Why Trump Matters
..To a great extent, our progressive culture strips ordinary people of almost all settled roles, other than economic ones. This heightens the existential pain of the already harsh economic realities of our globalized economy, which can be very punitive to the poorly educated. Two generations ago, a working class man was often poor or nearly poor, but he could be respected in his neighborhood as a provider for his family, father to his children, law-abiding citizen, coach of a Little League team, and usher in church. The culture that made such a life possible has disintegrated, partly due to large-scale trends in our post-industrial society, but also because of a sustained and ongoing ideological assault on the basic norms for family and community.
.. white people do not know how to suffer successfully.
.. In particular, we explore the possibility that working class disengagement from the institutions of work and marriage (Cherlin, 2009;Wilcox, 2010) are strongly associated with recent declines in religious attendance among white working class Americans.
.. Thus, if moderately educated whites are now less likely to be stably employed, to earn a decent income, to be married with children, and to hold familistic views, they may also be less likely to feel comfortable or interested in regularly attending churches that continue to uphold conventional norms, either implicitly or explicitly
.. the bottom line is that the changes in the American economy over the past few decades have worked to alienate working-class whites from religious life because of the way the white working class connects its sense of self, and of justice, to the ability to be rewarded for hard work, being honest, playing by the rules, and delaying gratification. When this formula fails, they don’t know how to deal with it. Say the sociologists, “In brief, the declining economic position of white working class Americans may have made the bourgeois moral logic embodied in many churches both less attractive and attainable.”