NYTimes on Class #2

One of the more interesting pieces to appear in "Class Matters" so far has been "On A Christian Mission to the Top," a look at how evangelical Christians are organizing to change the "class culture" in corporate boardrooms and at ivy league and other prestigious universities. The authors point out that statistically evangelicals became more affluent during the final decades of the twentieth century. But the article spends more time talking about how the culture of fundamenalist Christianity is gaining cultural capital in various high-prestige sites. They write:

What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. In the process they have overturned the old social pecking order in which "Episcopalian," for example, was a code word for upper class, and "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" shorthand for lower.

Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical C.E.O.'s pray together on monthly conference calls, evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street and deep-pocketed evangelical donors gather at golf courses for conferences restricted to those who give more than $200,000 annually to Christian causes.

The Times' analysis nicely allows mobility, affluence, and cultural markers to intersect in this piece. It presents the most inclusive definition of class of all the pieces so far in the series.

It should also be required reading for new faculty members at my soon-to-be-former-institution, Miami-Hamilton, where so many of our students are working-class (and sometimes working-poor) evangelicals. I've had numerous experiences and conversations with students and other community members in the Hamilton area that illustrate this tension. Resistance to readings and films with "questionable content" certainly, but also some interesting red state-blue state kinds of dialogue (I've been asked to defend One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch 22, for example, and the ensuing conversation revealed radically different, and fascinating perspectives about the purpose of reading a novel--learning about the best the culture has to offer vs. learning about ALL the culture has to offer). There's a prevailing sense among our students, and much of the Hamilton community, that the culture of higher education is suspect, and even antithetical to their own ideologies. And at times they're right. The humanities in particular value contingent knowledges and contested truths, for example. The trouble is, the discussion in the popular press of these different ideologies often is reduced to the "elitism" trope.

Humanities ideology (sorry to get all reductive and imply that there's only one version of "humanities ideology"--in reality there are of course many version of the "liberal arts" value system) *is* elite in the sense that it's a value system that's got high cultural capital. A bookshelf full of canonical texts of western civilization (connoting "education") still has a higher prestige factor than a shelf of denominational religious literature (connoting at best "belief" and at worst "rube"). That is indeed a class issue. But as the Times piece illustrates, fundamentalist culture is itself quite "elite" from the standpoint of mobility and the bottom line: "The growing power and influence of evangelical Christians is manifest everywhere these days, from the best-seller lists to the White House" and, of course, corporate boardrooms.

The article--which might have carried a subtitle saying something like "From Bob Jones University to Harvard"--focuses on the organized effort to affect change at high-prestige universities in particular. It's hard to imagine the ivy league losing its secular and socially liberal character, but as conservative Christians increase and consolidate their political and financial clout it's a trend worth watching. The article points out that raising funds to work toward this kind of change is quite easy in the red states:

Mr. Havens, the Brown missionary, is part of the upsurge of well-educated born-again Christians. He grew up in one of the few white households in a poor black neighborhood of St. Louis, where his parents had moved to start a church, which failed to take off. Mr. Havens's father never graduated from college. After being laid off from his job at a marketing company two years ago, he now works in an insurance company's software and systems department. Tim Havens's mother home-schooled the family's six children for at least a few years each.

Mr. Havens got through Brown on scholarships and loans, and at graduation was $25,000 in debt. To return to campus for his missionary year and pay his expenses, he needed to raise an additional $36,000, and on the advice of Geoff Freeman, the head of the Brown branch of Campus Crusade, he did his fund-raising in St. Louis.

"It is easy to sell New England in the Midwest," as Mr. Freeman put it later. Midwesterners, he said, see New Englanders as "a bunch of heathens."

So Mr. Havens drove home each day from a summer job at a stone supply warehouse to work the phone from his cluttered childhood bedroom. He told potential donors that many of the American-born students at Brown had never even been to church, to say nothing of the students from Asia or the Middle East. "In a sense, it is pre-Christian," he explained.

The myth of the benevolence of the rich is alive and well for Havens, who later in the article says "God has always used wealthy people to help the church." Indeed, there's an overwhelming trust of the rich among the evanegelicals interviewed in the article--and among my own evangelical students. Whereas the "educated" are suspected for being elites, the rich are not usually subjected to such scrutiny.

Indeed the kind of "social change" that Havens et al wish to affect generally involves "moral issues," not broader issues of economic and social justice. Havens worries about promiscuity and homosexuality, not labor exploitation or racial inequality. Again, very consistent with my own experiences at MUH. I've talked to students about how this differs from my own experiences with Jesuit education--and I wish the Times had taken up the class dynamics of left-leaning campus activism on Catholic campuses like my own alma mater and other urban colleges and universities.

I hope to blog the series more--particularly the pieces that focus on education.