As we watch the political muddle of states trying to sort out policy on gay marriage, spare a thought for a group caught in the middle: the clergy.
I recently wrote on another blog about a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who was dismissed from his position as a Bible teacher because he signed the legal (for Washington state) license for his stepdaughter's marriage to another woman. But what was legal for the state wasn't legal for Brett Hadley. In the authoritarian Seventh-day Adventist church, Hadley was quickly fired.
The Methodist church handles the matter by holding trials for pastors accused of marrying gay couples. Frank Schaefer, a United Methodist minister of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was in November found guilty of violating UMC's Book of Discipline by officiating (back in 2007) at the wedding of his son to another man. Schaefer subsequently had his credentials revoked. (Underlining the similarity to a civil court: Schaefer is appealing the decision.) According to Religious News Service, four other Methodist clergy trials may be convened soon.
To some, the matter may seem simple: if your denomination prohibits marrying gay couples, then don't do it, no matter what state law permits. But in a profession known for organizational compliance, there are still some pastors motivated by conscience and belief more than by polity. A pastor once said to me, "God called me to minister. The denomination I landed in was an accident." As gay marriage is recognized by a growing number of states, it should hardly be surprising that some pastors who hold views that differ from the denomination or congregation they work for will perform weddings for gay couples.
It's hard to know what to make of the UMC's clergy trials. On one hand, they are indicative of defined process and, one hopes, justice. Yet the mere mention of pastors "on trial," especially over something that many regard as a matter of justice to a long-persecuted subgroup, sounds vaguely persecutory itself. (Some Methodist leaders are demanding a discussion of the matter, earlier than the denomination's next General Conference in 2016, perhaps hoping to mitigate PR-damaging situations like Schaefer's.)
We are far from a consensus. Churches are divided. So are citizens. With SCOTUS's passing up the chance to ban gay marriage, state courts are opponents' last chance, and they've generally been supportive of gay marriage. (More likely: renewed challenges to gay marriage bans.) A popular HuffPo piece contrasts Pope Francis' comments on homosexuality with those that got “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson suspended from the popular A&E reality show. Never mind the number of ways the comparison between the two men is absurd: it's one more demonstration of how polarized we are.
It's hardly a novel observation that it's easier to make negative judgments about people who we know little about. Early in my lifetime, we Americans made many negative assumptions about ordinary Russians based on the actions of a few leaders. Today, the same is true of Muslims. For example, Americans believe, based on events like the destruction of the World Trade Center, that there is widespread Muslim animus primarily directed toward them. (This despite the undeniable fact that the West has taken more conflict to them than they've brought to us.) Some assume that there is something flawed in the Muslim culture or character that makes them value living in peace less than we do.
The Pew Research Center is a wonderful resource for understanding faith around the world. One of their latest surveys has to do with attitudes of Middle-Eastern Muslims toward the sectarian strife in their own faith community. It shows that most Muslims are concerned about extremism, and recognize that there's as much or more animosity between Muslims as toward Christians or the West. 67% of Lebanese Muslims, and 52% of Iraqis are concerned about the sectarian tensions between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims. Both groups spawn extremists and terorists. According to a 2012 report from the National Counterterrorism Center, more violence is directed against other Muslims than against the West.
The Sunni-Shia divide is obscure to us, for the same reasons that we don't understand the Muslim world in general. Much like the Catholic-Protestant divide, there are historical reasons, practical differences, and prejudices that are almost impossible to explain to someone outside the culture. Historically, the divide began with a conflict over who should have succeeded Muhammed as leader of the faith. The Sunnis hold that leadership passed to caliphs elected by the Islamic elders after his death, the Shias that Muhammed's cousin and son-in-law Ali was God's chosen successor. This led to them to giving authority to hadiths (extra-Quranic teachings and commentary of the prophet) recorded by different followers and companions of Muhammed. (Some historians say that none of the hadiths are as early or authentic as their followers think they are.)
Springing from their belief in Divine selection of leaders, Shia gives much authority to contemporary Ayatollahs and Imams. It shouldn't be a surprise then that religiously-intolerant Iran and Iraq are the home of the majority of Shias. Most of the rest of the Islamic world, about 85%, is Sunni.
In every major teaching the two sides are in agreement: God and his prophet Muhammed, heaven, hell, angels and predestination. Both groups practice the five pillars including daily prayers and fasting for Ramadan. More interesting to me is what divides them: the Sunni reject the Shia practice of appealing to dead relatives for help or guidance, and are less likely to approve devotional exercises at the tombs of Muslim saints. Shia regard their human leaders, Imams and Ayatollahs, as centrally authoritative and in some cases sinless or infallible.
A particularly interesting finding of this study is that some Muslim attitudes vary less between sects than they do between countries, suggesting that nationalism has had a major effect on devotion. Both Sunni and Shia in Lebanon and Azerbaijan regard religion as of less importance than Muslims in the other countries studied, and fewer than half of Azerbaijanis of either sect keep strictly the Ramadan fast.
One thing is sure: it is oversimplistic to assign the blame for Middle-Eastern conflict to a decifiency in the Muslim faith or character. There are multiple causes, including Western wars and policies. It's also useful to remember that we Christians have a parallel history: from the Crusades to the Thirty Years' War to the Inquisition, Christians shed a great deal of blood, both inside and outside our faith community, for the sake of defending what some regarded as orthodoxy.
Last week my brother and I attended morning mass at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist in Brecon, the seat of the bishop of Swansea and Brecon in the Church in Wales. For those of us with a taste for such things, the service was lovely, not to mention extravagant by the standards of most churches: choir, pipe organ, incense and three priests in posh frocks. It's hard to beat the grandeur (and the acoustics) of a cathedral built in 1538.
My observations probably won't surprise you if you know anything at all about Christianity in the UK. In this massive edifice were seated perhaps 30 worshipers, all of them elderly. From an announcement sheet in the missalette it appears the church has other ministries, such as a food distribution center. Yet that doesn't translate into participation in weekly worship. What the priests and musicians were doing was beautiful, historical, venerable, but apparently not especially winsome to the people of Brecon.
It's hard to measure religious faith, because what people say they believe differs from what they do about it, and notably from what they say they do about it. UK church attendance estimates ("regular attendance" is usually considered once a month) range between 6% and 10%, depending upon whether you're talking about Christians or C of E members. Earlier this year a C of E press release claimed that a mere .3% drop from 2012 translated into the guardedly good news that weekly attendance might have hit bottom. Just remember that that bottom is 1.1 million out of 56 million Britons—about 2%. As The Guardian'sAndrew Brown says the graphs "look like the cool-down portion of a bicycle ride – the precipitous and frightening descent is over, and now there is just a gentle slightly downward path." He adds, "There isn't really a large portion of hope in the age profile and there is nothing in the figures to supply a cheerful story."
Though I appreciated the worship service, I admit I've never felt so keenly the out-of-touchness of organized religious worship as while watching three men in gold brocade dresses read 500-year-old prayers in Oxbridge accents to a mere handful of grayheads. Yet I'm reluctant to blame it on ritual. People in the UK still turn to churches in large numbers for some very ritualized services: weddings, christenings, funerals. Christmas and Easter attendance is up, too. It might even be that ritual is the best thing the Anglican church has going for it. Just don't expect people to sit through it more than a couple of times a year.
The preacher in the Brecon Cathedral that morning (who in person bore a passing resemblance to Martin Clunes) blamed a great deal on Richard Dawkins' and his ilk for their arrogant opposition of religion. What crossed my mind was one of one of the most famous ripostes in British history, by prostitute Mandy Rice-Davies when the prosecutor in the Profumo scandal told her Lord Astor denied having even met her: "He would, wouldn't he?" It may not have been a profound sermon, but it was an honestly defensive one: we would say it's someone else's fault, wouldn't we?
This is the cross that we Christians are currently crucifying ourselves on, throughout the cultures that brought Christianity to the world. The system we've capitalized for two millennia fewer and fewer people value. We've too many big buildings, offices, titles, rituals, books, doctrines and degrees to admit easily the irrelevance of what we're doing with them. We know we're losing our audience, yet are at a loss to know how to respond. Andrew Brown says that the question is "whether things are going to change, or whether the church will pootle along, like an exhausted cyclist, until it finally wobbles over and collapses."
American Christianity, freighted by less history and more experienced in business building, has tried to be relevant. Yet successful empire builders like Osteen, Hybels, Warren, and Jakes raise just as many questions of authenticity to the message of Jesus as do the old cathedral denominations. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt instead of a cassock and surplice, building an auditorium instead of a cathedral, having one rich and famous pastor instead of an entire curia, doesn't excuse one from questions of how wealth, power, heirarchy and recognition fit with the message of Jesus.
Or maybe relevance—that so, so American ideal—isn't even what we should be worrying about. All I know is that there's still spiritual interest out there. Are we in the the church able to help people make something good, truthful and life-affirming of that interest? Or are we too busy being the church?
My friend lost his wife to cancer about a year ago. His children are grown and gone, and the house is stiflingly quiet. "Just a house," he sighs. "Not a home anymore." So after being alone for a respectable amount of time, he signed up for an online dating site.
He didn't want to do it. He feared that dating sites would throw him in with people so desperate and dysfunctional that they couldn't meet others in the normal course of life. But being an introverted person himself who after 30 years of happy marriage wasn't practiced at meeting women, plus living in a low-population area, and because of his conservative faith uncomfortable in traditional meeting places like bars, he didn't know where else to turn.
A new Pew Research study suggests that the stigma against online dating is declining. Thirty-eight percent of Americans who categorize themselves as "single and looking" have used an online or mobile dating service, which translates into 11% of American adults. And fewer feel like the people they meet online are "desperate"—a descriptor that means, apparently, scraping the bottom of the barrel and willing to do anything to get a spouse. Compared with a 2005 study, more are going on dates with those they meet on line, and 23% of online daters said online dating had led to a marriage or significant relationship.
My friend opted for a niche dating site: in his case, one that matches up members of the conservative Seventh-day Adventist church. While there are big players in the online dating market like eHarmony and Match.com, targeted dating services narrow the field for those looking for something quite particular. There are sites just for Catholics, Jews, farmers, smokers, body-builders, deaf people, and fans of the cartoon "My Little Pony".
At least one Christian dating service presumes on God's good graces to suggest that finding love with them is Divine destiny. Christian Mingle's overconfident slogan, "Find God's match for you," led one tweeter to quip, "How did Christians meet before God invented the internet?"
But even with all potential love interests qualifying on one significant point—in my friend's case, all Seventh-day Adventists—he found the process more draining than he expected. He's not alone. Talk to online daters, and you'll hear stories of white lies and exaggerations, or of investments emotionally and financially that don't pay off. Sometimes, the truth is the problem: when my friend was contacted by women who were looking for their sixth marriage, or who opened the conversation with health or financial problems that they wanted him to solve, just having a faith in common wasn't enough. "The odds are good," he observed, "but the goods are odd." From female friends I've heard of men introducing themselves with boasts of their sexual prowess, which says loads about the quirky dynamics of internet self-identity: it's hard to imagine them doing that in person.
At its best, online dating works. But it's different from the old way of dating. First, the pool is larger—generally a good thing. But second, not living together in a community (the way most of us met one another when we were young) and instead forming our impressions in the artificial world of the internet, means there's a danger of being deceived. I can't imagine going into a mid-life marriage nowadays without legal protections like credit, criminal and identity checks, backed up by prenuptial agreements.
That sacrifice of romance to practicality may be the cost of dating in the digital age.
Dr. Ben Carson has received a lot of well-deserved praise for his skills as a neurosurgeon. He even wrote a book about his experience coming up from poverty to worldwide acclaim called (if you'll forgive his self-compliment, which in any case is hard to deny) Gifted Hands. He's also a proud member of the conservative Seventh-day Adventist church.
But his foray into politics has been an embarrassing one, starting with his call-out of Barack Obama at a prayer breakfast. The only person who seems not to know he's embarrassing himself is Dr. Carson himself. The latest gaff is telling an audience at the Values Voter Summit that "Obamacare is, I think, the worst thing that has happened since slavery. It is slavery."
Look on the bright side: at least he didn't compare the ACA to the Third Reich.
It's hard to believe that such an intelligent man as Dr. Carson would make such a moronic statement. He appears to have fallen into a not-uncommon trap of aging great men, who believe their success in one field makes them experts in every other, and gives them permission to hyperbolize as much as they please. That Fox News and Republican leaders have made overtures toward him may be insulating him from the truth. Yet it's hard to escape the feeling, when seeing him interviewed by Sean Hannity, that he's nothing more to them than the conservative black man of the moment, the current anti-Obama, a dark-skinned face who will say what they want their constituency to hear, and who they'll abandon just as quickly as they embraced him. (See Steele, Michael.) The group who hate Barack Obama for his race will hate Dr. Carson just as much should he move any deeper into politics, as he's hinted he might.
Sadly, there are people with weak judgment who might think that a black man whose own people were transported, beaten, and treated like animals should know what he's talking about when he makes the comparison between the Affordable Care Act and slavery.
No one begrudges Dr. Carson his opinion on the ACA. I'm not a big fan of it myself: a single-payer option would have been better in the long term. Still, you don't win arguments by stupid overstatement. You only win stupider, more prejudiced followers.
The effect is to lower Dr. Carson's esteem among those who have looked up to him, like black people seeking education and social betterment, not to mention the Seventh-day Adventist church that has been so proud of him.
Churches have income, employees and capital, and carry on business, sometimes business that makes profits. So should they pay taxes?
A piece by Amelia Thomson-Deveaux in Slate brought the question to mind again recently. In response to political initiatives that advocate churches' right to openly endorse candidates and tell congregants for whom they ought to vote, she has a suggestion: "Religious leaders who want the liberty to endorse candidates can give up their churches’ tax deduction." Matthew Yglesias takes off from Amelia's piece to suggest that we simply tax all churches. Inasmuch as every church across the religious spectrum says it's right and the others wrong, he concludes (a bit tongue-in-cheek) "Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it's undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines. Under the circumstances, tax subsidies for religion are highly inefficient."
These folks have an uphill fight: the church tax exemption is a popular one. But the pro-church taxers may have a point.
For one thing, not all churches are especially self-sacrificing or charitable—or for that matter, very religious. A lot of very profitable ventures (like church-run health care) hide behind the religious exemption to enrich themselves. For another, it puts the government in the position of having to decide what is a church and what isn't. Case in point: apparently Scientology is.
Before you decide, Read Gregg Easterbrook's latest piece in the Atlantic, where you'll discover that the NFL—yes, that NFL, the National Football League, the wealthiest sports franchise in the world—has long had written into Federal law a special non-profit, non-tax status just like churches have, plus exemption from anti-trust rules—and has a near-perfect record of getting huge gifts from taxpayers in the form of new facilities. If you can read "How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers" without your blood boiling, you're a better person than I am. A few exerpts:
"State laws and IRS rules generally forbid the use of nonprofit status as a subterfuge for personal enrichment. Yet according to the league’s annual Form 990, in 2011, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the NFL paid a total of almost $60 million to its leading five executives."
"Judith Grant Long, a Harvard University professor of urban planning, calculates that league-wide, 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, not NFL owners. … When ongoing costs are added, Long’s research finds, the Buffalo Bills, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints, San Diego Chargers, St. Louis Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Tennessee Titans have turned a profit on stadium subsidies alone—receiving more money from the public than they needed to build their facilities."
People have said that football is an American religion. This may be the proof.
Growing up in a conservative church I learned that Scripture demanded perfect sexual purity before marriage. The way the subject was framed even made it seem a virtue to be ignorant and naive. Implied (and sometimes said) was that sexual interest couldn't coexist with faith. Consequently some left the church precisely when they needed a church family most. Others stayed and learned hypocrisy.
Some Christian commentators are questioning the high place we've given virginity. In the Christian press Sarah Bessey, Elizabeth Esther,Rachel Held Evans, Jen Pollock Michel and Carolyn Custis James have all taken on the subject. Writes Bessey in "I Am Damaged Goods", "I was nineteen years old and crazy in love with Jesus when that preacher told an auditorium I was 'damaged goods' because of my sexual past. He was making every effort to encourage this crowd of young adults to 'stay pure for marriage.' He was passionate, yes, well-intentioned, and he was a good speaker, very convincing indeed. And he stood up there and shamed me, over and over and over again."
We Christians pride ourselves on a sterner morality: "thus saith the Lord" trumps any other reason for being good. Yet inseparable from—ideally, homogenized into—a specifically Christian morality is something that we don't always mention: Divine grace as a guarantee of forgiveness and restoration.
In practice, the line between acceptable Christian behavior and forgiveness for misbehavior is a shifty one. The church has had a tough time finding the balance between discouraging sin and encouraging sinners. The reformed sinner back from a life of addiction and debauchery may be a hero, making the rounds of the Christian lecture circuit to show what God can do. At the same time the young Christian trying to make early adult decisions is protectively shamed and scolded and left to believe there won’t be a way back."Your life will be ruined if you lose your virginity" is self-fulfilling: it gets ruined at least in part because we said it would be. And admitting there’s forgiveness isn't giving permission.
Understandably, Christian leaders don’t want young people to do what they’d later regret. There’s plenty to fear about the effects of promiscuity: unwanted children, STDs, exploitation and psychological damage. I think you can make a good argument that fewer of these things would happen if there were any way for the church to talk about sex except "Don’t!"
Given what is apparently permitted under the seventh commandment (concubines, multiple wives, women as chattel, adolescent marriage, child-bearing slaves), it’s hard to see how it can make the case for the judgemental purity preached from many pulpits. The New Testament is clearer on adultery and marriage, but it still doesn’t come up to the standard of conservative churches—a standard Elizabeth Esther calls our "new and improved" virginity. "Ultimately" she says, "we implied that a woman’s inherent worth and dignity could be measured by whether or not a man has touched her."
Perhaps that's why where the church is leading, few are following. A 2009 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy concluded that 80 percent of unmarried evangelical young adults (18 to 29) admitted to having had sex. (See more here.) Another study shows that the Christian purity movement has been a crashing failure: "Teens who took a virginity pledge have sexual relationships that are nearly identical to those of similar teens who did not make such a pledge. The one area in which the pledge does make an impact is negative: Teens who took a virginity pledge and did have sex were less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control."
There must be more effective ways to help young people grow up to have happy Christian families.
The nuances of truth-telling and falsehood have always been near the top of Christian ethical concerns. We Christians say that even if you can successfully fool other human beings, God is watching. A piece in the September Atlantic explores a new frontier in this discussion: more people than ever before are watching, too. Living on the internet means that as never before in history we leave a trail of everything we do and say. It's easy to tell lies on the internet, but hard to lie securely.
Christian criticism of the internet has centered around two somewhat contradictory concerns: its potential for secret sin (false identities, predation, online gambling, pornography) and the erosion of personal privacy. Megan Garber thinks the second mitigates the first, or at least certain aspects of it. And she may be right. Early on, the growth of information on the net outpaced our ability to find it. But Google has organized the internet
, and sophisticated tools in the hands of professionals can make mince of whatever privacy we thought we had.
Everyone lies, although Garber presents evidence that we lie less and about things of less consequence than a moral pessimist might assume. "Our daily allotment of dishonesty instead tends to involve lubricating lies ('I’m doing fine') and logistical lies ('I’ll be there soon') and charitable lies ('Of course that doesn’t make you look fat')." Only the most extreme ethic holds all untruths to be of equal weight, and a few Christian ethicists, such as Joseph Fletcher, go so far as to argue that sometimes a lie is the most loving thing to do. (As for the ninth commandment, it's frankly difficult for it to carry the weight of prohibiting every untruth: its immediate intention was to address a particular misuse of the legal system, and as interpreted by the New Testament, any statement that hurts others. It can't be used, as a few do, to defend blathering your version of the truth at everyone, such as telling someone she has an ugly hairstyle just because she does.)
But the internet can threaten even serviceable polite lies, such as "Sorry, I didn't see your email," when the receipt's time stamp shows otherwise, or "I was too busy to call you back" when your Facebook page pictures you lounging in your hammock with an iced lemonade.
Could the argument be made that this erosion of privacy, whatever its other dangers, is a boon for honesty? "The network," says Garber, "can be its own kind of lie detector." This has less to do with God watching than our desire to be trusted by others: "We may lie sometimes, but we don't want to be seen as liars." Just ask Anthony Weiner what happens to a reputation when one's e-cheating becomes public.
At best the internet brings into high relief basic human inconsistency. None of us are capable of living all in one room all the time. The condemnation of political flip-flopping notwithstanding, a foolish consistency remains the hobgoblin of little minds, which is to say even the smartest and most moral of us are self-contradictory as we evolve and grow. Even without digging too deeply, our historical net presence shows how fundamentally dis-integrated even the best of us are.
Using gas on families and children (or even organized, professional
troops) puts the so-called president of Syria in a class of criminals
who have committed the worst crimes; crimes against humanity. It is my
prayer that he will one day stand before the International Criminal
Court and spend the rest of his life in prison. The fact that a man
trained as a physician, who presumably took the usual oath, is guilty of
this is particularly disturbing.
But does this justify the unleashing of firearms and missles, unless
it were for the specific purpose of making an arrest or destroying the
stockpiles yet unused? (If the news media reports are to be believed, it
is the largest such on the globe right now.) If ever "just war" theory
made sense, this is surely one instance, no matter how much it troubles
my conscience. How could so many Americans, particularly those who have
been criticizing the president for months about not taking a
sufficiently hard line on such matters, now suddenly develop a reason to
hold off? This has to be one of the most blatently political and
hypcritical moments in the history of the United States Congress.
Frankly, the entire lower house should be abolished as being of
insufficient character or intellect to be worth the millions of dollars
it costs to maintain it!
What is the moral path here? Should one maintain a basic position
against all military action, no matter the specific context? If the
criminal element that controls the Syrian government gets away with
this, it may end all of the generations of effort to develop some rules
of war, some standards of decency even when the peace cannot be
maintained. It is one thing for a lawless group in the depths of the
Congo rain forests or rural Cambodia to behave in such horrible fashion until neighboring armies can get to them, but Syria is an ancient nation long visible on the world scene. It is defying a universal decision made in the 1920s, nearly a century ago.
One of the reasons that something like this could happen may well be a sense that there are no cops. Back in the Cold War, it was likely that one side or the other would bring an end to such nonsense quickly and quietly because they did not want the stupidity of some little dictator to upset the balance of power that was more important to them. Now that we have only one credible world power, then the politics change and there seems to be a vast crowd who would like to see the big power somehow weakened just to increase their own little advantage. If President Obama had simply dispatched a blow to Syria before there was much debate, would it have given everyone a sense that the police are still on duty and they had better stay close to the rules? Would peace have been preserved longer and therefore justified the limited warfare involved?
Is the widespread moral fragmentation and failure of character in virtually every country's political elite visible in the last few days truly an invitation down the slippery slope to World War III? Or, does it give peace a chance? We are clearly in a new moral universe. How should Christian pacifists relate to "low-grade warefare" of the type that is currently widespread and so different from what we grew up with in World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War and even the Bush Wars in Iraq? Are incidents like Rwanda a matter of moral ambituity or moral failure of a massive order?
Mankind has invented nothing worse than war. It is all of the evil things about humanity unleashed. We now have a more slippery kind of war, but does that make any less terrible? How did we get twisted into situations where pacifists are marching to protect horrible little tyrants who gas women and children by the thousands? Have we come to the point that if we are serious about peace we must establish in the United Nations an armed police force? Or, allow the United States military to take on that additional mission?
You may think I am hiding an answer somewhere to all my questions; that in the end I will come down one place or another. Think again! I don't know the answer and that is the most disturbing thing about this whole experience of the last 10 days. I feel like my moral compass is spinning in freeflow near the magnetic pole. Things seemed clearer once upon a time. Even my prayers bring no quiet to my heart.
Pew Research has just
released a study that says that the recovery of the past couple of years
has largely benefited the wealthiest 7%, while the lower 93% of Americans have
seen net worth decline. Wealthier households hold their value in stocks, bonds,
and other financial instruments that have rallied in value. But for the majority
of Americans who have little or no investment in these markets—whose net worth
is in their now-less-valuable family home—net worth has declined by 4%.
What will this mean for churches and the institutions
associated with them? Most congregations rely exclusively on contributions, but many
educational institutions are also heavily dependent upon gifts. Those who have
in their constituency a concentration of these wealth holders will undoubtedly
be in a better position to ride out the next few years.
That assumes that wealthy Christians are willing to
contribute. Ken Stern writes in a recent
Atlantic article that the
wealthiest families give an average of 1.3% to charity, while the poorest give
3.2%. Stern suggests that “the personal drive to accumulate wealth may be
inconsistent with the idea of communal support”, and he quotes Berkeley
research psychologist Paul Piff that “the rich are way more likely to prioritize
their own self-interests above the interests of other people.” The reason, he
believes, is isolation: the wealthy are simply less aware than others of the
needs around them. “Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent
areas—areas where more than 40 percent of households earned at least
$200,000 a year—were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in
more socioeconomically diverse surroundings.
The rich also contribute differently than the poor. “The
poor” says Stern “tend to give to religious organizations and social-service
charities, while the wealthy prefer to support colleges and universities, arts
organizations, and museums.” So small churches and schools, especially those
located in declining industrial and rural areas, may continue to decline, while
universities and large congregations, especially those in wealthy suburbs that
are most likely to have well-off alumni and members, might even thrive.
Given the increase in income inequality, that 1.3% can
be massive. Charting the path ahead for ministry providers will require
institutions to get the attention of those relatively isolated wealth-holders
for less “sexy” projects than museums and self-named new college buildings—and
that might not be easy.
