Road to the Middle Class - Chapter - by Christopher Chantrill

Rosin’s angle may have been the “envy” and “embarrassment” of the Christian right that had voted for George W. Bush, but the story turned out to be her own embarrassment and discomfort with the simple aspirations of the people she interviewed. It seems to be impossible for a liberal writer to report on the Christian right without making herself the story. After reporting that right-wing voter Mary Johnston “wanted to be more like [George W. Bush],” Rosin tells us that what “determined her vote [was] class envy.” Really? Wanting to be like someone you admire is class envy? Envy is usually used to denote a combination of covetousness and ill will. Would it not be more appropriate to write simply that Mary Johnston admired Bush and that the Christian right seemed to experience the Bush family as a “role model” that represented the values and the status it wanted to achieve? Then there was Jim Ardrey, an ex-redneck who had recently developed a parcel of land his family had owned for 100 years. “‘[His family] didn’t know what to do with it, because they were all, you know, rednecks,’” according to Ardrey. But he was better than that. He’d “taken the land and built a housing development of massive brick houses in faux Southern Colonial style, hedges trimmed to resemble swans.” Rosin knows—and so do her broadsheet newspaper readers—that wannabe McMansions are not quite out of the top drawer. But what would you expect in superstitious bigoted culture of enthusiastic Christianity?

Enthusiastic Protestantism is flourishing in the white striver suburbs of South Carolina where it helped elect the heir to the Bush dynasty to the presidency. But it is exploding elsewhere as well: in the minority communities of New York City. Tony Carnes reported in The Wall Street Journal that Pentecostalism nearly died when, on May 3, 1973, newspapers reported that a Pentecostal church near Wall Street had collapsed. (Carnes 2001) Sociologists had reported in the 1960s that “religion was all but finished as an important presence in New York.” Yet today “Hermes Caballero, assistant to Bronx borough president and a Pentecostal pastor himself, says that in the past five years more than 300 Pentecostal churches have been founded in the Bronx.” Born a century ago in Kansas, Pentecostalism has “moved from the American West through New York to Latin America, Europe, Russia, China, and elsewhere. Now the converts have come back.” Says Marcos Rivera, active in the Primitive Christian Church on East Broadway: “There are Josephs arising in this city.”

He refers, of course, to people who have descended from normal lives to utter degradation, and then arisen from the dead to lead their broken communities from ruin to redemption, like Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob, sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, falsely accused of rape and cast into prison. But Joseph was plucked from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fat cattle and the seven lean cattle that foretold seven fat years followed by seven lean years. He came to rule the land of Egypt and came to have mercy on his brothers when they came to Egypt to buy grain during the famine. The Triumphs of Joseph is Robert L. Woodson’s witness to the religious activists working to save America’s most blighted neighborhoods from drugs and despair. They are fallen people: former drug addicts, convicts, and prostitutes. They came from utter selfishness, impulse, and exploitation and transformed their lives towards love, direction, and purpose. They transformed their lives through Christianity. Woodson argues that the vice of drug addiction and selfish impulse cannot be solved by education or by frightening people straight with pictures of frying eggs. “When a doctor… decides to take drugs, his or her problem cannot be solved by education.” People that self-destruct on drugs are beyond rational argument. What they need is not rational rehabilitation but spiritual transformation. Their problem is not a problem of behavior, but a problem of values. The solution is not a change in behavior but a transformation of their values. Part of that process is taking responsibility for another person. Woodson writes of recovered addict Juan Rivera:

[The recovering addicts] kept a vigil of prayer and caregiving over the cots on newcomers who are breaking hard-core addictions. In that process… a part of their heart opens and they have, for the first time in years, a sensitivity to the condition of another person. I have seen men who had been hardened by life, men who have stolen and even killed, come to me sobbing if the person they were trying to save didn’t make it and went back to the streets. (Woodson 1998 p87)

These modern Josephs are raising up their communities with simple enthusiastic Christianity, unheralded and uncelebrated. Our political and educational elites prefer methods of uplift that they control, through government programs, left-wing activism, and top-down consciousness-raising. Yet the spontaneous movements of uplift that spawn in the cities are built on faith and self-help.

Spiritual uplift is not confined to the slums. The Alpha Course, the once-a-week seminar in Christianity, was started by Rev. Nicky Gumbel of Holy Trinity Brompton in London’s tony Knightsbridge. It consists of 15 talks, and a “Holy Spirit Weekend” in the middle. Over a million people have taken the course in Britain and two million elsewhere in the world since 1990. (Combe 2001)

Why should the rednecks of South Carolina choose enthusiastic Protestantism, as they emerge from the hills into the striver suburbs of the new economy? And why should the blacks and Puerto Ricans of New York City choose the ecstatic rhythms of Pentecostalism as they struggle to survive in the vice and social decay in the teeming boroughs of Gotham? Why should the recovering drug addicts thrill to the love of Jesus Christ? And why should the young professionals of London be turning to Christianity? Don’t they know that God died almost two hundred years ago?

And why should the upscale commentators who comment on them exhibit such naked contempt for their honest toil and simple faith? Don’t they know these ordinary people are doing the best they can?

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Chapter 2:Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 2:
Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn