Poorer, Less Educated, but not Easily Led

Peter Sean Bradley gave me a shout-out to give my $0.02 on this Unspun piece (I added a link to his post in the quote)

I'd be interested in knowing what you and your readership feel about a comment I ran into on another site that "evangelicals largely tend to be poor, uneducated and willing to do whatever one or two charismatic leaders tell them to do" You can follow the source of the discussion through my blog, if you're interested.

Is that statement a mark of prejudice? Is it pernicious, benign, irrelevant, or inconsequential? Do evangelicals run into that kind of attitude in practice? Do they care if that's a belief of popular culture?

I'm not an evangelical, but I am, inter alia, a civil rights attorney, and my sense is that that statement would be as offensive in ascribing it to evangelicals as to any of the groups that I would recognize as a "protected class."

That zinger at evangelicals goes back at least a dozen years; in 1993, the Washington Post had a reporter call them "poor, uneducated and easily led," which is the most noteworthy version of that meme. Rick from Unspun links to this poll that backs up the first two points. While the stats on the upscaleness of Catholics seems a bit off, I'll grant that evangelicals are a bit more downscale and a bit less likely to have gone to college.

That plays into the hillbilly stereotype of evangelicals. I grew up with that stereotype; my mainline family used to look down their noses at "Holy Rollers." Golly gosh, now I is one. With a daggum PhD in Finance, but I is one.

Peter's right in that if I called blacks "poor, uneducated and willing to do whatever one or two charismatic leaders like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or, maybe, Tom Joyner, told them to do," (substitute Falwell, Robinson and Dobson and you have a direct quote from Rick) my comment section would light up like a Christmas tree. They might be statistically poorer and less educated on average, but it doesn't make them a mindless mob waiting for marching orders from Civil Rights Leaders^®. 

You in the back right-"Their 90% Democratic vote only makes it seem that way." That wasn't nice.

We can't assume that blacks or evangelicals (or name your voting block) are monolithic and/or stoopid, because they aren't. They may be working with a different set of assumptions and values, but they aren't dumb.

Is that "a mark of prejudice?" Sorta; let me rephrase it as "acting on a stereotype." You're likely to believe a stereotype until you're shown evidence to the contrary, especially if the subject of the stereotype is in the opposition. If you disagree with evangelicals and they have a hillbilly stereotype in your circle, then it's in your rhetorical interest to run with the stereotype; you won't get too many brownie points for nuanced discussion of the opposition.

There's also the tendency to label the opposition as either evil or stupid. Since they don't understand the right way to view things, they must be either evil or stupid; if they were good and smart, they'd be reasonable and see things your way.

The problem is that people of good intention and average smarts can have different  world-views that create different political voting patterns. Blacks tend to have a world-view that there's a lot of racism and black poverty and that bigger government and more affirmative action are needed to counteract that; even if they overestimate the amount of racism and the effectiveness of bigger government and more AA, that's the paradigm they're working with. It doesn't make them dumb.

Likewise, evangelicals are coming at things with a paradigm that they're to take the Bible at face value. One of the political side-effects is that it says extramarital sex and homosexual activity is wrong and that it has a strong focus on marriage and family as traditionally defined. There's also a application/stretching of scripture that has God knowing prophets in the womb to treating the unborn as persons, thus giving them an anti-abortion and anti-embryo-research stance. Those takes may seem wrong to those on the left, but that's the paradigm they're working with. It doesn't make them dumb.

"Is it pernicious, benign, irrelevant, or inconsequential?" It is pernicious if a large portion of the population thinks of evangelicals as some dumb mob that marches at James Dobson's command. The rhetoric deteriorates and closes some people's minds to the Gospel if they buy into the rhetoric from the left.

I don't think it's benign or inconsequential, for when Democratic politicians start buying into the meme, it makes the left "half" (not all Democrats will use it, but quite a few) of the political spectrum enemies of most evangelicals. Even if most people see it as rhetorical overkill, it will make it harder for them to take the Gospel at face value if they hear lots of politicians bashing people who do.

Another problem with that easily led meme is it assumes that the leaders are taking them where they don't want to go. Additionally, people tend to assume that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are still major leaders within evangelical circles; they aren't.

Not that they have no influence, but Robertson and Falwell are largely spent forces these days, people who cite them are fighting the wars of the 80s and 90s. They did serve to first focus them on the problems at hand (Falwell) and organize them as a part of the GOP (Robertson), but their heydays are well past. They're still trotted out by the MSM to comment on things, but they've jumped the shark in influence with evangelicals a decade or more ago.

Dobson, on the other hand, is near the top of his influence peak; methinks he may have jumped the shark, but just barely. He's still the biggest political influence in evangelical circles. However, if Focus on the Family were to crater in some massive scandal, there would still be an active evangelical political movement; Dobson's merely a vocal, cocky and effective spokesman for it.

That political influence mainly touches on what Dobson's audience already believes. They don't have to be taught that same-sex marriage is wrong, they only need to learn that it's up for a vote in X legislature or on X's state's ballot and to act accordingly. The flood of calls that come from a Dobson spiel may make it sound like he's got a mindless mob at his beck and call; he's just tapping a body of like-minded folks working with a common world-view.

There's isn't a James Dobson of the left because there isn't a comparably large block of voters on the left that share a common world-view. I sense a bit of underlying envy on the left. Much like they've tried and failed to come up with a liberal Rush Limbaugh (suggestion-Jim Hightower) they don't have a liberal James Dobson, either.

That might be because they don't have a liberal analog to Christian radio. The closest thing would be NPR, but you don't have Diane Rehm telling people to call their congressman to fight the latest conservative excesses; they're limited by their public-funding nature to not be openly activist. Most shows on Christian radio don't get political, and even the ones that do bring politics into the mix like Focus on the Family generally steer clear of backing candidates in order to keep tax-exempt status.

While unions, feminists, blacks and Hispanics are part of the Democratic coalition, none can bring the political firepower that conservative evangelicals can. That makes evangelicals the most dangerous force for the left. They can demagogue against the rich, since most people aren't rich. It's harder to argue against the Bible, since most people would generally be for it.

Instead of going directly against the Bible, the effective liberal attack is to demean conservative evangelicals and their leaders, so that the swing voter gets turned off by them and drifts left. That's what the "poor, uneducated and easily-led" meme does, especially when coupled with the "theocracy" meme.

I'll tackle the theocracy meme later this weekend.

Comments

[Rick]

It's a little far-fetched to refer to Falwell and Robertson as "spent forces" when the media quotes them as much as it does, Republican leaders attend to them and the President of the United States seems to share much in common with them. If these are the Theocracy's "spent forces," I'm grateful they don't have any real powerhouses.

Nevertheless, I find it interesting the way you and Mr. Bradley utilize logical form in your arguments. Substituting "blacks" for "evangelicals" or "fundamentalists" and the names of a few left-leaning African-American newsmakers is, on its most gracious reading, misleading. Evangelicals and fundamentalists actually do self-subscribe to particular points of view, even if they often seem to do so unthinkingly. Consequently, the beliefs to which they subscribe are commonly held by the group, even if not every member of the group holds them. The same is not true of African-Americans: they neither self-subscribe to the group (given the state of science in America today, I should perhaps point out that the characteristics that make them African-American are inherited and, Michael Jackson notwithstanding, largely immutable), nor does the group itself promulgate a particular set of beliefs.

It does make for an interesting Straw Man for those under-educated religionists who may stumble across it. ;) And what better way to allow bigots to continue feeling good about their bigotry than to try to argue that it's unfair to call them what they are on the basis of their chosen relatively-homogenous views because no one would think of talking about some other identifiable group which is not similarly homogenous and did not choose group affiliation in the same way.

For what it's worth, there is a large contingency of left-leaning folk who have also arrived at their beliefs unthinkingly, a fact I have occasionally pointed out on my blog. As a whole, though, I've personally found that group less harmful since, after all, they tend to advocate greater rather than less personal freedom, which leaves room for others to refuse to live their lives according to the unthinking left-leaners' mores. There also appear to be fewer of them and studies I've seen tend to show that liberals as a group tend to be better educated than theocrats. Consequently, I write more often about the phenomenon and the harm of it as relates to the theocrats. Call it an indirect, substitute attack — because, after all, I won't go "directly against the Bible[,]" which I frequently quote — if you will; fact is, as I've said more than once on my own blog: "If America were truly officially a Big-C-Christian nation, I’d still long for the days of freedom of religion, but I have to agree the world would be a nicer place." Hardly the kind of thing I think I'd be saying if I were interested in attacking the Bible, as opposed to the bigots who say they live by it (but for which there is no evidence outside of dressing up and visiting the same buildings every Sunday).

At any rate, it would be a worthwhile encounter to continue discussing these points with you and Mr. Bradley if only the two of you would start using all the tools of logic, and not just those which, through your creative touch and great skill, construct subtle red herrings and straw men. (This is particularly true since one reason I started reading Mr. Bradley's blog is that the two of us actually have similar views on many social issues; we're just approaching them from opposite ends of the spectrum.)

[Peter Sean Bradley]

Rick,

As I understand your position, you believe that you can draw a meaningful difference between the stereotyping of racial groups, which would be pernicious, and the stereotyping of religious groups, which might be valid. I discern in your observation that religious groups are basically a matter of "self-identification", the buried assumption that religious groups are not what foonote 4 of Carolene Products would describe as a "discrete and insular minority." Consequently, I take that, in your view, this distinction is why anyone who says that the statement "blacks are easily led" is the equivalent of saying "evangelicals are easily led" has set-up an "illogical" "straw man" argument.

My basic problem with your precis is that I don't see that racial groups and religious groups belong in different, hermetically sealed boxes, such that the rules applicable to the former are inapplicable to the latter.

First, I am not sure that you are on safe empirical grounds in claiming that religion is purely about "self-identification" or that it is freely chosen. Many religions are in fact a kind of ethnicity, which is why you can have "lapsed Catholics" and "jack Mormons." My partner is a Mennonite, notwithstanding that he no longer - I believe - self-identifies as a Mennonite. In my church, every Sunday we recite that we are a "holy people a nation set apart" because we are taught that we are, in truth, a "people." In other words, belonging to a religious tradition is not equivalent to being a member of Rotary. (My Rotary club has never claimed to be a "holy people," for example.)

This observation is non-trivial for two reasons. First, attitudes and beliefs are formed by early membership in these groups. Run as far as I want, I will never stop being a Catholic on many issues. Second, many people feel they don't have a choice in their religious convictions. After my divorce, I learned that I really could never become, say, an Episcopalian despite the advantages. I'm stuck where I am.

I understand that my evangelical separated brethren often, pace John Calvin, feel that they are predestined to be where they are. Are you so certain that they are wrong? Are you willing to cram your conviction down their throat by claiming that their religious identity is merely a product of "self-identification." I think it might be useful for you to talk to them about that subject. (That's not a patronizing point; I really think the non-religious really don't understand religious convictions; I know I don't understand Protestant religious conviction.)

In short, religious association can inculcate values and attitudes, just like being an member of an ethnic or racial group. Undoubtedly, the members of African-Americans, Jews and Irish Catholics have their own particular shibboleths and totems because of being raised in their particularl culture. Is it therefore acceptable to say "blacks are easily led" or that "Irishman are drunkards" (as I hear every St. Pat's day?) I don't think so because I think those are still pernicious stereotypes, whether based on purported cultural or religious traits.

Second, why shouldn't associations that are freely chosen be entitled to the same level of concern about stereotyping as ethnic minorities are? Isn't "freedom of conscience" something that our laws and cultural ideals pay homage to? John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" was written to argue that tolerance should be extended to groups and people with heterodox ideas. But if we encourage stereotypinga and discrimination against people with such ideas, by describing them as "gullible" or "dangerous", aren't we doing great injury to our ideal of "freedom of conscience."

Third, as an employment attorney, I have to fight the idea that there is a "lexical ordering" of prejudice. I see people make comments all the time about the elderly or pregnant or white, which they know would be sheer prejudice if said about African-Americans. In fact, the law does not establish different standards for prejudice - a disabled person is equal to a racial minority is equal to a woman who is pregnant is equal to a Seventh Day Adventist when it comes to discrimination. One of the most effective things I can do in representing these "less favored" groups is to insert the word "African-American" in place of the less favored groups because that underscores the vice of discrmination because we all know in our heart that racial discrimination is evil!

Sorry, if my logic wasn't clearer for you previously, but I hope that this opus helps you to see that I was arguing from reason and my empirical experience.