Sunday, November 26, 2023
Americans Under 30 Don’t Trust Religion
When I wrote my series on why Americans are moving away from organized religion, I didn’t focus specifically on those under 30, even though I knew they were the least religiously affiliated. I wanted to tell the full story that included different age groups because in recent decades, all age groups have seen a decline in religious participation. The sociological term for the unaffiliated is “nones,” a catchall for atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no religion in particular.
I also thought that for the youngest adults, the move away from traditional worship was just an extension of the overall trend : a combination of fewer of them being raised by religious parents, a greater social acceptance of not identifying as a person of faith and a cultural association between conservative political beliefs and Christianity that started years before the first Zoomer was born.
But after more reading, rumination and reporting, I think there’s something slightly new happening for Gen Z and the youngest millennials. So I turned again to Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who is a pastor and the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going.” He told me: “The estimates vary on this, but it’s empirically defensible to say that at least 40 percent of Gen Z are nones now.”
And while some of their disaffiliation is driven by the same reasons we’ve seen for older millennials and Gen X, what distinguishes the under-30 set is a marked level of distrust in a variety of major institutions and leaders . . .
A new report from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute calls this “formative distrust,” noting that older Americans had “greater confidence in political leaders during their childhood years.” If you grew up, as I did, during the relatively stable Clinton years, for example, you probably have a very different view of political institutions than someone turning 25 today, whose political consciousness may have been formed during the Trump era.
[F]or a long time most Americans generally respected society’s institutions and processes and expected that even if people had differing opinions, “the adults would kind of take care of things.” That’s changed.
What’s more, some religious institutions have had high-profile ethical failures around cases of sexual abuse — concealing rather than confronting allegations of wrongdoing among their leadership. “Instead of trying to redress these really incredibly painful problems, they made things worse in many instances,” Cox said. “So I think that’s a really different environment to come of age and to learn about how these institutions operate and who they operate for.”
When I talked to several readers under 30 about moving away from the faith traditions they were brought up in, more than one used the metaphor of a Jenga tower: When they lost faith in the religion they were raised in, it was as if load-bearing blocks were being removed and eventually the entire structure collapsed.
Elizabeth Hildreth, 29, grew up Southern Baptist and lives in Georgia. She said that for her, while there were shifts away from the faith tradition that she experienced over time, the first load-bearing block that pulled away represented abortion — she became more open-minded about the issue during the 2020 election. “Once there was a fracture that couldn’t reconcile,” she said, the whole worldview she was raised with “was subject to internal interrogation.”
George started to question whether his faith was meant to be about connecting with God and doing good for others or if it was, “in the more insidious version of it,” a way for powerful men “to give cover to themselves.”
Several under-30s whom I spoke to said their views on L.G.B.T.Q. acceptance and the role of women in their churches were also factors in their moves away from organized religion. Evan Moss, 29, who lives in Arkansas and was raised in Oklahoma, said that coming out as gay was inextricably tied to his move away from organized religion. While he knows that many churches are L.G.B.T.Q. affirming, he said, “It seems like almost all discrimination against queer people is really tied up in religious belief.”
When the congregation he grew up in cut ties with the United Methodist denomination because it was too open to L.G.B.T.Q. rights, Moss said that even though he had moved away from religion at that point, it still felt like “a slap in the face.”
Here’s one more interesting wrinkle: According to Burge, the “long-held trend” of women being more religious than men seems to be flipping for younger generations. His research has shown that “with those born in 2000 or later, women are clearly more likely to be nones than men.” The relationship between Christianity and conservative politics may be related here — as young women increasingly are more liberal than young men, they may be more inclined to move away from religion.
Even though being a none tends to be culturally accepted among younger Americans, that doesn’t mean that distancing oneself from religion is easy. Kevin Miller, who is 29 and lives in Tennessee, also used the Jenga analogy — after one block fell, it all collapsed pretty easily. . . . Building a fulfilling world back up took him years.
Democracy Faces Two Dangerous Threats
Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.
The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves.
Let’s start with the good news: It has become untenable to treat Trump as a normal presidential candidate, thanks to his own evermore radical rhetoric, starting with his pledges to use the Justice Department as a tool for revenge against political enemies. The result is a partial but welcome shift in journalistic coverage recognizing Trump’s journey into what the New York Times called “more fascist-sounding territory.” The Economist, no avatar of left-wing politics, received wide attention for declaring that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”
[M]ost Republican politicians shy away from calling out the former president’s planned assaults on our constitutional democracy, but at least the issue is being joined outside the GOP’s cocoon.
We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.
This led to an explosion of state abuses, including discriminatory voter-identification laws, targeted purges of electoral rolls, gerrymanders that undercut minority representation and changes in early-voting rules that often advantaged some groups over others.
Because such moves fall short of the wholesale disenfranchisement of Black voters during the Jim Crow era — it ended with the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965 — defenders of today’s restrictions insist they are not discriminating against anyone. But making it harder for some people to vote — often in the name of preventing the falsely imagined “voter fraud” that is at the heart of Trump’s election denial — is no less of an attack on democracy.
And the attack continues.
In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.
The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2.
This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote on the Election Law Blog website that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights, since “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act.
Preventing Trump from overthrowing liberal democracy is certainly a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient. Renewing the fight for a new Voting Rights Act and the access-enhancing reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act is essential. But it’s also time to address one of the major flaws of our Constitution: It does not contain an explicit, affirmative guarantee of every citizen’s right to vote. Enacting a constitutional amendment that would do so, Hasen argues, would bring our voting wars to an inclusive conclusion.
A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.
Polarization makes amending the Constitution nearly impossible these days, one reason Hasen addresses fears on both the left and the right. But whatever chances Hasen’s amendment has, it calls on Americans to address the most important question facing our democracy: Are we truly committed to being a democracy? We’ll decide that at the ballot box next November, but we’ll have a lot more work to do even if we get the initial answer right.
Be very afraid of where we could be as a nation a year from now.
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Why Are U.S. Courts Afraid of the 14th Amendment?
Why are U.S. courts so determined to dilute the 14th Amendment?
Consider the recent ruling upholding former president Donald Trump’s appearance on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot. Here we have the latest entry in a dismaying 155-year tradition of American judges stripping that radical amendment to the U.S. Constitution of its intended power.
Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s decision that Trump engaged in insurrection but is nevertheless qualified to run for office is emblematic of the often outright resistance courts have shown to the 14th Amendment’s guarantees and protections. This instance applies to Section 3, which bars any participant in a rebellion against the government of the United States from holding public office. But almost from its inception, all the amendment’s radical provisions have inspired fear and timidity in jurists of every stripe.
The 14th Amendment was conceived of and pushed by the “Radical Republicans” in Congress after the Civil War. They were so named because of their commitment to eradicating slavery and its vestiges from American political life. A number had been abolitionists, and all had seen the threat that white supremacist ideology and the spirit of insurrection posed to the survival of the United States as a republic. Although the South had been soundly defeated on the battlefield, the belief among most Southerners that insurrection was a worthy and noble cause, and that Black people — even if no longer enslaved — were meant to be subjugated to the demands of Whites, was still firmly held.
The 14th Amendment was meant to protect Black people against that belief, and the nation against insurrection, which was understood to constitute an ongoing threat to the future of our country. Frederick Douglass . . . had no illusions about the persistence of the “malignant spirit” of the “traitors.” He predicted that it would be passed “from sire to son.” It “will not die out in a year,” he foretold, “it will not die out in an age.”
It was of this understanding that Section 3 was born. . . . The language is clear: “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States … shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.” William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, widely respected conservative constitutional legal scholars, have combed through the legislative history to answer the question of whether the president is to be considered an “officer of the United States.” . . . They note the “absurdity” of imagining that the Reconstruction Congress would include all other officers, yet exclude those two.
Wallace’s decision is of a piece with courts’ frequent unwillingness to contend honestly with all the radical demands of the 14th Amendment. During Reconstruction and the first half of the 20th century, it was the Supreme Court that left unprotected Southern Black people seeking to vote and engage in the political process in the face of deadly violence by White mobs seeking to disenfranchise them (United States v. Cruikshank, 1875). It was the Supreme Court that held that the 14th Amendment did not protect Black citizens from discriminatory conduct by private actors (Civil Rights Cases of 1883). And it was the Supreme Court that endorsed a system of Jim Crow segregation that essentially nullified the 14th Amendment for Black people in the South for nearly 100 years after its ratification (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).
In short, post-Reconstruction courts have rarely upheld or applied in full the ambitious demands of the 14th Amendment. Instead, its guarantees have been watered down to accommodate the political forces of the day or repurposed to serve powerful interests (such as the dubious determination that corporations are “persons” entitled to its protections), or treated like an a la carte menu, in which some items — such as the guarantee of privileges and immunities and all of Section 2 (which would reduce state representation as punishment for voter suppression) — are essentially ignored.
The 14th Amendment is treated as a suggestion, but rarely in full measure when the status quo will be upended. . . . The Colorado court’s approach to Section 3 continues this tradition. To find that a president incited a violent insurrection against the United States, but to hold that such a president can still run for public office — indeed to return to the presidency itself — could not stand in starker opposition to the words and spirit of Section 3.
The 14th Amendment has once again proven too bold for the judges empowered to interpret it. Political forces are at play again, this time fearful of a backlash if Trump is removed from the ballot. As this case makes its way through the appellate process and, most likely, to the Supreme Court, it should be understood in the context of how the timidity and unwillingness of judges to acquiesce to the judgment of the 14th Amendment’s framers effectively derailed our democracy’s promise after Reconstruction and until the mid-20th century. We must ensure that it does not do the same in the 21st.
Why Americans Hate a Good Economy
Earlier this month, a Financial Times poll of about 1,000 registered voters found that most Americans believe their financial situation has gotten worse since Joe Biden became president. The economist Claudia Sahm tweeted that the results were “impossible,” adding, “The vast majority of Americans are better off financially. Full stop”—before receiving so much pushback for her statement that she deleted the post. This online drama was part of a larger debate among economists, policy makers, and commentators who have different explanations for why Americans report negative assessments of the economy despite some objective positive measures.
Economists who agree with Sahm are heavily influenced by low unemployment, often considered the standard metric for how the economy is performing. Last month the unemployment rate was down to 3.9 percent. But it’s not just unemployment that’s headed in the right direction. The Consumer Price Index was unchanged. A new paper shows that wage inequality has fallen over the past three years, driven by workers leaving their old jobs for better-paying ones. The U.S. has been adding jobs at a record clip. And wages—adjusted for inflation—may have finally surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
Here are seven possible explanations for what’s going on.
1. People need a second to adjust.
COVID-19 caused an unprecedented social and economic crisis, including job loss for lots of people. In May 2020, roughly 60 million people reported that they had been unable to work in the preceding month because their employer had closed or lost business due to the pandemic. Then inflation kicked in, raising food, energy, rent, and housing prices.
Although price jumps are leveling off, it’s important to appreciate that economic conditions changed really fast in both directions, and people may need time to register what’s going on. One researcher found that although public opinion has “historically followed the business cycle” (it declines during recessions and improves during expansions), the difference now is that pay hasn’t been keeping up with inflation. That’s only just beginning to change. If job growth, wage growth, and low inflation all continue apace, people may well start to feel better about the economy.
2. Inflation is just really that bad.
People seem to be more sensitive to inflation than to unemployment. The Financial Times poll found that 60 percent think avoiding inflation is more important than keeping good-paying jobs; just 30 percent favor the latter. Economists tend to think a good economy is one with a low unemployment rate, but for the public, that’s not enough.
3. Expectations are high.
During the pandemic, the federal government provided Americans unprecedented support. It stopped evictions; it dropped thousands of dollars into personal bank accounts; it paused student-loan repayments; it gave aid to unemployed workers; it provided tax breaks to parents of young children, and billions in aid to state and local governments. In doing so, the government may have raised expectations for what a “good economy” is supposed to feel like.
Real wages are above where they were in January 2020, but they are below where they were in mid-2020. An added wrinkle is that most of the wage growth is accruing to low-income workers, which could explain why middle- and high-income workers don’t believe that the economy is doing better.
4. The rent is too damn high.
Housing affordability hit a historic low in August as high interest rates have meant that the typical family cannot afford to buy. Although inflation overall is slowing, shelter inflation is still rising.
If renters who want to own are frustrated, so are some of the so-called winners—those who have already bought their homes—because they feel locked in place by their low mortgage rate. Moving now comes with the high penalty of giving up that rate.
When asked about current conditions for buying a home, survey respondents are utterly despondent, and that could be coloring their overall perception of the economy. And of course, the main federal response to inflation has been to raise interest rates, which actually increases housing prices as mortgages and the cost of construction rise.
5. The biggest winners are at the bottom.
A new study showing declining inequality found that Americans whose incomes rank in the bottom 10 percent have seen their inflation-adjusted wages rise to new heights since the pandemic. Neither the 50th nor 90th percentile has seen similar real-wage growth.
6. The media loves bad news.
When asked last month why “most people still don’t feel positive or feel good news about the economy,” Biden responded in part:
You all are not the happiest people in the world—what you report …You get more legs when you’re reporting something that’s negative. I don’t mean, I don’t mean you’re picking on me or I’m—just the nature of things. You turn on the television, and there’s not a whole lot about “boy saves dog as he swims in the lake.” You know?
Those who blame the media tend to emphasize the apparent gap between how people discuss their own financial situation and how they describe their feelings about the broader economy. According to the progressive economist Dean Baker, this gap “must be attributable to things that [people] are hearing about the economy from places like Fox News and the New York Times.”
7. Democrats are bad cheerleaders.
A recent paper on partisanship and the economy finds that, going back to the Reagan administration, “individuals who affiliate with the party that controls the White House have systematically more optimistic economic expectations” than those who affiliate with the other party. That is, Democrats think the economy is good under Democratic presidents, Republicans under Republican presidents.
But Democrats may benefit less and suffer more from partisan cheerleading than Republicans, suggest two former Biden-administration economists. “When a Republican is in the White House, Republican survey respondents feel about 15 index points better than predicted about the economy, whereas Democrats feel around 6 index points worse,” they wrote recently. But when a Democrat is in the White House? Republicans feel 15 points worse and Democrats feel only six points better.
Needless to say, the MAGA base and the far right talking heads drive the negativity on the economy even as the real source of grievance of in MAGA world is driven by racism and Christofascist desires to return to the 1950's when those deemed "other" - blacks, gays, women and other non-whites - knew their place and either lived in the shadows or were afraid to demand better for their lives.
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