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Chapter 2:
Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
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Rosin’s angle may have been the “envy” and “embarrassment” of the Christian right that had voted for George W. Bush, but the story turned out to be her own embarrassment and discomfort with the simple aspirations of the people she interviewed. It seems to be impossible for a liberal writer to report on the Christian right without making herself the story. After reporting that right-wing voter Mary Johnston “wanted to be more like [George W. Bush],” Rosin tells us that what “determined her vote [was] class envy.” Really? Wanting to be like someone you admire is class envy? Envy is usually used to denote a combination of covetousness and ill will. Would it not be more appropriate to write simply that Mary Johnston admired Bush and that the Christian right seemed to experience the Bush family as a “role model” that represented the values and the status it wanted to achieve? Then there was Jim Ardrey, an ex-redneck who had recently developed a parcel of land his family had owned for 100 years. “‘[His family] didn’t know what to do with it, because they were all, you know, rednecks,’” according to Ardrey. But he was better than that. He’d “taken the land and built a housing development of massive brick houses in faux Southern Colonial style, hedges trimmed to resemble swans.” Rosin knows—and so do her broadsheet newspaper readers—that wannabe McMansions are not quite out of the top drawer. But what would you expect in superstitious bigoted culture of enthusiastic Christianity?
Enthusiastic Protestantism is flourishing in the white striver suburbs of South Carolina where it helped elect the heir to the Bush dynasty to the presidency. But it is exploding elsewhere as well: in the minority communities of New York City. Tony Carnes reported in The Wall Street Journal that Pentecostalism nearly died when, on May 3, 1973, newspapers reported that a Pentecostal church near Wall Street had collapsed. (Carnes 2001) Sociologists had reported in the 1960s that “religion was all but finished as an important presence in New York.” Yet today “Hermes Caballero, assistant to Bronx borough president and a Pentecostal pastor himself, says that in the past five years more than 300 Pentecostal churches have been founded in the Bronx.” Born a century ago in Kansas, Pentecostalism has “moved from the American West through New York to Latin America, Europe, Russia, China, and elsewhere. Now the converts have come back.” Says Marcos Rivera, active in the Primitive Christian Church on East Broadway: “There are Josephs arising in this city.”
He refers, of course, to people who have descended from normal lives to utter degradation, and then arisen from the dead to lead their broken communities from ruin to redemption, like Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob, sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, falsely accused of rape and cast into prison. But Joseph was plucked from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fat cattle and the seven lean cattle that foretold seven fat years followed by seven lean years. He came to rule the land of Egypt and came to have mercy on his brothers when they came to Egypt to buy grain during the famine. The Triumphs of Joseph is Robert L. Woodson’s witness to the religious activists working to save America’s most blighted neighborhoods from drugs and despair. They are fallen people: former drug addicts, convicts, and prostitutes. They came from utter selfishness, impulse, and exploitation and transformed their lives towards love, direction, and purpose. They transformed their lives through Christianity. Woodson argues that the vice of drug addiction and selfish impulse cannot be solved by education or by frightening people straight with pictures of frying eggs. “When a doctor… decides to take drugs, his or her problem cannot be solved by education.” People that self-destruct on drugs are beyond rational argument. What they need is not rational rehabilitation but spiritual transformation. Their problem is not a problem of behavior, but a problem of values. The solution is not a change in behavior but a transformation of their values. Part of that process is taking responsibility for another person. Woodson writes of recovered addict Juan Rivera:
[The recovering addicts] kept a vigil of prayer and caregiving over the cots on newcomers who are breaking hard-core addictions. In that process… a part of their heart opens and they have, for the first time in years, a sensitivity to the condition of another person. I have seen men who had been hardened by life, men who have stolen and even killed, come to me sobbing if the person they were trying to save didn’t make it and went back to the streets. (Woodson 1998 p87)
These modern Josephs are raising up their communities with simple enthusiastic Christianity, unheralded and uncelebrated. Our political and educational elites prefer methods of uplift that they control, through government programs, left-wing activism, and top-down consciousness-raising. Yet the spontaneous movements of uplift that spawn in the cities are built on faith and self-help.
Spiritual uplift is not confined to the slums. The Alpha Course, the once-a-week seminar in Christianity, was started by Rev. Nicky Gumbel of Holy Trinity Brompton in London’s tony Knightsbridge. It consists of 15 talks, and a “Holy Spirit Weekend” in the middle. Over a million people have taken the course in Britain and two million elsewhere in the world since 1990. (Combe 2001)
Why should the rednecks of South Carolina choose enthusiastic Protestantism, as they emerge from the hills into the striver suburbs of the new economy? And why should the blacks and Puerto Ricans of New York City choose the ecstatic rhythms of Pentecostalism as they struggle to survive in the vice and social decay in the teeming boroughs of Gotham? Why should the recovering drug addicts thrill to the love of Jesus Christ? And why should the young professionals of London be turning to Christianity? Don’t they know that God died almost two hundred years ago?
And why should the upscale commentators who comment on them exhibit such naked contempt for their honest toil and simple faith? Don’t they know these ordinary people are doing the best they can?
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Click for Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.
©2005 Christopher Chantrill
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
