms. Our brains have different regions that seem to correspond to a developmental sequence from the parts in the bottom that we share with the reptiles, through a section like that of lower mammals, to the large region like the higher mammals, and finally the lobes in the front that are distinctively human. As brain scientists have studied these different parts of the brain, they perform different functions. They also promote different, sometimes competing impulses. We have inherited a propensity to do things that gratify our simplest urges for pleasure and survival that conflict with our more complex understanding of what is good and right. This inheritance, Dowd argues, is how we can understand Original Sin.

Seeing our conflicting sinful urges in this way, as an emergent result of our psychological and physical evolution, does not make them less sinful. But it does, Dowd argues, help us defuse the emotions around them. Calmness is the face of strong desires can help us not give in to them.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 2

The most engaging part of Michael Dowd's vision in Thank God for Evolution! is that God is immanent in the entire cosmos, creating and evolving everything. As Dowd frames the great purpose of our lives, "Humanity's Great Work is to further divine creative emergence -- God's will -- in ways lifegiving for the whole." This is close to a doctrine that is more Catholic than Calvinist, but I like it still: that we are meant to be co-creators with God in the further making of this world.

Dowd names his position Creatheism, which deliberately plays on creation-theism and creative-atheism. He treats all names for God as metaphors, but as nonetheless pointing to something real. He allows that his position has strong affinities with panentheism and with process theology, but is trying to express it in a way more palatable to both Biblical theists and atheists. We is trying to express a view of God both immanent and transcendent, while recognizing that the reality of God goes beyond any terms or metaphors we could come up with.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 1

Recently I wrote about "evolutionary evangelists" Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow.

I am now working through Dowd's book, Thank God for Evolution! Dowd was a UCC minister. I think he still is. Dowd and Barlow now make their living traveling around the country arguing for a "marriage of science and religion" based on an appreciation of the cosmic grandeur of evolution.

At an early point, Dowd distinguishes between Evolutionary Christianity (and Evolutionary Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) and "flat earth faiths." Flat earth faiths may not literally believe in a flat earth now, but they revere scriptures, and interpretations of scriptures, that were written when flat earth beliefs were indeed the norm. Dowd names this as the problem he is trying to solve: "today's continuing use of flat-earth commentaries to interpret flat-earth scriptures is the most problematic of all."

Dowd is going to try to thread a middle way. He does not reject scriptures (any of them), but accepts them as good-faith efforts to understand the meaning of the cosmos. As his phrasing of what is "most problematic" makes clear, it is our interpretation of scriptures as literal theories of the cosmos that he is going to tweak, if not utterly transform.

What I like about Dowd and Barlow's project is their attitude of humility, wonder, and, most of all, gratitude for the cosmos -- and their commitment to understanding the evolution of the cosmos as a meaningful story.

Baptists vs. Structural Evils

Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, say liberals shouldn't scorn evangelicals because they now do good social action work. Which is true. But even that he says in a scornful "they've come so far" way.

In this column he specifically mentions Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback megachurch, which is quietly Southern Baptist. His and his wife's personal experience with poverty and misery in Africa has mobilized the "purpose driven" wing of evangelicalism to do heroic work there. Baptists do fabulous cup-of-cold-war work -- 7,500 Saddlebackers going personally to Africa to fight poverty is truly impressive.

And yet, they still can't see the structural picture. You fight AIDS by changing individual behavior. Score one for the Baptists. But you fight warlords, who sell drugs, rape, and kill, with armies. Baptists don't have an army (nor should they). That is what the government is for. And when low-church evangelicals are in charge of the government, they can't seem to get that.

Most Americans Want a Servant-Leader President

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

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

Guess the Fantasy

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


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

Super Bowl Church Parties

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

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

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

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

Evolutionary Evangelists Praise Creation Museum

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

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

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

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

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

The Mormons' "John Paul II" Dies

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

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

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

No Country for Old Men

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

There are serious religious themes here.

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

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

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

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

I think so.

Students at the Creation Museum

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

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

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

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

Two Words: LOLCAT Bible

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

Genesis 1: 1-3


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

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

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


Matthew 1: 18-21

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

A Religion Joke to End the Term

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

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

Gruntled Song of the Year

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

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

The ad is here.

A Middle Way, Even With Bin Laden

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua Obama

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

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

Jackson and Cromwell

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

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

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

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

Paris Hilton, the New Princess Margaret

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

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

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

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

Hindus Beat Buddhists in the Personal Networks of My College Students

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

Does French Fertility Rest on an Overseas Foundation?

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

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

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

We're Having a Baby (Boomlet)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Electoral Difference Between the Religious Right and the Secular Left

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

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

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

Very Happy Wedding for Mature People

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

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

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

Birds of a Feather Go Too Far

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

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

Who Will Unite the Country?

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

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

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

Hillary Clinton's Tears and the Gender Gap

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

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

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

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

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

We'll Always Have Paris - Run!

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

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

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

"Juno" is a Fine Teen Preg Movie

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

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

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

God on Both Sides of Charlie Wilson's War

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

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

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

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

Bibliomulas

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

Meritocracy Delivers: The Clintons and the Obamas

Good Things for the New Year 4

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

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

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

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

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

The Primary Finally Begins

Good Things for the New Year 3

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

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

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

Support Free Elections - No Matter Who Wins

Good Things for the New Year 2

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

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

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

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

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

The Democrats' Deep Bench

Good Things for the New Year 1

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

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

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

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

Worth A Thousand Words

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

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

Mid-Century Educational Homogamy Squeeze

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

Educational Homogamy Matters More Than Ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

If You Want Educational Homogamy, Marry Right After School

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

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

Half of American Wives Are Educationally Homogamous

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

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

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

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