Reality, Reconstruction & the Real World
Here’s your weekly(-ish) roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, December 26–December 30, 2023.
Thought-Provoking Content
Motel Life, Lower Reaches by Charles Portis in The Oxford American
I had seen worse rooms, if not thinner and shorter towels. There was plenty of hot water. I had the privacy of a cabin, and indeed not a single neighbor. What I had was a cottage, and a steal at three dollars.
The Sphere by Elena Saavedra Buckley in The Paris Review
After I left Las Vegas, I initially told people as shorthand that I found the outside of the Sphere more compelling than the inside, which quickly began to feel like any other performance venue as my eyes adjusted. Everyone seemed to understand this intuitively; I didn’t have to explain why entering the bubble might burst it. But at some point I decided that I wasn’t really telling the truth.
Craft and Theology: The Reason by Nathaniel Marshall in Front Porch Republic:
The unmoored, untethered existence towards which we are barreling and which, indeed, we are creating, is precisely the one that pastors are tasked with speaking into, and they must speak with feet firmly planted on the ground, fingers firmly wrapped around reality, gripping and gripped by the world that we live in.
One of the Most Remarkable Features of Early Christian Manuscripts by Michael J. Kruger in Canon Fodder:
These abbreviations remind us that Christians communicated their theology not merely by the words on the page, but by visual symbols. The nomina sacra are essentially the earliest Christian art.
The Confederate General Whom All the Other Confederates Hated by Eric Foner in The Atlantic:
Longstreet believed that peaceful and just reunion would be possible only when the white South moved beyond the myth of the Lost Cause. The end of his erasure from historical memory highlights what a long and complicated evolution that has proved to be.
The time has come to shift attention from taking down old monuments to erecting new ones, including some to the Black and white leaders of Reconstruction, who braved white-supremacist violence in an effort to bring into being the 'new birth of freedom' that Abraham Lincoln envisioned at Gettysburg.
Why I'm Increasingly Worried About Boys, Too by Jon Haidt in After Babel:
For boys and young men, the key change has been the retreat from the real world since the 1970s, when they began investing less effort in school, employment, dating, marriage, and parenting.
Music
Baby boy, baby boy, don't you weep
Baby boy, baby boy, don't you weep
You will be our savior, but until then
Go to sleep
Salvation is created, in midst of the earth, O God, O our God.
Fragments
On White Representation in Canadian Churches
What Kevin Burrell may have taken for granted here, but what Americans may not understand, that the elephant in the Canadian room on this point is not race. It's secularity. "A Canadian is basically twice as likely to say that religion is not important at all compared to an American” (source).
That's not to say that there's no race problem here but to say that even if there were no race problem here, we'd still be facing much the same situation.
The visual symptom is the changing racial makeup of our congregations. The disease is an increasing inability to make sense of religious affiliation out of the experience of growing up Canadian.
Give it another generation and the children of the children of immigrants will have the same attitude toward religion, and not because of their race.
For those looking for a way to face the challenge of secularity, may I recommend this book, which a group of colleagues in my city recently read together and had many fruitful discussions about.
On White Flight vs. Religious Disaffiliation as an Explanation for Changing Demographics in Adventist Churches
In sociology, it's said that a lot depends on who gets to claim to the null hypothesis. Is racial self-segregation or religious disaffiliation the status quo, the default, in our churches experiencing demographic change, all other things being equal?
It's not hard to observe that there has been a history of postwar white flight in Adventism: white people moving to the redlined, wealthier suburbs as the older neighborhoods near downtowns became increasingly populated by minorities and poorer. The white Adventists started new majority white churches as the historic downtown churches became majority-minority. And it's not hard to observe that negative attitudes toward minorities persist among whites.
It's also not hard to observe that the immigrants coming from the countries where religion is very important to people are sustaining the Adventist Church in countries where religion is very unimportant to people and that this trend is more advanced in places like the UK and Canada where the difference is more stark than in America (source).
I would combine the two hypotheses: What started as racially and economically motivated white flight is now endemic religious disaffiliation, which shows up visibly as a lack of white people in church even though it affects other racial groups in the nation almost as much (source). So even if a white person is not the sort that would worship with minorities, it increasingly doesn't matter because they don't want to attend a worship service in the first place. And note the the trend of religious disaffiliation is most pronounced among the lower socio-economic classes, in which Adventists are over-represented (see the last wave Pew's Religious Landscape study).
Anecdotally, as a white pastor of a downtown, multicultural (no dominant ethnic group) church in Canada, I've taken an interest in why my kids are the only visibly white kids in the congregation. We could go down a list, and I could tell you which white families in my city might not be attending my church because of racial issues and attend whiter, suburban churches instead and which probably aren't attending my church because they don't value religion they way their parents did. Suffice it to say that the latter group is much larger than the former.