24AR29-25

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AR 29:25 - Globalist elites, ignoring consent of the governed

In this issue:

ATHEISM - what's up with freshmen at elite colleges?

CULTURE - elites as the most "normophobic" demographic

RACISM - the "myth of White Christian Nationalism," debunked

WITCHCRAFT - surveying popular portrayals of teen witches in print and film

Apologia Report 29:25 (1,666)
July 5, 2024

ATHEISM

Ryan Burge <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-R-Burge> arouses our curiosity with a recent narrow sampling of Harvard freshmen. His brief findings:

 * - About 12% of Americans identify as atheist or agnostic 

 * - Among all college freshmen, it was 21%

 * - Among Harvard's freshman class it was 47%

 Meanwhile:

 * - 30% of all college freshmen are Protestant

 * - 6% of Harvard's 2023 incoming class were Protestant

Any questions? Here's one you may be asking after reading this issue of AR: "What did I just read about secularists from elite colleges?" Stay tuned. <www.tinyurl.com/ymnnt4ms>

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CULTURE

"David Brooks on Elite Dysfunction" by Rod Dreher -- Dreher's Substack reports that Brooks (a Canadian-born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times) "remains a valuable analyst of cultural dynamics." Brooks points out the "various ways that the elites become progressives, and how this produces dynamics that screw up society."

   An observation by Brooks moves Dreher to recount how "so many whites - not only progressives - embrace progressive policies as a way of resolving their intense guilt over their own privilege. ... [T]hey are willing to objectively harm their organizations and its function, all for the sake of instituting these moralistic therapeutic policies."

   Dreher opines that: "Elites are the most 'normophobic' demographic in our society. They use their immense power - political, economic, institutional - to undermine or even destroy norms, for the sake of progress, of their idea of justice." And in another scenario, Dreher explains "how a globalist elite establishes and strengthens their power, without the consent of the governed." <www.tinyurl.com/z6myv89x>

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RACISM

"The Myth of White Christian Nationalism" by former Newsweek religion editor Kenneth L. Woodward (First Things, May '24) -- this is more than a critical review of Robert P. Jones' most recent book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future <www.tinyurl.com/5n775b8s> (2023), in which "Jones enlarges the category of the oppressed to include indigenous Americans. He also enlarges the category of oppressors to include a couple of fifteenth-century popes." Woodward builds strong background detail with his comprehensive historical analysis.

   He begins by calling attention to the findings of "a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, <www.tinyurl.com/334h7w9a> where '54 percent of Americans have never heard of Christian nationalism....' And of the 45 percent who have heard at least a little about it, only 5 percent viewed the label favorably. <www.tinyurl.com/4ufr25h8>

   "'White Christian nationalism' entered the political lexicon around 2015 as part of an effort to explain why white evangelical Protestants were drawn to Donald Trump, a thrice-married womanizer who is ignorant of the Bible and says he has no reason to ask God's forgiveness. Since then, hunter-gatherers in the polling industry have sought to identify and quantify white Christian nationalists through surveys. ... And a number of academics, some of them raised in fundamentalist homes, have labored to locate white Christian nationalism within the wellsprings of the American character.

   "Foremost among the latter is Jones, who, in addition to being founder and former CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) <prri.org>, writes books, based in part on his surveys and spiced with slices of autobiography, decrying the effects of white Christian supremacy. ...

   "In The End of White Christian America (2016),  <www.tinyurl.com/mv7n84xk> [Jones] heralded the cultural and demographic decline of white American Protestants...." In White Too Long (2020), <www.tinyurl.com/3kkkxj6s> "the material he uses is old, derivative, and superficially sourced.

   "Throughout all his books, Jones champions diversity and inclusion, but only of the familiar race-and-gender kind." Jones "appears not to realize that the Catholic Church in this country was multicultural long before the most recent tide of Hispanic immigrants.

   "But my fundamental problem with Jones as a retailer of recent social history is that his basic narrative remains a simplistic and mostly regional story of oppressors and oppressed." However, as Woodward explains, Jones' "teachers were blind, but now he sees.

   "Except he gets the story wrong." Worse yet, "none of the conclusions he draws are true. ...

   "Jones is fueled by moral indignation, which is admirable when warranted. But his work suffers under the evangelist's need to condemn and convert. So, with less intensity, do those social scientists, and their amen corner in the media, who insist that white Christian nationalism is a fundamental threat to American democracy. Is it?

   "Actually, the first question has to be, 'What is it?' And the only reliable answer is, 'Depends on whom you ask.'"

   Woodward's lengthy analysis provides plenty of evidence to confirm the impression that he's been asking a lot of the questions Jones should have asked. Woodward has been looking at the work of sociologists such as Samuel Perry, Andrew Whitehead and Philip Gorski in addition to the results of competing research surveys. 

   He concludes: "In sum, 'white Christian nationalist' is an inherently political concept. But so is the concept on which it depends: 'white evangelical Protestant.' ...

   "What links all the books and articles and angst about white Christian nationalism is their political present-mindedness, a trait exacerbated by the prospect of another Trump presidency. Surveys give us snapshots, not storylines. The lack of historical perspective - indeed, the absence of references to acknowledged experts in American history - in the works I've cited is appalling."

   Woodward notes past evidence of how "politics shapes American religion rather than the reverse. ...

   "Yes, those who take religion seriously - that is, those who exhibit high levels of religious belonging, behavior, and belief - tend to vote Republican. But they make up only about 17 percent of the population, according to various studies. They are far less numerous than the 28 percent who, according to political scientist David Campbell and his colleagues, identify as 'Secularists' - meaning people who are not simply nonreligious, but adamant and active in opposing the presence of religion in the public square. The Secularists alone outnumber, by almost three to one, the 10 percent or so who have been labeled white Christian nationalists. And they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

   "Despite the vagueness of the term 'white Christian nationalism' and the difficulty of identifying its adherents, we are certain to hear a great deal more.... But what will we hear of the Secularists, who are more numerous, wealthier, much better educated, and more politically active than those who have been labeled WCNs? What we will hear is the sound of silence." <www.tinyurl.com/4dhu88xw>

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WITCHCRAFT

Ethan Doyle White reviews Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches, <www.tinyurl.com/4tk2jc6m> by Miranda Corcoran, lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork, in Nova Religio (27:3, 2024, pp111-112) -- White authored Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft (2016) which was featured in AR 21:43 <www.tinyurl.com/mztbf323> the same year. Here his focus is on the interest in witchcraft among young people.

   White opens: "In both the United States and other western countries, the witch has gone from strength to strength since the 1950s. ... Indeed, the rising teen interest in Wicca and related forms of modern religious witchcraft during the late 1990s and early 2000s has been explored in both a monograph by Helen Berger and Doug Ezzy <www.tinyurl.com/56k2py49> (2007) and an edited volume by Hannah E. Johnston and Peg Aloi <www.tinyurl.com/ma8pbcwr> (2007)."

   Corcoran <www.tinyurl.com/4rj5hax6> "looks at how teen witches have been portrayed in American literature, television, and cinema since the mid-twentieth century, thus providing important insights into the texts that would have been consumed by many of those who went on to embrace forms of modern religious witchcraft.

   "Corcoran's approach leans quite heavily on theory." White surveys related popular titles in print and film covered by Corcoran, and concludes: "While this is not a book written for scholars of new religions specifically, readers of Nova Religio will appreciate that Corcoran [addresses both] Wicca and LaVeyan Satanism." <www.tinyurl.com/2vt4huak> 

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