And I thought the Huckster’s cavorting with Copeland was bad. Reuters:

“I’m very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement today,” McCain said at a news conference. “He has been the staunchest leader of our Christian evangelical movement in many areas, but especially, most especially, his close ties and advocacy for the freedom and independence of the state of Israel.”

“Victory is within our grasp because John McCain knows it’s never wrong to do the right thing,” Hagee said

Does McCain have the foggiest clue why Hagee is so orgasmic over Israel? The man essentially wants the end of the world to happen and soon! What is this - find a living representative of the Anti-Christ to boost your conservative street cred? Good Lord. Is the endorsement-seeking-bandwagoning of politicians like this the problem, or is the real problem that fools like Hagee are fueling the spiritual fervor of so many conservatives? If my derision for this fodder makes me a flaming liberal then…Flame On!

(HT: Jim West)

Jan Edmiston got me thinking more… 

I said it here, but it's worth more emphasis.  Everyone should read The Restructuring of the American Religion in light of the data presented in the report. It clearly gives more supporting evidence that Wuthnow is right about the blurring of denominational organizational lines and the re-drawing of them around ideological lines.  I learned this first hand when it became clear to me that I had much more in common with several Jesuit priests than I did with most of the people in the Presbytery of which I was under care. If members of my Presbytery were more like those Jesuits, I might be a pastor today.

The blogosphere seems to bear this out as well. It is a medium that intentionally blurs these boundaries because associations are built first on ideas and the medium itself does not support traditional ways of circumscribing boundaries.  Human cognitive, social, and physical boundaries are drawn with the mind and through non-physical representations of the self and space in ideas through an information flow.  Sherry Turkle takes this idea too far in Life on the Screen by suggesting a literal non-physical self that exists.  The way the self is represented and the origin of that representation are collapsed.  Be that as it may, the presentation of ideas is a representation of the self.  Some will invest more into that representation.  Other, like myself, are less conscious of the representation of the self and more tuned in to the sharpening of ideas and the free flow of information sharing without authoritative gatekeepers to demarcate social boundaries that demand response be it assent or revolt.

The blogosphere is the organizational model of the termite mound.  Termites have an instinctual and pre-determined drive that directs them to work together to create those magnificent mounds.  No one termite or group of termites dictates what that mound needs to look like or how to do it.  The collective intelligence of the group creates order out of complete chaos at an unconscious level.

Each of us in the blogosphere do this.  We call them blog updates or blogrolls.  They are representations of how we manage our relationships not just with ideas, but with others - the sources of the ideas - to some degree.  These are not boundaries that have created us, but boundaries that we have created - and often unintentionally or unconsciously.  Such boundary construction is bound to be disruptive to existing structures of organization.  Blogging and social networking in this Web 2.0 form, in a real sense, is both representative of and constitutive of this phenomenon as the report shows in religious switching behavior.  The way that boundaries are constructed and maintained through the medium exist without real boundary commitment to denominational structures - even if there is an appeal made to those structures.  Our consciousness is rather meta-organized much like Robert Kegan's understanding of a trans-system complex.  Here we manage our systems of relationships that are constitutive of our consciousness and to this end, we become trans-ideological and our boundaries become more complex as they become more fluid.  This is, at least, the kind of self that the medium supports even if one does not allow for one's own ideological evolution to reach this kind of boundary reconstruction.

I hope I would have more time to pursue this idea further. 

This is really an addendum to my previous post here.

Marcus Borg weighs in with another way to look at religious switching as other than a negative phenomenon.

I think this is healthy. It suggests that many people have moved beyond their socialization within a particular form of Christianity to a thoughtful (and sometimes agonizing) re-assessment of what it means to be Christian.

However, even here the conclusion he draws is merely speculative.

Americans tend to have a rather high rate of religious switching that has lead to a relative decline in net numbers of various religions groups in rather uneven distributions. That’s it. That’s what it tells us. It gives us no information as to the variances or makes any predictions regarding future landscapes and therefore we would be mistaken to draw such conclusions as Brian McLaren already has and Emergent Village picked up on it:

Old-fashioned denominational loyalty is gone…Why are churches here? What is our mission? What is our core message? Does Christ’s church have a mission, or does Christ’s mission have a church? How much can, and should, change in our churches? What shifts in church history can guide us as we face this sea-change in our religious environment?

The fastest-growing religious segment - especially among the young - continues to be the unaffiliated…”How can our churches inspire younger generations to live a new way of life as disciples each day of the week?”

In light of the accumulating data, it’s become increasingly clear: we don’t just need new answers to old questions, but we need new questions as well.

1) Wuthnow argued this in his Restructuring of American Religion and Christianity in the 21st Century. It has been gone - for a while now. Old news. 2) This is called the cohort effect. Young people tend to be less affiliated with institutions. The Regnerus et. al. study of religiosity among college students bears this out. As well as all of those studies with the name Hoge associated with them among college students. And this is not just because they are suspect of institutions as Beaudoin just assumes in his lousy book on Gen X religion which has no real data to support his assertions. These are most attributable to lifecycle effects that a thumbing of the nose at institutions or an apparent lack of inspiration. 3) My first questions to this end are: How did you reach these conclusions since the variances in the data are not regressed? If we do not know what the cause of some of these shifts are, should we just make up a bunch of questions to “discuss”?

Many others have already written things about the recent Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey as if it really is showing us something new. Ethics Daily (HT to Jim West who gives the appropriate response to the data as of now with “Hmmm”) asks about declining Baptists. Christianity Today criticizes the definition of “evangelical” and “mainline” in the study. Beliefnet actually only discusses the broad findings.

What amazes me is how many people have and will now make conclusions about the survey data that the report itself does not support. One area of freak-out might be the surge in unaffiliated members. It helps to read the whole study rather than the summary of findings on the first few pages. Further down we get a better sense of what the data means.

As mentioned previously, the group that has exhibited the strongest growth as a result of changes in affiliation is the unaffiliated population. Nevertheless, the overall retention rate of the unaffiliated population is relatively low (46%) compared with other groups. This means that more than half (54%) of those who were not affiliated with any particular religion as a child now identify themselves as members of one religion or another (p. 33).

Just because you are not affiliated does not mean that you will stay that way. Moreover, this group should not be confused with atheists or agnostics since only one quater of this group actually identified with this group. So save some of that drama if you are thinking about it or you are already in your study planning intervention programs with your church outreach.

The study confirms the low institutional commitments of 18-29 year olds (the cohort effect), marriage is a cause of religious switching (lifecycle effect). There are also child birth effects and many other factors that we have known about for years in statistical analyses published in such journals as Social Forces and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. I would commend Greeley and Hout’s book The Truth about Conservative Christians which contains more analyses of studies they previously published. For instance, the effect of the aging Gen Xers and their kids who are now just starting to enter their pre-adolescent phase will continue to affect these data in coming years. Moreover, now that Gen Xers are entering different age demographics changes in numbers will take effect. Kids will change that. As more Gen Xers have kids, more will go back to church and the mothers will lead the way. We know this as well. We know that these trends revolve with the religious marketplace. And all of the material on the religious marketplace has been theorized by Stark and Bainbridge.

If you want to know the meat of these parts of the study, I implore you to read some of the articles on religiosity and measures of it in the bibliography in my paper here. You don’t even have to read the paper. Just use the references. These studies already argue reasons for these data through statistical analyses. Let’s look at this material before asking questions Mr. McLaren (and others who will make hasty conclusions).

What is bigger news in Pittsburgh than the death of William Buckley?  The death of radio hall of famer and long time color announcer for the Pittsburgh Steelers - Myron Cope.  He invented a culture in the Steeltown during the great teams of the 70's and his legacy stays in Pittsburgh every game with the flailing of a sea of gold Terrible Towels with his name emblazoned on each one.

He was as powerful a cultural icon as Harry Caray and much bigger than that in Pittsburgh.  He was Steeltown.  He was the Steelers.

See another bio here. He was 79.

I rarely read Andrew Sullivan because all of the political talk bores me too quickly I also think that he made a critical error in his written debate with Sam Harris when he clung to the Catholic card. When you cling to a religious tradition in any such debate with an atheist these days you are setting yourself up for disaster. Anyway, Sullivan writes an interesting little piece in Time that I think makes a very good point to us folks who rather see ourselves in the middle of the right and left both politically and religiously. I know I am more or less in the middle because I have both liberals and conservatives who find much of what I say repellent. Along these lines Sullivan coins a term: “christianism”.

Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?…

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque.

However, the thought here needs some work. Can the faith and the ideology and/or politics be so cleanly separated? Sullivan elsewhere does not seem to think so in a comment about Catholicism:

I can no more divorce my church than I can divorce my parents. Becoming an Anglican, given my Irish-Catholic background in England, would be slightly more traumatic than becoming a Muslim.

So it sounds like a good idea, but I am not sure if it really works out pragmatically. I am not sure it really works out for Mr. Sullivan either.

When I saw this track I thought it was going to be a cover of the Beach Boys song. Instead I got a humorous sort of anti-Brian Wilson musing on the theme.  The song seems strikingly true to the form of which it speaks - especially if you have ever seen any of that mental black hole that is The Real Housewives of Orange County.  The entire album is a glorious power-pop psych-out.  Loaded with shoegaze happy distortion, incessantly catchy hooks, and varied enough vocal textures to balance the low fi personae that resonates outward.  This one is surely to be one of the top albums of the year.

See them on their big bright screen
tan and blonde and seventeen
Eating nonfood keeps them mean
but they're young forever
If they must grow up
they marry dukes and earls
I hate California girls

They ain't broke, so they put on airs,
the faux folks sans derrieres
They breathe coke and have affairs
with each passing rock star
They come on like squares
then get off like squirrels
I hate California girls

Looking down their perfect noses
at me and my kind
do they think we won't
well, never mind

Laughing through their perfect teeth
at everyone I know
do they think we wont
Get up an go?

So
I have planned my grand attacks
I will stand behind their backs
with my brand-new battle ax
Then they will they taste my wrath
They will hear me say
as the pavement whirls
"I hate California girls…"