Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
Dvault,
That's all true for a segment of the population sure, but the rant pendulum also has to swing back to Trump voters actually having money. There's a lot of pretending (fooling themselves perhaps) to be in a lower class by people who drive their $50k pickups to a NASCAR race.
I agree. We should be clear where this tangent started, which is basically the Southern Baptist ecosystem of churches are at a cross-roads between (basically) Trumpism versus modernity; and (some) leadership fighting for modernity and trying very hard to not alienate racial minorities.
I think it is obviously true that Trump voters were on the whole wealthier than Clinton voters; in this case though we're talking almost exclusively about Trump voters. Obviously almost literally everyone at a Southern Baptist convention is a Trump voter, but some remain committed to trying to thread the needle and re-invoke compassionate conservative branding and beat back the influence of the alt-right. I was simply pointing out that this internecine battle was suggestive of the gentrification of even the Southern Baptists, and wondered aloud what that meant for the people that are are right now on twitter bemoaning the Southern Baptists as too liberal (!!!) because of events like this, and were largely falling out of organized religion. A trend that's been manifest for some time now; this convention is symbolic of the divide, not causative.
It was an allegory about social isolation and segregation and how there's a whole class of people (largely white, largely angry, largely racist, some with decent incomes, some not, consolidated in specific geographic places) increasingly feeling alienated by one of the remaining institutions that was largely considered a bulwark for that worldview/mentality. Again, this isn't Hillbilly Elegy, I do not demand sympathy but simply note that populations of people largely set adrift without structures of social order or any real social purpose besides "fuming in anger" is usually a hallmark of bad things. I do not shed a tear for Southern Bapists either but church in the South is a bonafide cultural institution and its degradation in standing, its decline in the social order is imo a worrisome sign. It's another point in the "America at a dark place right now" data set. Even if we hold their institutions in low esteem, they likely have social utility.
Last edited by DVaut1; 06-15-2017 at 12:15 PM.