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Chapter 6:
Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century
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The growth of the Mormons has been rapid and steady. Starting from Joseph Smith’s “holy family” of 23 in the 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints grew by the end of the nineteenth century to over 200,000 adherents, an average annual growth of 17 percent. A century later, it had about ten million members.
Of course, all this was merely bagatelle. More than the nineteenth century, it was the twentieth century was the great age of popular religion. In 1906 a Christian sect was founded in Los Angeles, California, that grew to half a billion worldwide by the turn of the twenty-first century.
In any century popular religion, its colorful leaders and its millions of adherents, is a world outside the interest of our modern elites. The reason is not difficult to discover. People engage with popular religion as part of a self-governed struggle to achieve a competence and respectability in the city, to negotiate the transition from country ways to city ways. To the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, its earnestness and its enthusiasm is slightly embarrassing and shameful, its reverence for the family and its dutiful roles is confining, and its experience of salvation from sin inexplicable. But as this same religion flourishes in the favelas of Latin America, in the chaotic nations of southern Africa, and in the burgeoning giants of East Asia, the observer is bound to admit that there is something between enthusiastic Christianity and emerging capitalism that makes them eager partners.
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up
rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
