Next week Crown Forum will publish “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” The weekend Wall Street Journal gave a generous two–pagepreview.
The foretaste in the Journal presented no surprises, since the author, Charles Murray, offered the standard American Enterprise Institute blame-throwing: “As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration” of the culture, beginning with economic change.
No doubt these urgent reforms did have a downside and contributed to the “American Divide,” but this single-explanation approach leaves out too much about the “why” in accounting for the way “the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated.”
One might add to the list of the many causes of the divide: cynicism spread by cynical popular culture and mass media; hyper-individualism (St. Ayn Rand) and denigration of community and support of “the common life;” polarization in politics and the loss of civility in “discourse;” quick-fix solutions to problems in religious, educational and cultural life where patience would have more to offer; certainly the move into the worlds of virtual reality with artificiality and insubstantiality in the bytes-world; radical pluralism and the jostling it brings.
I know, I know: there is an upside to most of these, but we need to remind ourselves of more causes of division and isolation of “classes” than get much attention in Charles Murray’s world.
That being said, Murray is still worth a read, not least of all because of data with which he works and statistics he presents.
Of the numerous “worlds” he headlines for the “white working class”: “Marriage down 36 percentage points;” “males with jobs working fewer than 40 hours per week, ” “percentage doubled;” “secularism up 21 percentage points.”
Mention “secularism,” and Sightings pays special attention. Murray necessarily has to use broad measuring tools and concentrates on “people who profess no religion or attend a worship service no more than once a year.”
If 38 percent were “secular” by that measure in 1971-76, we do well to pay attention if the figure is 59 percent in the years 2006-10.
There are other ways to measure “secularism,” and church critics might look at the market-oriented and prosperity gospel churches and see that commitment to God through them may often be defined as “secular.”
Still, Murray’s “churchy” concentration indicates what I call “seismic,” not “glacial” shifting.
The church (and synagogue and mosque and “whatever,” as they say in pluralist America), has known other seismic shifts through the centuries but, as many within them remind us, “they’re still here.”
One hears many notices of the change, mixed with lamentations, whispered whining, expressions of nostalgia for a world that never was, along with careful analyses and efforts at programming.
The theologians would say that all this has something to do with the nature of faith in God, hope for the future, and love for the good, and would ask for more than statistics, market analysis and blaming.
If Murray’s work is recognized as a contribution that merits attention, we can thank the author for it, but set it in a larger context than the one he provides.
Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His column first appeared in Sightings.
