For the Eco-Conscious Parent, How to Be Gentle on the Earth and the Wallet
By Mary Ellen Slayter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 2007; F01
Those cute little feet sure do make a big carbon footprint.
The mountains of disposable diapers, the piles of swiftly outgrown clothing, the bins of last year's toys. So many resources consumed, so much energy burned.
Modern parenthood often feels like an exercise in excess -- even an assault on the environment.
What, then, is a an eco-conscious mommy or daddy to do?
For Lia Mack, it's a green birthday party for her son, Nathan. She's trying to mark Nathan's fourth without the mountains of wrapping paper and plastic that have cluttered past celebrations.
"We just really want to make it simple," said Mack, a Maryland resident who also has a 16-month-old daughter, Julia. "But it's so hard."
Raising a green baby comes with challenges. Just a glance at the price tags on the various organic baby products suggests that going green could very well mean going broke. Consider: A two-pack of organic onesies from Gerber costs $11.99, three times as much as their conventional counterparts. For my 10-month-old dirt magnet, that's not even a day's worth of laundry.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Cheaper environmental alternatives are available. Look beyond brand-name organic products. And take a hard look at your lifestyle. The old "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" can help you in more ways than one. "Part of the whole green movement is that we need to cut down on all the products that are headed to our landfills," said Trish Riley, author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Green Living" and the mother of two grown children.
Organic and "natural" baby products are increasingly lining store shelves. Grocery-store chains including Safeway and Giant are rolling out their own organic store brands.
Other retailers are pushing hard, too. For instance, Babies R Us, one of the nation's biggest retailers of infant and toddler products, has been aggressively stepping up its green offerings, including food, skin-care and bedding items. Even Soleil Moon Frye, also known as Punky Brewster, is in on the action; she recently opened her own eco-baby store in Los Angeles.
If you feel passionately about the environment, don't let all the marketing -- or the higher prices -- scare you from trying to make greener choices, Riley said. "It's not nearly as expensive as it seems."
Parenting Goes Green
Food: Full Bellies And Fatter Wallets
Diapers: Waste Management
Travel: Hitting the Road With a Smaller Carbon Footprint
Toys and Soothers: Another Round of Play
Clothes: Organic Onesies vs. Secondhand
The Nursery: Rethinking The Furniture Fixation
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Mom, What Were the '70s?
By Mary Kane
Sunday, November 4, 2007; B02
I'm not much of a history buff, but my 7-year-old daughter is. For the past few years, we've spent bedtime following the travails of Mary and Laura Ingalls as they settled the open prairie in the "Little House" series.
Then last winter, Annabeth turned to uncharted territory: the "American Girl" books. Whether the result of her budding interest in history or of the fact that she's not allowed to get an American Girl doll until she's 8, Annabeth readily devoured this fictional series, from Irish servant girl Nellie's escape from the city orphanage in the early 1900s to Depression-era Kit spotting her father at the soup kitchen.
So when Annabeth raced from the front door recently with an American Girl catalog and begged me to look at the latest doll, I prepared to give it a quick glance. She spread the catalog out on the dining room table and pointed with excitement to American Girl Julie -- circa 1974.
That's right, a historical doll younger than me.
Annabeth quickly put this into context. "So you're younger than the 1944 doll but older than the Julie doll, right, Mom?"
Yes. Well. Let's move on. Julie lives in San Francisco, sports bellbottoms, a purple crocheted hat and a "far-out" room with cascading beads. Like all the American Girls, she's supposed to be an archetype of her generation. While 1850s pioneer Kirsten dealt with a fire that left her Swedish immigrant family homeless, Julie faces the "trials" of the 1970s: Her parents get divorced and she fights to play sports with boys, post-Title IX.
The American Girl creators, acknowledging the relatively recent history of their latest doll, say they hope that she sparks remembrances that moms can share with their daughters. Taking their advice, I guess I could point out to Annabeth that Julie's problems, while real, pale a bit in comparison to working in a sweatshop, having no food or losing your home. I could note further that Julie was born at the tail end of the baby-boom generation, a privileged cohort that wielded undue cultural influence and spent much of the '70s doing things you don't necessarily want to share with children.
I can't imagine that the American Girl folks expected moms to snuggle next to their daughters and detail the changes wrought by the sexual revolution or explain what all those people were up to in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.
But what to say, exactly? Here's what I remember: a heated argument at our dinner table the day my 16-year-old brother slapped a George McGovern sticker on our Ford Pinto, the one with the red, white and blue trim. My friend Gayle's house, where a picture of her brother Fred, in a military uniform, hung on the wall. (Fred's room was empty, Gayle's mother never mentioned him, and I knew by the way her father sat in a corner chair, buried in the newspaper, that I was not to ask.) President Richard M. Nixon delivering a speech on television one summer day, with my brother patting the set and saying, "It's about time, buddy."
Given that the dolls are supposed to be 9 years old and that girls who are much younger covet them, I questioned, at first, the wisdom of marketing young Julie. But then I realized that the American Girl people might be on to something. Maybe the closer history gets, the more we distance ourselves from it. Insulated by the years gone by, young girls can enjoy learning about the hardships of pioneer life and the disgrace of child labor. But they -- and their moms -- may not be ready to ruminate on events too freshly recalled. It's easier to give our history a makeover, dress it up and dance around its edges, and then share the results. What more fitting a time period for this exercise than the '70s?
I sported a Secretariat poster on my wall back then. I had my thick, wavy hair cut into a Dorothy Hamill wedge, a particularly disastrous move. I wore gauchos. Only Dan Fogelberg could understand me. And we haven't even touched on lime-green leisure suits and disco balls.
Yes, Julie has a furry foot-shaped rug in her room and a "Brady Bunch" poster on her locker. But there's more to her story, according to the American Girl folks. Julie eventually learns to handle change and "to become more hopeful about her family's future."
Well then, hats off to Julie. Maybe she ends up with the kind of '70s memories she can pass along, even if our own histories tell us that's not always so easily done.
Sunday, November 4, 2007; B02
I'm not much of a history buff, but my 7-year-old daughter is. For the past few years, we've spent bedtime following the travails of Mary and Laura Ingalls as they settled the open prairie in the "Little House" series.
Then last winter, Annabeth turned to uncharted territory: the "American Girl" books. Whether the result of her budding interest in history or of the fact that she's not allowed to get an American Girl doll until she's 8, Annabeth readily devoured this fictional series, from Irish servant girl Nellie's escape from the city orphanage in the early 1900s to Depression-era Kit spotting her father at the soup kitchen.
So when Annabeth raced from the front door recently with an American Girl catalog and begged me to look at the latest doll, I prepared to give it a quick glance. She spread the catalog out on the dining room table and pointed with excitement to American Girl Julie -- circa 1974.
That's right, a historical doll younger than me.
Annabeth quickly put this into context. "So you're younger than the 1944 doll but older than the Julie doll, right, Mom?"
Yes. Well. Let's move on. Julie lives in San Francisco, sports bellbottoms, a purple crocheted hat and a "far-out" room with cascading beads. Like all the American Girls, she's supposed to be an archetype of her generation. While 1850s pioneer Kirsten dealt with a fire that left her Swedish immigrant family homeless, Julie faces the "trials" of the 1970s: Her parents get divorced and she fights to play sports with boys, post-Title IX.
The American Girl creators, acknowledging the relatively recent history of their latest doll, say they hope that she sparks remembrances that moms can share with their daughters. Taking their advice, I guess I could point out to Annabeth that Julie's problems, while real, pale a bit in comparison to working in a sweatshop, having no food or losing your home. I could note further that Julie was born at the tail end of the baby-boom generation, a privileged cohort that wielded undue cultural influence and spent much of the '70s doing things you don't necessarily want to share with children.
I can't imagine that the American Girl folks expected moms to snuggle next to their daughters and detail the changes wrought by the sexual revolution or explain what all those people were up to in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.
But what to say, exactly? Here's what I remember: a heated argument at our dinner table the day my 16-year-old brother slapped a George McGovern sticker on our Ford Pinto, the one with the red, white and blue trim. My friend Gayle's house, where a picture of her brother Fred, in a military uniform, hung on the wall. (Fred's room was empty, Gayle's mother never mentioned him, and I knew by the way her father sat in a corner chair, buried in the newspaper, that I was not to ask.) President Richard M. Nixon delivering a speech on television one summer day, with my brother patting the set and saying, "It's about time, buddy."
Given that the dolls are supposed to be 9 years old and that girls who are much younger covet them, I questioned, at first, the wisdom of marketing young Julie. But then I realized that the American Girl people might be on to something. Maybe the closer history gets, the more we distance ourselves from it. Insulated by the years gone by, young girls can enjoy learning about the hardships of pioneer life and the disgrace of child labor. But they -- and their moms -- may not be ready to ruminate on events too freshly recalled. It's easier to give our history a makeover, dress it up and dance around its edges, and then share the results. What more fitting a time period for this exercise than the '70s?
I sported a Secretariat poster on my wall back then. I had my thick, wavy hair cut into a Dorothy Hamill wedge, a particularly disastrous move. I wore gauchos. Only Dan Fogelberg could understand me. And we haven't even touched on lime-green leisure suits and disco balls.
Yes, Julie has a furry foot-shaped rug in her room and a "Brady Bunch" poster on her locker. But there's more to her story, according to the American Girl folks. Julie eventually learns to handle change and "to become more hopeful about her family's future."
Well then, hats off to Julie. Maybe she ends up with the kind of '70s memories she can pass along, even if our own histories tell us that's not always so easily done.
Will the Bottom Billion Ever Catch Up?
Will the Bottom Billion Ever Catch Up?
By Paul CollierSunday, October 21, 2007; B03
OXFORD, England The World Bank's new president, Robert B. Zoellick, is passing a major milestone: his first time leading the bank's annual meetings. As the world's finance and development ministers descended on Washington last week, Zoellick established himself firmly at the head of the most important agency designed to ensure that globalization does not leave people behind, mired in desperate poverty. But he faces a planet that has changed far more rapidly than his institution has.
The Third World has shrunk, but it hasn't vanished. The new third world -- the hard core of the development challenge that Zoellick faces -- is composed of about 50 countries that are home to a billion people. Globalization is propelling China and India toward wealth, and both are closing in on the prosperous with unprecedented speed.
But globalization is not working for the bottom billion. Their incomes have been virtually stagnant. From 1960 to 2000, the new third world experienced no growth at all. Meanwhile, the economies of the rest of the developing world have enjoyed accelerating growth, decade by decade. First gradually, then rapidly, the bottom billion have fallen away from the rest of mankind. Encouragingly, Zoellick has picked up on this. "Globalization must not leave the bottom billion behind," he told the National Press Club on Oct. 10. But it already has.
During the golden decade of the 1990s, between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the bottom billion's divergence from the middle 4 billion people on Earth accelerated to 5 percent a year, measured in per capita gross domestic product. By the millennium, the income gap between the average citizens of the bottom billion and those of the middle 4 billion was 5 to 1. And if you think that wealth gap is alarming, think about the lucky billion -- in Europe, North America, Japan and elsewhere -- at the top.
One part of the problem is the World Bank and the United Nations, which focus on poverty like a bean counter. That only confuses the real issue. It is not enough that absolute levels of poverty start to fall in the new third world. The further a billion people fall behind the rest of humankind, the more it will present the world of our children with unmanageable pressures. Even as the world's economies are bifurcating, the Earth continues to draw closer together socially through information and migration. So youth in the bottom billion know that they are being left behind. To catch up, they will need spectacular increases in growth.
Most of the bottom billion live in Africa, but the countries at the bottom are scattered across the continents: places such as Haiti and Bolivia in Latin America, Yemen in the Middle East, many of the "stans" in Central Asia, and Laos and East Timor in East Asia.
They are nearly all small, which is part of the problem. Countries with small and poor populations tend to lack the critical mass of educated and talented people to diagnose failure and do something about it.
Globalization has compounded this shortage by making exits both feasible and attractive: The bottom billion are hemorrhaging their limited talent. Chinese students go back to China, Indian students now go back to India, but students from the countries of the bottom billion don't go back.
Many of these small countries are also plagued by civil war. Imagine if India or China were divided into 50 countries. Do you think they would all be at peace? To be small is also to be at the mercy of your neighbors, especially if you are landlocked.
Suppose this country were not the United States but the Divided States, each sovereign and self-serving. The great manufacturing and agricultural heartland states would have been strangled at birth by the absence of interstate highways, railways and canals. The plight of Niger, which is dependent on Nigeria, and of Uganda, which is dependent on Kenya, is to be landlocked and located in the Divided States of Africa. A third of Africa's population lives in such countries.
So how can Zoellick and others help the bottom billion catch up? In each country of the new third world, reformers are struggling with entrenched interests. Catching up depends on the reformers winning these struggles. We can't do that for them, but we can make their battles a whole lot easier than they have been.
In 1945, the United States got serious about rebuilding Europe. Yes, there was aid, through the Marshall Plan. But there was also trade: Washington reversed the protectionism of the 1930s and created the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, thereby integrating Europe into the U.S. economy. And there was also security: Washington reversed the isolationism of the 1930s and created NATO, thereby stabilizing Europe by placing U.S. troops on European soil for decades. And there was also a shrewd attempt to create systems that produce good governance: Washington created the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and encouraged the formation of the European Economic Community, thereby starting the process of mutually setting standards that locked first Greece, Spain and Portugal and then much of Eastern Europe into democratic market economies.
It's feasible to get the bottom billion on a more prosperous track, but doing so will require a serious approach that utilizes all the instruments at our disposal -- and is sustained for at least two decades. Indeed, we will need the same toolkit we used in the recovery of postwar Europe: aid, trade, security and good governance, though utilized differently.
Aid will probably be more or less as important to helping the bottom billion as it was to saving postwar Europe: part of the solution but not decisive. The exclusive reliance on aid has distorted what should be institutions and energy devoted to development. Instead of development agencies, we have aid agencies. Instead of pressure from the street for development, we have pressure for aid.
The distortion of institutions and citizen pressure is self-perpetuating because it crowds out consideration of other approaches. (What, for example, do you imagine aid agencies lobby for?) Our utter neglect of trade, security and governance policies for the bottom billion is a scandal -- and an opportunity. Properly used, these policies have real power, which is why they were employed for the recovery of Europe. Zoellick and others who care about world poverty have to learn how to use the full array of policies, rather than pretending that it can all be done with aid.
Saving the bottom billion will also require the United States and Europe to work together. The emerging economies will need to do the same. To produce this unity of serious purpose, caring will not be enough: Goodness is in limited supply. Fortunately, it can be reinforced by the less morally demanding (and therefore better supplied) motivation of enlightened self-interest.
Moved as I am by the miseries of life at the bottom, I, too, have a self-interested stake here: I am fearful of the world that my 6-year-old son will inherit unless we wake up. The generation of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower rose to the challenge of restoring Europe and gave us a safer world. Our own generation now has its own choice to make: whether to face up to our responsibilities or, like the generation of the 1930s, to go into collective denial and sleepwalk into a nightmare.
It isn't just about Zoellick. In our democracies, politicians will ultimately do what we ask of them. It is our collective responsibility to grasp the challenge posed by the bottom billion -- and, critically, to get up to speed with the issues to understand what can be done about it. Only then will our politicians move from gestures to serious, effective actions.
By Paul CollierSunday, October 21, 2007; B03
OXFORD, England The World Bank's new president, Robert B. Zoellick, is passing a major milestone: his first time leading the bank's annual meetings. As the world's finance and development ministers descended on Washington last week, Zoellick established himself firmly at the head of the most important agency designed to ensure that globalization does not leave people behind, mired in desperate poverty. But he faces a planet that has changed far more rapidly than his institution has.
The Third World has shrunk, but it hasn't vanished. The new third world -- the hard core of the development challenge that Zoellick faces -- is composed of about 50 countries that are home to a billion people. Globalization is propelling China and India toward wealth, and both are closing in on the prosperous with unprecedented speed.
But globalization is not working for the bottom billion. Their incomes have been virtually stagnant. From 1960 to 2000, the new third world experienced no growth at all. Meanwhile, the economies of the rest of the developing world have enjoyed accelerating growth, decade by decade. First gradually, then rapidly, the bottom billion have fallen away from the rest of mankind. Encouragingly, Zoellick has picked up on this. "Globalization must not leave the bottom billion behind," he told the National Press Club on Oct. 10. But it already has.
During the golden decade of the 1990s, between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the bottom billion's divergence from the middle 4 billion people on Earth accelerated to 5 percent a year, measured in per capita gross domestic product. By the millennium, the income gap between the average citizens of the bottom billion and those of the middle 4 billion was 5 to 1. And if you think that wealth gap is alarming, think about the lucky billion -- in Europe, North America, Japan and elsewhere -- at the top.
One part of the problem is the World Bank and the United Nations, which focus on poverty like a bean counter. That only confuses the real issue. It is not enough that absolute levels of poverty start to fall in the new third world. The further a billion people fall behind the rest of humankind, the more it will present the world of our children with unmanageable pressures. Even as the world's economies are bifurcating, the Earth continues to draw closer together socially through information and migration. So youth in the bottom billion know that they are being left behind. To catch up, they will need spectacular increases in growth.
Most of the bottom billion live in Africa, but the countries at the bottom are scattered across the continents: places such as Haiti and Bolivia in Latin America, Yemen in the Middle East, many of the "stans" in Central Asia, and Laos and East Timor in East Asia.
They are nearly all small, which is part of the problem. Countries with small and poor populations tend to lack the critical mass of educated and talented people to diagnose failure and do something about it.
Globalization has compounded this shortage by making exits both feasible and attractive: The bottom billion are hemorrhaging their limited talent. Chinese students go back to China, Indian students now go back to India, but students from the countries of the bottom billion don't go back.
Many of these small countries are also plagued by civil war. Imagine if India or China were divided into 50 countries. Do you think they would all be at peace? To be small is also to be at the mercy of your neighbors, especially if you are landlocked.
Suppose this country were not the United States but the Divided States, each sovereign and self-serving. The great manufacturing and agricultural heartland states would have been strangled at birth by the absence of interstate highways, railways and canals. The plight of Niger, which is dependent on Nigeria, and of Uganda, which is dependent on Kenya, is to be landlocked and located in the Divided States of Africa. A third of Africa's population lives in such countries.
So how can Zoellick and others help the bottom billion catch up? In each country of the new third world, reformers are struggling with entrenched interests. Catching up depends on the reformers winning these struggles. We can't do that for them, but we can make their battles a whole lot easier than they have been.
In 1945, the United States got serious about rebuilding Europe. Yes, there was aid, through the Marshall Plan. But there was also trade: Washington reversed the protectionism of the 1930s and created the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, thereby integrating Europe into the U.S. economy. And there was also security: Washington reversed the isolationism of the 1930s and created NATO, thereby stabilizing Europe by placing U.S. troops on European soil for decades. And there was also a shrewd attempt to create systems that produce good governance: Washington created the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and encouraged the formation of the European Economic Community, thereby starting the process of mutually setting standards that locked first Greece, Spain and Portugal and then much of Eastern Europe into democratic market economies.
It's feasible to get the bottom billion on a more prosperous track, but doing so will require a serious approach that utilizes all the instruments at our disposal -- and is sustained for at least two decades. Indeed, we will need the same toolkit we used in the recovery of postwar Europe: aid, trade, security and good governance, though utilized differently.
Aid will probably be more or less as important to helping the bottom billion as it was to saving postwar Europe: part of the solution but not decisive. The exclusive reliance on aid has distorted what should be institutions and energy devoted to development. Instead of development agencies, we have aid agencies. Instead of pressure from the street for development, we have pressure for aid.
The distortion of institutions and citizen pressure is self-perpetuating because it crowds out consideration of other approaches. (What, for example, do you imagine aid agencies lobby for?) Our utter neglect of trade, security and governance policies for the bottom billion is a scandal -- and an opportunity. Properly used, these policies have real power, which is why they were employed for the recovery of Europe. Zoellick and others who care about world poverty have to learn how to use the full array of policies, rather than pretending that it can all be done with aid.
Saving the bottom billion will also require the United States and Europe to work together. The emerging economies will need to do the same. To produce this unity of serious purpose, caring will not be enough: Goodness is in limited supply. Fortunately, it can be reinforced by the less morally demanding (and therefore better supplied) motivation of enlightened self-interest.
Moved as I am by the miseries of life at the bottom, I, too, have a self-interested stake here: I am fearful of the world that my 6-year-old son will inherit unless we wake up. The generation of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower rose to the challenge of restoring Europe and gave us a safer world. Our own generation now has its own choice to make: whether to face up to our responsibilities or, like the generation of the 1930s, to go into collective denial and sleepwalk into a nightmare.
It isn't just about Zoellick. In our democracies, politicians will ultimately do what we ask of them. It is our collective responsibility to grasp the challenge posed by the bottom billion -- and, critically, to get up to speed with the issues to understand what can be done about it. Only then will our politicians move from gestures to serious, effective actions.
Reduced to the Small Screen
Incident, Reaction, Forget, Repeat: Formulaic Entertainment Replaces Serious Discussion on Race
By DeNeen L. Brown and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 11, 2007; M01
Has racial conflict become amusement? Is the conversation about racism mere entertainment, dialogue rendered for show, inflammatory words tossed back and forth over a racial divide to excite an audience?
Thousands of black people are marooned after Hurricane Katrina amid government paralysis, and the race debate on TV kicks into overdrive. A black woman accuses some white men of rape at a Duke University party and the inflamed rhetoric flies.
Comedian Michael Richards shouts the N-word at a black man in a comedy club. Radio host Don Imus calls the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."
Shouts of injustice fill the small-town streets of Jena, La., after white teens are suspended from school for hanging nooses from a tree while black teens are charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight. Nooses are found at the University of Maryland, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Columbia University.
Fox News's Bill O'Reilly has his turn on the stage of race after dining at a famous soul food restaurant and musing at the surprising civility of black people. Then comes James D. Watson, Nobel Prize winner and head of one of the world's leading genetics research institutes, questioning the intelligence of black people.
And with each episode in the long-running Saga of Race in America, a string of characters lines up to react to the latest eruption. The media records them as they take up positions in the Great Race Debate. The media stokes the discussion as self-proclaimed black leaders scream outrage while opponents -- often white, sometimes black -- scream counter-outrage. The "colorblind" wonder why we all just can't get along. And the rest of us watch from ringside, rooting for one camp or another, sometimes in silence.
Then inevitably, the media turns away. The outrage fades. The talking heads go silent. The curtain falls, and the debate recedes to wherever it goes until the next eruption.
Which raises the question: Has the debate over race become a melodrama? A bad television soap opera? A theatrical stage play with complex issues boiled down to a script? Entertaining words thrown around simply to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere?
Are we doomed to debate racism over and over -- stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes, of shock and awe, with nothing gained, nothing learned?
Or is there a way to change the ritual, to go deeper into our national consciousness and get off this merry-go-round?
'Putting On a Show'
There it was on television one afternoon, another episode in the Great Race Debate. A perky commentator moderated the banter between two intellectuals discussing the Jena 6 case and the debate over racial injustice.
Even with the sound off, it looked like entertainment, says Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, a Texas-based criminal justice reform organization that began probing the Jena 6 case long before it became big news. Bean was watching the show while sitting in an airport. That's when it occurred to him: The race debate had become theater.
"When I looked at the woman who was the correspondent refereeing the fight between two talking heads, I didn't get the impression she was concerned about enlightening the audience or coming to a meeting of the minds or shedding light on inequities in the criminal justice system," says Bean, who is white. "Her primary concern seemed to be putting on a show."
The talking-head debates about racial conflicts "exert a kind of car-wreck fascination," says John McWhorter, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
The debates are like a "recreational source of psychological policing," McWhorter says, "which reminds me of the place that religious faith held in medieval society. Being charged with racism today is like being charged as a heretic in medieval Europe. One must indulge in all kinds of gestures which one may or may not feel because to not do these things is to invite condemnation as a moral pervert."
The debate dissolves into a routine, "where all good thinking people are supposed to condemn that person," he says.
An example: Michael Richards's racist tirade at a comedy club in Los Angeles, where he even evoked a lynching. His words were caught on tape and played over and over. Black leaders demanded an apology. Richards issued a statement and apologized again and again.
Then there was silence. Episode ended.
"And now here we are today and the whole humbug over that looks like the formulaic cartoon that it was," says McWhorter, who is black. "We know now and we knew then that what Michael Richards said some night in some club, in the grand scheme of things, was utterly insignificant. But there is a ritual that America has been going through for 40 years where we grab on to all and any opportunity to show we are morally pure in not being racist."
The Rev. Al Sharpton knows about this pattern, of course. Those accused of racism often go to him or to Rev. Jesse Jackson seeking absolution. Sharpton has carved out a leading role in racial matters. He defines himself, Jackson and others as strategists with a goal. But he is aware that some people define him as a demagogue.
"Don't assume that because a lot of us are screaming and hollering in the middle, we don't have a strategy," he says. The media "try to reduce us to being performers on their stage rather than thinkers in our studies."
Of his penitent radio show guests, such as Richards and Imus, Sharpton says, "I think that they want to appear like they want absolution, but I really don't think that's what they want."
But he plays along, hosting them on his show as part of an orchestrated trap. In the case of Imus, Sharpton wanted him fired, and he wanted his employers to change their policy regarding racial language.
"I wanted to make it very clear to people why it is that I'm going after them, and to let them trap themselves with their own language," he said.
On the Sharpton show, Imus complained that he just could not win with "you people." Sharpton and many other African Americans find that phrase offensive. More fuel for the Great Race Debate.
In April, Imus was fired. The punishment didn't last. He's set to return to the airwaves next month.
And the race show goes on.
By DeNeen L. Brown and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 11, 2007; M01
Has racial conflict become amusement? Is the conversation about racism mere entertainment, dialogue rendered for show, inflammatory words tossed back and forth over a racial divide to excite an audience?
Thousands of black people are marooned after Hurricane Katrina amid government paralysis, and the race debate on TV kicks into overdrive. A black woman accuses some white men of rape at a Duke University party and the inflamed rhetoric flies.
Comedian Michael Richards shouts the N-word at a black man in a comedy club. Radio host Don Imus calls the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."
Shouts of injustice fill the small-town streets of Jena, La., after white teens are suspended from school for hanging nooses from a tree while black teens are charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight. Nooses are found at the University of Maryland, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Columbia University.
Fox News's Bill O'Reilly has his turn on the stage of race after dining at a famous soul food restaurant and musing at the surprising civility of black people. Then comes James D. Watson, Nobel Prize winner and head of one of the world's leading genetics research institutes, questioning the intelligence of black people.
And with each episode in the long-running Saga of Race in America, a string of characters lines up to react to the latest eruption. The media records them as they take up positions in the Great Race Debate. The media stokes the discussion as self-proclaimed black leaders scream outrage while opponents -- often white, sometimes black -- scream counter-outrage. The "colorblind" wonder why we all just can't get along. And the rest of us watch from ringside, rooting for one camp or another, sometimes in silence.
Then inevitably, the media turns away. The outrage fades. The talking heads go silent. The curtain falls, and the debate recedes to wherever it goes until the next eruption.
Which raises the question: Has the debate over race become a melodrama? A bad television soap opera? A theatrical stage play with complex issues boiled down to a script? Entertaining words thrown around simply to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere?
Are we doomed to debate racism over and over -- stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes, of shock and awe, with nothing gained, nothing learned?
Or is there a way to change the ritual, to go deeper into our national consciousness and get off this merry-go-round?
'Putting On a Show'
There it was on television one afternoon, another episode in the Great Race Debate. A perky commentator moderated the banter between two intellectuals discussing the Jena 6 case and the debate over racial injustice.
Even with the sound off, it looked like entertainment, says Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, a Texas-based criminal justice reform organization that began probing the Jena 6 case long before it became big news. Bean was watching the show while sitting in an airport. That's when it occurred to him: The race debate had become theater.
"When I looked at the woman who was the correspondent refereeing the fight between two talking heads, I didn't get the impression she was concerned about enlightening the audience or coming to a meeting of the minds or shedding light on inequities in the criminal justice system," says Bean, who is white. "Her primary concern seemed to be putting on a show."
The talking-head debates about racial conflicts "exert a kind of car-wreck fascination," says John McWhorter, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
The debates are like a "recreational source of psychological policing," McWhorter says, "which reminds me of the place that religious faith held in medieval society. Being charged with racism today is like being charged as a heretic in medieval Europe. One must indulge in all kinds of gestures which one may or may not feel because to not do these things is to invite condemnation as a moral pervert."
The debate dissolves into a routine, "where all good thinking people are supposed to condemn that person," he says.
An example: Michael Richards's racist tirade at a comedy club in Los Angeles, where he even evoked a lynching. His words were caught on tape and played over and over. Black leaders demanded an apology. Richards issued a statement and apologized again and again.
Then there was silence. Episode ended.
"And now here we are today and the whole humbug over that looks like the formulaic cartoon that it was," says McWhorter, who is black. "We know now and we knew then that what Michael Richards said some night in some club, in the grand scheme of things, was utterly insignificant. But there is a ritual that America has been going through for 40 years where we grab on to all and any opportunity to show we are morally pure in not being racist."
The Rev. Al Sharpton knows about this pattern, of course. Those accused of racism often go to him or to Rev. Jesse Jackson seeking absolution. Sharpton has carved out a leading role in racial matters. He defines himself, Jackson and others as strategists with a goal. But he is aware that some people define him as a demagogue.
"Don't assume that because a lot of us are screaming and hollering in the middle, we don't have a strategy," he says. The media "try to reduce us to being performers on their stage rather than thinkers in our studies."
Of his penitent radio show guests, such as Richards and Imus, Sharpton says, "I think that they want to appear like they want absolution, but I really don't think that's what they want."
But he plays along, hosting them on his show as part of an orchestrated trap. In the case of Imus, Sharpton wanted him fired, and he wanted his employers to change their policy regarding racial language.
"I wanted to make it very clear to people why it is that I'm going after them, and to let them trap themselves with their own language," he said.
On the Sharpton show, Imus complained that he just could not win with "you people." Sharpton and many other African Americans find that phrase offensive. More fuel for the Great Race Debate.
In April, Imus was fired. The punishment didn't last. He's set to return to the airwaves next month.
And the race show goes on.
5 Myths About Art, Age and Genius
By David W. Galenson
Sunday, November 11, 2007; Page B03
"Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job." So said Andy Warhol, one of the greatest artists of the past century. He zeroed in on a myth that lives on in the art world and academia alike. Dazzled by genius, too many people assume that artists are born with mystical abilities unknowable to the rest of us. In fact, many innovations spring not from their creators' innate talent, but from their years of accumulated knowledge. Keep that in mind when you head to an art museum, settle into your seat at a theater or open a new book. Sometimes what looks like creative genius is just regular old hard work.
1. Only young geniuses produce great innovations.
Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Rimbaud, Orson Welles and Bob Dylan all revolutionized their artistic disciplines before they turned 30. They were archetypal young geniuses. But Paul Cézanne, Mark Twain, William Butler Yeats, Alfred Hitchcock and Irving Berlin made equally important contributions to the same art forms, and they all produced their greatest work at 50 or older.
The differences between these artists' creative life cycles are not accidental. Precocious young geniuses make bold and dramatic innovations -- think of Picasso's cubism -- and their work often expresses their ideas or feelings. Wise old masters, on the other hand, are experimental thinkers who proceed by trial and error. Their work, such as Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," often aims at realistic representations of what the artists see and hear.
So how did the young geniuses upstage the old masters? The word "genius" is derived from the Greek word for birth, and since the Renaissance philosophers and critics have associated creative genius with youth. Mature artists are no less important than budding ones, but the gradual innovations they make over a lifetime are less conspicuous than sudden breakthroughs. The subtle craftsmanship of old age attracts less attention than the pyrotechnic iconoclasm of youth.
2. All great innovators produce timeless masterpieces.
Because young geniuses tend to be conceptual thinkers, they often create iconic individual works. Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which he painted at 26, appears in more than 90 percent of art history textbooks published in the past 30 years. Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte," which he finished at 27, appears in more than 70 percent.
For mature artists, on the other hand, discoveries evolve over years instead of exploding onto the scene in a single masterpiece. Thus no single painting by Cézanne or his friend Claude Monet appears in even half of art history textbooks. Yet no one would question their place among the greats.
3. Successful artists always plan their works in advance.
Young conceptual artists formulate an idea, then plan its presentation. Picasso made more than 500 preparatory drawings for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," and 32-year-old James Joyce outlined "Ulysses" so he would not have to write the chapters in the order in which they would appear in the book.
Older experimentalists, on the other hand, value the discoveries that come through the process of creation. They try to avoid preconception. In his most sophisticated years, Cézanne never made preparatory drawings for his paintings. Virginia Woolf, who worked until her death at age 59, acknowledged that she wrote with no plan at all so that each day produced surprises. Twain also struggled to chart plot lines, and he twice abandoned "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in frustration. Even when he finished the book after nine years of work, Twain considered it unresolved. The last paragraph alludes to a sequel, which he later only attempted to write.
4. Great artists produce multiple innovations.
One-hit wonders are not unique to rock music. Many important artists produced just one great idea, and in almost every case it came when they were young. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, originally designed for a class she took as a college senior, appears in 16 of 40 art history textbooks published since 1990 -- a number matched by only one other work by an American artist during the 1980s, Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc." The radical minimalist form of Lin's creation changed memorial architecture forever. It also made her famous. Yet she has produced no other significant innovations, and none of her subsequent work appears in any of those textbooks.
Literature also has its roster of one-hit wonders. Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road" when he was in his 20s, J.D. Salinger wrote "The Catcher in the Rye" at 32, and Harper Lee wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird" at 34. Ralph Ellison produced "Invisible Man" and Joseph Heller, "Catch-22," before turning 40. It wasn't old age that doomed these artists to be known for a single great work, but rather their fixed habits of thought. They got stuck in a rut. After making an important discovery early in their careers, conceptual thinkers should follow the Monty Python theorem: "And now for something completely different."
5. Today's frenetic art world demands that artists mature early.
The impatient Internet age rewards flashy visual artists such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Tracey Emin, who became famous at a tender age and rich soon thereafter. But some of today's greatest artists are nonetheless experimental old masters. The painter Brice Marden, who had a retrospective exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art last year, is 69, and has produced his greatest work in the past two decades. The sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who currently has a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Modern, is 95. She did her greatest work after 80.
There are also important experimentalists at work in other fields. J.M. Coetzee, who did not begin writing fiction until he was 30, won the Booker Prize for novels he wrote at 43 and 59. Philip Roth won a Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral," which he wrote at 64. And Clint Eastwood, who directed his first film after turning 40, won Oscars for movies he directed at 62 and 74. Today's culture, with lightning-fast transfer of information and correspondingly short attention spans, clearly favors conceptual innovators who quickly produce new ideas. But these artists all show that perseverance remains a valuable asset: Tortoises can sometimes still win out over hares.
Sunday, November 11, 2007; Page B03
"Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job." So said Andy Warhol, one of the greatest artists of the past century. He zeroed in on a myth that lives on in the art world and academia alike. Dazzled by genius, too many people assume that artists are born with mystical abilities unknowable to the rest of us. In fact, many innovations spring not from their creators' innate talent, but from their years of accumulated knowledge. Keep that in mind when you head to an art museum, settle into your seat at a theater or open a new book. Sometimes what looks like creative genius is just regular old hard work.
1. Only young geniuses produce great innovations.
Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Rimbaud, Orson Welles and Bob Dylan all revolutionized their artistic disciplines before they turned 30. They were archetypal young geniuses. But Paul Cézanne, Mark Twain, William Butler Yeats, Alfred Hitchcock and Irving Berlin made equally important contributions to the same art forms, and they all produced their greatest work at 50 or older.
The differences between these artists' creative life cycles are not accidental. Precocious young geniuses make bold and dramatic innovations -- think of Picasso's cubism -- and their work often expresses their ideas or feelings. Wise old masters, on the other hand, are experimental thinkers who proceed by trial and error. Their work, such as Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," often aims at realistic representations of what the artists see and hear.
So how did the young geniuses upstage the old masters? The word "genius" is derived from the Greek word for birth, and since the Renaissance philosophers and critics have associated creative genius with youth. Mature artists are no less important than budding ones, but the gradual innovations they make over a lifetime are less conspicuous than sudden breakthroughs. The subtle craftsmanship of old age attracts less attention than the pyrotechnic iconoclasm of youth.
2. All great innovators produce timeless masterpieces.
Because young geniuses tend to be conceptual thinkers, they often create iconic individual works. Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which he painted at 26, appears in more than 90 percent of art history textbooks published in the past 30 years. Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte," which he finished at 27, appears in more than 70 percent.
For mature artists, on the other hand, discoveries evolve over years instead of exploding onto the scene in a single masterpiece. Thus no single painting by Cézanne or his friend Claude Monet appears in even half of art history textbooks. Yet no one would question their place among the greats.
3. Successful artists always plan their works in advance.
Young conceptual artists formulate an idea, then plan its presentation. Picasso made more than 500 preparatory drawings for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," and 32-year-old James Joyce outlined "Ulysses" so he would not have to write the chapters in the order in which they would appear in the book.
Older experimentalists, on the other hand, value the discoveries that come through the process of creation. They try to avoid preconception. In his most sophisticated years, Cézanne never made preparatory drawings for his paintings. Virginia Woolf, who worked until her death at age 59, acknowledged that she wrote with no plan at all so that each day produced surprises. Twain also struggled to chart plot lines, and he twice abandoned "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in frustration. Even when he finished the book after nine years of work, Twain considered it unresolved. The last paragraph alludes to a sequel, which he later only attempted to write.
4. Great artists produce multiple innovations.
One-hit wonders are not unique to rock music. Many important artists produced just one great idea, and in almost every case it came when they were young. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, originally designed for a class she took as a college senior, appears in 16 of 40 art history textbooks published since 1990 -- a number matched by only one other work by an American artist during the 1980s, Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc." The radical minimalist form of Lin's creation changed memorial architecture forever. It also made her famous. Yet she has produced no other significant innovations, and none of her subsequent work appears in any of those textbooks.
Literature also has its roster of one-hit wonders. Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road" when he was in his 20s, J.D. Salinger wrote "The Catcher in the Rye" at 32, and Harper Lee wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird" at 34. Ralph Ellison produced "Invisible Man" and Joseph Heller, "Catch-22," before turning 40. It wasn't old age that doomed these artists to be known for a single great work, but rather their fixed habits of thought. They got stuck in a rut. After making an important discovery early in their careers, conceptual thinkers should follow the Monty Python theorem: "And now for something completely different."
5. Today's frenetic art world demands that artists mature early.
The impatient Internet age rewards flashy visual artists such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Tracey Emin, who became famous at a tender age and rich soon thereafter. But some of today's greatest artists are nonetheless experimental old masters. The painter Brice Marden, who had a retrospective exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art last year, is 69, and has produced his greatest work in the past two decades. The sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who currently has a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Modern, is 95. She did her greatest work after 80.
There are also important experimentalists at work in other fields. J.M. Coetzee, who did not begin writing fiction until he was 30, won the Booker Prize for novels he wrote at 43 and 59. Philip Roth won a Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral," which he wrote at 64. And Clint Eastwood, who directed his first film after turning 40, won Oscars for movies he directed at 62 and 74. Today's culture, with lightning-fast transfer of information and correspondingly short attention spans, clearly favors conceptual innovators who quickly produce new ideas. But these artists all show that perseverance remains a valuable asset: Tortoises can sometimes still win out over hares.
Study Debunks Theory On Teen Sex, Delinquency
Study Debunks Theory On Teen Sex, Delinquency
New Analyses Challenging Many Old Assumptions
By Rick WeissWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, November 11, 2007; A03
Researchers at Ohio State University garnered little attention in February when they found that youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. So obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal "abstinence only" programs.
There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.
That new analysis, a reworking of the same data the Ohio team used, is one of several recent instances in which a more precise parsing of data has begun to turn long-standing societal presumptions on their head. By bringing evidence to bear on complex social issues, these studies are forcing individuals and policymakers to rethink such hot-button topics as the benefits of breast-feeding, the risks of teen child-bearing and, in the latest example, the harms long presumed to result from teen sex.
Like many of the newer studies, the latest one -- led by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville -- used the powerful techniques of behavioral genetics. The field specializes in studies on twins, research that can help tell whether behavioral traits are the result of genes or the social environment, and that has periodically stirred controversy when it has focused on the genetic underpinnings of criminality and intelligence.
But the specialty's analytic methods can also help tell whether one behavior, such as early sex, is merely correlated with or actually causes a second behavior that is often found with it, such as delinquency. If two behaviors often exist in the same people but are found not to be connected by cause and effect, then a third factor is likely to be causing both.
That kind of finding can help identify better targets for prevention efforts, experts say.
"Behavioral geneticists have long sought to establish causal links between genes and complex behaviors. So it's fascinating to see them use the tools of their trade to dispute widely held beliefs" about the social roots of some of those behaviors, said Erik Parens, a senior research scholar who has tracked the field intensively at the Hastings Center, a Garrison, N.Y., science and ethics think tank.
The latest example started when Dana Haynie, a sociologist at Ohio State, and her then-graduate student, Stacy Armour, published a study in February in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. They analyzed data collected from more than 7,000 children as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a federally funded survey that in 1994 began gathering information about the health-related behavior of U.S. schoolchildren who were then in grades seven through 12.
Haynie and Armour divided the children into three groups based on when they first had sex: when they were younger, about the same age or older than the age at which most of their local peers lost their virginity. (It varies by region, but on average, U.S. children lose their virginity at age 16.) They also compiled information on graffiti-painting, shoplifting, drug-selling and other "problem behaviors" by those young people in later years.
Their conclusion: One year after losing their virginity, children in the early category were 20 percent more likely than those who started having sex at the average age to engage in delinquent behavior, even when several other relevant factors such as wealth, race, parental involvement and physical development were taken into account.
Those findings supported the widely held notion that loss of virginity at a relatively young age appears to, as Haynie and Armour wrote, "open the doorway to problem behaviors."
Harden, at the University of Virginia, didn't believe it.
Looked at from a similarly high altitude, she said, people might conclude that red meat is a health food, since people live longer in countries where more is eaten. Only when the issue is studied within one country does red meat's link to chronic diseases appear.
Suspecting such an error in the Haynie study, Harden and three colleagues, including her adviser, Eric Turkheimer, an expert in behavioral genetics, studied more than 500 pairs of twins in the same national survey analyzed by the Ohio team. Because twin pairs share similar or identical genetic inheritances (depending on whether they are fraternal or identical) and the same home environment, twin studies are useful for seeing through false cause-and-effect relationships.
The team looked at identical twin pairs in which one twin initiated sex younger than the other, then team members tallied subsequent problem behaviors. If sex really adds to the chances of delinquency, then early-sex teens should end up delinquent more often than their later-sex twins.
"It turns out that there was no positive relationship between age of first sex and delinquency," Harden said.
The way to reconcile that with the previous evidence of a link is to conclude that some other factors are promoting both early sex and delinquency, she said. In an e-mail, Haynie agreed. And the Virginia study, to appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, offers some clues.
It found that identical twins, who have the same DNA, were more similar to one another in the ages at which they lost their virginity than were fraternal twins, whose DNA patterns are 50 percent the same -- an indication that genes influence the age at which a person will first have sex. Other twin studies have found the same pattern for delinquency.
Together, those findings suggest that some genes -- perhaps, for example, those that increase impulsivity and risk-taking -- may underlie both behaviors.
"You need to have some appetite for risk-taking to be a delinquent. And the same if you're 13 and going to have sex for the first time," Harden said.
Efforts to prevent delinquency can hardly take aim at people's genes. But the Virginia study also indicates that social factors, as yet unidentified but perhaps involving relationships with family and friends, have an even bigger impact than genes on whether a child will become delinquent. Those are the things that should be identified and targeted by delinquency-prevention programs, said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, co-director of Columbia University's National Center for Children and Families.
"I wouldn't be focusing on early sexuality . . . to alter rates of delinquency," she said.
Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person's readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.
Even then, there are emotional and physical risks. Young adolescents, in particular, are less likely to use condoms and so are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.
But those are risks that other nations have mitigated with education, Harden and Turkheimer said, while U.S. educators wanting a piece of the nation's $200 million "abstinence only" budget must adhere to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency and explicitly precludes discussion of contraception.
The new study "really calls into question the usefulness of abstinence education for preventing behavior problems," Harden said, "and questions the bigger underlying assumption that all adolescent sex is always bad."
Similar re-analyses have begun to undermine other conventional notions about health.
A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother's IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children's IQ.
In another example, Arline Geronimus, a University of Michigan professor of health behavior who is now a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study, knew that babies born to teenagers are more likely to die in their first year of life than those born to older women.
"But that is an apples-to-oranges comparison," she said. In New York City, for example, far more teen mothers live in Harlem than on the Upper East Side, she said, and "there are a lot of differences between those groups."
So Geronimus looked more closely and got a different answer.
"If you compare Harlem teen moms to Harlem older moms, you find that the kids of the teen moms are actually less likely to die," she said. The reasons include the fact that, unlike older women, poor teenagers are generally not juggling jobs and have older relatives to help.
It can make sense for poor women to have children when they are quite young, Geronimus concludes, and any effort to change that ought to treat it as an economic problem, not a health education problem.
In a different re-analysis, Geronimus made another counterintuitive finding. While it is true that, in general, teen mothers are less likely to breast-feed their babies than older moms, it is not true among poor women. Poor teenagers are actually more likely to breast-feed than poor older moms, in large part because the older women have jobs that don't grant them the time to breast-feed or pump milk.
Because of that misconception, programs promoting breast-feeding have targeted teens instead of older women, Geronimus said. And they have taken aim, in part, at a concern that teenagers were believed to have: the cosmetic effects of breast-feeding on their breasts.
"So you've targeted the wrong population," Geronimus said, "and come up with the wrong kind of intervention."
In God's name
Nov 1st 2007
From The Economist print edition
Religion will play a big role in this century's politics. John Micklethwait (interviewed here) asks how we should deal with it
THE four-hour journey through the bush from Kano to Jos in northern Nigeria features many of the staples of African life: checkpoints with greedy soldiers, huge potholes, scrawny children in football shirts drying rice on the road. But it is also a journey along a front-line.
Nigeria, evenly split between Christians and Muslims, is a country where people identify themselves by their religion first and as Nigerians second (see chart 1). Around 20,000 have been killed in God's name since 1990, estimates Shehu Sani, a local chronicler of religious violence. Kano, the centre of the Islamic north, introduced sharia law seven years ago. Many of the Christians who fled ended up in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, where the Christian south begins. The road between the two towns is dotted with competing churches and mosques.
This is one of many religious battlefields in this part of Africa. Evangelical Christians, backed by American collection-plate money, are surging northwards, clashing with Islamic fundamentalists, backed by Saudi petrodollars, surging southwards. And the Christian-Muslim split is only one form of religious competition in northern Nigeria. Events in Iraq have set Sunnis, who make up most of Nigeria's Muslims, against the better-organised Shias; about 50 people have died in intra-Muslim violence, reckons Mr Sani. On the Christian side, Catholics are in a more peaceful battle with Protestant evangelists, whose signs promising immediate redemption dominate the roadside. By the time you reach Jos and see a poster proclaiming “the ABC of nourishment”, you are surprised to discover it is for chocolate.
Recently Christians have been returning to Kano, partly because sharia law (which in any case applies only to Muslims) has been introduced sympathetically. None of the bloodier sentences has been carried out. Indeed, the election in April was settled in a reassuringly secular way—with the local political barons swapping cash and ballot papers in the bungalow of the Prince Hotel.
Yet it would not take much for things to boil over again. The Muslim north resents the Christian south's hogging of Nigeria's oil money. When earlier this year the shadowy “Black Taliban” struck a police station in Kano, around 20 militants were killed. In September Muslim youths set shops on fire after rumours that a Christian teacher in the area had drawn a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. And the missionaries are still pushing provocatively north. Salihu Garba, a prominent Muslim convert to Christianity (who has survived various assassination attempts), claims that the Evangelical Church of West Africa now has 157 churches in Kano state—double the number five years ago.
The journey from Kano to Jos may seem a trip back in time. In fact, religious front-lines criss-cross the globe.
Most obviously, Americans and Britons would not be dying in Iraq and Afghanistan had 19 young Muslims not attacked the United States in the name of Allah. The West's previous great military interventions were to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croatians. America's next war could be against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Other conflicts have acquired a new religious edge. In the poisonous war over Palestine, ever more people are claiming God on their side (with some of the most zealous sorts living miles away from the conflict). In Myanmar (Burma) Buddhist monks nearly brought down an evil regime, but in Sri Lanka they have prolonged a bloody conflict with Muslims. If India has an election, a bridge to Sri Lanka supposedly built by the god Ram (and a team of monkeys) may matter as much as a nuclear deal with America.
Formerly communist countries are also getting hooked again on the opium of the people. Russia's secret police, the KGB, hounded religion: its successor, the FSB, has its own Orthodox church opposite its headquarters. In the Polish parliament the speaker crosses himself before taking his seat. Some of China's technocrats think that Confucianism, which Mao condemned as “feudal”, is useful social glue in their fast-changing country. But they brutally repressed a Buddhist sect, the Falun Gong, and they are worried that Christian churchgoers may already outnumber Communist Party members.
In Western politics, too, religion has forced itself back into the public square. The American president begins each day on his knees and each cabinet meeting with a prayer. The easiest way to tell a Republican from a Democrat is to ask how often he or she goes to church. And although European liberals sneer about American theocracy, American conservatives claim that secular, childless Europe is turning into Eurabia.
Many secular intellectuals think that the real “clash of civilisations” is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A succession of bestselling books have torn into religion—Sam Harris's “The End of Faith”, Richard Dawkins's “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens's “God is not Great—How Religion Poisons Everything”. This counterattack already shows a religious intensity. Mr Dawkins has set up an organisation to help atheists around the world.
Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. After all, it has been a canon of progressive thought since the Enlightenment that modernity—that heady combination of science, learning and democracy—would kill religion. Plainly, this has not happened. Numbers about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that any drift towards secularism has been halted, and some show religion to be on the increase. The proportion of people attached to the world's four biggest religions—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism—rose from 67% in 1900 to 73% in 2005 and may reach 80% by 2050 (see chart 2).
Moreover, from a secularist point of view, the wrong sorts of religion are flourishing, and in the wrong places. In general, it is the tougher versions of religion that are doing best—the sort that claim Adam and Eve met 6,003 years ago. Some of the new converts are from the ranks of the underprivileged (Pentecostalism has spread rapidly in the favelas of Brazil), but many are not. American evangelicals tend to be well-educated and well-off. In India and Turkey religious parties have been driven by the up-and-coming bourgeoisie.
With modernity now religion's friend, an eternal subject has become fashionable. Father Richard John Neuhaus points out that when he founded his Centre for Religion and Society in 1984, there were only four centres of religion and public life in America; now, he thinks, there are more than 200. Religious people are getting more vocal in all sorts of fields, including business. Religion is also cropping up in economics. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian, re-examined Max Weber's theory of the Protestant work ethic to explain why Europeans work less than Americans.
The garden of Eden
Philip Jenkins, one of America's best scholars of religion, claims that when historians look back at this century, they will probably see religion as “the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood and, of course, conflicts and wars.” If the first seven years are anything to go by, Mr Jenkins may well turn out to be right.
What has changed? The main protagonists are oddly unhelpful in providing explanations. Believers usually produce some version of “you can't repress the truth for ever.” Sociologists point out that outside western Europe most people have always been religious. Peter Berger, the dean of the subject, chides journalists for investigating the religious rule, not the secular exception: “Rather than studying American evangelicals and Islamic mullahs, you should look at Swedes and New England college professors.”
Yet even if underlying piety has not changed that much, religion's role in public life plainly has. Only ten years ago, most academics and politicians would have dismissed Mr Jenkins's claim about religion being central to politics as weird.
After all, for much of the 20th century religion was banished from politics. For most elites, God had been undone by Darwin, dismissed by Marx, deconstructed by Freud. Stalin forcibly ejected Him, but in much of western Europe there was no need for force: religion had been on the slide for centuries. In Britain the “long withdrawing roar” of Anglicanism that Matthew Arnold lamented faded to a distant echo in the 20th century.
In America the number of churchgoers stayed high, but evangelical Christians retreated from politics, embarrassed by the failure of prohibition and the Scopes Monkey trial (in which creationists were mocked). In 1960 Jack Kennedy assured the country that his Catholicism would not pollute his politics. In 1966 Time magazine famously ran a cover asking “Is God dead?”; three years later man reached the moon, metaphorically conquering the heavens.
For modernising post-colonial leaders in the developing world, secularism and progress were indivisible. “The fez”, said Kemal Ataturk, “sat upon our heads as a sign of ignorance and fanaticism.” In India Jawaharlal Nehru wished to make “a clean sweep” of organised religion: “almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.” In Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser, the champion of Arab nationalism, clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood. Africa's new rulers nationalised the Christian mission schools that had taught them. Even “the Jewish state” deemed religion a distraction: after Israel's founding in 1948 the secular David Ben-Gurion agreed that rabbinical law would prevail in matters such as marriage and divorce partly because he assumed the Orthodox would melt away.
In retrospect, the turning point came long before Osama bin Laden declared his jihad on Jews and Crusaders. For Timothy Shah, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who is writing a book on secularism, the symbolic turning point was the six-day war of 1967. It marked a crushing defeat for secular pan-Arabism; meanwhile Israel's “miraculous” triumph gave God a stronger voice in its politics, emboldening the settler movement. In the same year a Hindu nationalist party won 9.4% of the vote in India.
By the end of the 1970s this counter-revolution was in full swing. America had elected its first proudly born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter; Jerry Falwell had founded the Moral Majority; Iran had replaced the worldly shah with Ayatollah Khomeini; Zia ul Haq was busy Islamising Pakistan; Buddhism had been formally granted the foremost place in Sri Lanka's constitution; and an anti-communist Pole had become head of the Catholic church.
What caused this shift? Believers inevitably see a populist revolt against the overreach of elitist secularism—be it America's Supreme Court legalising pornography or Indira Gandhi harrying Hindus. From a more secular viewpoint, John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian, points out that much religious politics dates back to the 1970s, a time when more worldly “isms” seemed to fail. By then, the Soviet Union's evils had made a mockery of Marxism, and capitalism had also hit some buffers (the oil shocks, hyperinflation). More generally, politicians' ability to solve problems such as crime or unemployment was questioned: faith in government tumbled just about everywhere in the 1970s—and has stayed low since.
But why has religion's power seemed to keep on increasing? The first reason is a series of reactions and counter-reactions. Fundamentalist Islam, for instance, has helped spur radical Judaism and Hinduism, which in turn have reinforced the mullahs' fervour. Hamas owes much to Israel's settlers. Without Falwell, Messrs Hitchens and Dawkins would have smaller royalties.
Second, the latest form of modernity—globalisation—has propelled religion forward. For traditionalists, faith has acted as a barrier against change. For prosperous suburbanites, faith has become something of a lifestyle coach. It is no accident that America's bestselling religious book is called “The Purpose Driven Life”.
A hitch for the Hitch
Whatever the exact cause, two groups of people in particular have struggled to come to terms with this new world. The first is politicians, especially practitioners of foreign policy. Realpolitik does not easily cope with the irrational. For instance, religion does not appear in the index of “Diplomacy”, Henry Kissinger's 900-page masterpiece on statesmanship (a mistake, admits the former secretary of state, who now sees some “depressing similarities” with 17th-century Europe).
Mr Kissinger is not alone. Before September 11th 2001, most “big books” (with the exception of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilisations”) predicted a secular end to history. The Economist was so confident of the Almighty's demise that we published His obituary in our millennium issue. Madeleine Albright recalls a meeting at the State Department about Northern Ireland in the late 1990s when a diplomat asked despairingly: “Who would believe that we would be dealing with a religious conflict near the end of the 20th century?”
September 11th has changed that. A decade ago, a proposal by the CIA to study religion was vetoed as “mere sociology”; that would not happen now. But mistakes are still made. When America went into Iraq, people worried about George Bush's God-directed foreign policy; in fact it would have helped if Donald Rumsfeld et al had understood more about religion—especially the difference between Shias and Sunnis. “Everywhere we look, we have religious problems,” admits one (born-again) member of the Bush team. “And it is not just Islam. There are the Orthodox in Russia, Hindu nationalism in India, Christians in China...the list is long.”
The other group struggling to deal with religion's role in public life are liberals. When religious belief is plainly unreasonable—for instance, when schools teach creationism—it is easy to fight. But in many disputes there are liberal answers on both sides. Those who are embracing religion nowadays are doing so out of choice. Is it liberal to stop a British Airways worker from wearing a crucifix? Whose rights are being infringed when a majority of people on a Turkish bus ask the driver to stop so they can pray?
A schism in Western liberalism that dates back to its two founding revolutions seems to have reopened. In France, where the Catholic church was the sole faith, the revolutionnaires detested God as a crucial part of the ancien régime: politics, they declared, henceforth would be protected from this evil. By contrast, America's Founding Fathers, used to many competing faiths, took a more benign view. They divided church from state not least to protect the former from the latter.
This special report is an attempt to tease out these conflicts. It comes with three health warnings. First, many numbers in religion are dodgy: most churches inflate their support and many governments do not record religion in their censuses (in Nigeria the best source is health records). Second, in a field where many believers claim to know all the answers, it poses mainly questions. And lastly, given the emotion the subject arouses, the chances are that some of what follows will offend you.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
From The Economist print edition
Religion will play a big role in this century's politics. John Micklethwait (interviewed here) asks how we should deal with it
THE four-hour journey through the bush from Kano to Jos in northern Nigeria features many of the staples of African life: checkpoints with greedy soldiers, huge potholes, scrawny children in football shirts drying rice on the road. But it is also a journey along a front-line.
Nigeria, evenly split between Christians and Muslims, is a country where people identify themselves by their religion first and as Nigerians second (see chart 1). Around 20,000 have been killed in God's name since 1990, estimates Shehu Sani, a local chronicler of religious violence. Kano, the centre of the Islamic north, introduced sharia law seven years ago. Many of the Christians who fled ended up in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, where the Christian south begins. The road between the two towns is dotted with competing churches and mosques.
This is one of many religious battlefields in this part of Africa. Evangelical Christians, backed by American collection-plate money, are surging northwards, clashing with Islamic fundamentalists, backed by Saudi petrodollars, surging southwards. And the Christian-Muslim split is only one form of religious competition in northern Nigeria. Events in Iraq have set Sunnis, who make up most of Nigeria's Muslims, against the better-organised Shias; about 50 people have died in intra-Muslim violence, reckons Mr Sani. On the Christian side, Catholics are in a more peaceful battle with Protestant evangelists, whose signs promising immediate redemption dominate the roadside. By the time you reach Jos and see a poster proclaiming “the ABC of nourishment”, you are surprised to discover it is for chocolate.
Recently Christians have been returning to Kano, partly because sharia law (which in any case applies only to Muslims) has been introduced sympathetically. None of the bloodier sentences has been carried out. Indeed, the election in April was settled in a reassuringly secular way—with the local political barons swapping cash and ballot papers in the bungalow of the Prince Hotel.
Yet it would not take much for things to boil over again. The Muslim north resents the Christian south's hogging of Nigeria's oil money. When earlier this year the shadowy “Black Taliban” struck a police station in Kano, around 20 militants were killed. In September Muslim youths set shops on fire after rumours that a Christian teacher in the area had drawn a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. And the missionaries are still pushing provocatively north. Salihu Garba, a prominent Muslim convert to Christianity (who has survived various assassination attempts), claims that the Evangelical Church of West Africa now has 157 churches in Kano state—double the number five years ago.
The journey from Kano to Jos may seem a trip back in time. In fact, religious front-lines criss-cross the globe.
Most obviously, Americans and Britons would not be dying in Iraq and Afghanistan had 19 young Muslims not attacked the United States in the name of Allah. The West's previous great military interventions were to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croatians. America's next war could be against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Other conflicts have acquired a new religious edge. In the poisonous war over Palestine, ever more people are claiming God on their side (with some of the most zealous sorts living miles away from the conflict). In Myanmar (Burma) Buddhist monks nearly brought down an evil regime, but in Sri Lanka they have prolonged a bloody conflict with Muslims. If India has an election, a bridge to Sri Lanka supposedly built by the god Ram (and a team of monkeys) may matter as much as a nuclear deal with America.
Formerly communist countries are also getting hooked again on the opium of the people. Russia's secret police, the KGB, hounded religion: its successor, the FSB, has its own Orthodox church opposite its headquarters. In the Polish parliament the speaker crosses himself before taking his seat. Some of China's technocrats think that Confucianism, which Mao condemned as “feudal”, is useful social glue in their fast-changing country. But they brutally repressed a Buddhist sect, the Falun Gong, and they are worried that Christian churchgoers may already outnumber Communist Party members.
In Western politics, too, religion has forced itself back into the public square. The American president begins each day on his knees and each cabinet meeting with a prayer. The easiest way to tell a Republican from a Democrat is to ask how often he or she goes to church. And although European liberals sneer about American theocracy, American conservatives claim that secular, childless Europe is turning into Eurabia.
Many secular intellectuals think that the real “clash of civilisations” is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A succession of bestselling books have torn into religion—Sam Harris's “The End of Faith”, Richard Dawkins's “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens's “God is not Great—How Religion Poisons Everything”. This counterattack already shows a religious intensity. Mr Dawkins has set up an organisation to help atheists around the world.
Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. After all, it has been a canon of progressive thought since the Enlightenment that modernity—that heady combination of science, learning and democracy—would kill religion. Plainly, this has not happened. Numbers about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that any drift towards secularism has been halted, and some show religion to be on the increase. The proportion of people attached to the world's four biggest religions—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism—rose from 67% in 1900 to 73% in 2005 and may reach 80% by 2050 (see chart 2).
Moreover, from a secularist point of view, the wrong sorts of religion are flourishing, and in the wrong places. In general, it is the tougher versions of religion that are doing best—the sort that claim Adam and Eve met 6,003 years ago. Some of the new converts are from the ranks of the underprivileged (Pentecostalism has spread rapidly in the favelas of Brazil), but many are not. American evangelicals tend to be well-educated and well-off. In India and Turkey religious parties have been driven by the up-and-coming bourgeoisie.
With modernity now religion's friend, an eternal subject has become fashionable. Father Richard John Neuhaus points out that when he founded his Centre for Religion and Society in 1984, there were only four centres of religion and public life in America; now, he thinks, there are more than 200. Religious people are getting more vocal in all sorts of fields, including business. Religion is also cropping up in economics. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian, re-examined Max Weber's theory of the Protestant work ethic to explain why Europeans work less than Americans.
The garden of Eden
Philip Jenkins, one of America's best scholars of religion, claims that when historians look back at this century, they will probably see religion as “the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood and, of course, conflicts and wars.” If the first seven years are anything to go by, Mr Jenkins may well turn out to be right.
What has changed? The main protagonists are oddly unhelpful in providing explanations. Believers usually produce some version of “you can't repress the truth for ever.” Sociologists point out that outside western Europe most people have always been religious. Peter Berger, the dean of the subject, chides journalists for investigating the religious rule, not the secular exception: “Rather than studying American evangelicals and Islamic mullahs, you should look at Swedes and New England college professors.”
Yet even if underlying piety has not changed that much, religion's role in public life plainly has. Only ten years ago, most academics and politicians would have dismissed Mr Jenkins's claim about religion being central to politics as weird.
After all, for much of the 20th century religion was banished from politics. For most elites, God had been undone by Darwin, dismissed by Marx, deconstructed by Freud. Stalin forcibly ejected Him, but in much of western Europe there was no need for force: religion had been on the slide for centuries. In Britain the “long withdrawing roar” of Anglicanism that Matthew Arnold lamented faded to a distant echo in the 20th century.
In America the number of churchgoers stayed high, but evangelical Christians retreated from politics, embarrassed by the failure of prohibition and the Scopes Monkey trial (in which creationists were mocked). In 1960 Jack Kennedy assured the country that his Catholicism would not pollute his politics. In 1966 Time magazine famously ran a cover asking “Is God dead?”; three years later man reached the moon, metaphorically conquering the heavens.
For modernising post-colonial leaders in the developing world, secularism and progress were indivisible. “The fez”, said Kemal Ataturk, “sat upon our heads as a sign of ignorance and fanaticism.” In India Jawaharlal Nehru wished to make “a clean sweep” of organised religion: “almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.” In Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser, the champion of Arab nationalism, clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood. Africa's new rulers nationalised the Christian mission schools that had taught them. Even “the Jewish state” deemed religion a distraction: after Israel's founding in 1948 the secular David Ben-Gurion agreed that rabbinical law would prevail in matters such as marriage and divorce partly because he assumed the Orthodox would melt away.
In retrospect, the turning point came long before Osama bin Laden declared his jihad on Jews and Crusaders. For Timothy Shah, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who is writing a book on secularism, the symbolic turning point was the six-day war of 1967. It marked a crushing defeat for secular pan-Arabism; meanwhile Israel's “miraculous” triumph gave God a stronger voice in its politics, emboldening the settler movement. In the same year a Hindu nationalist party won 9.4% of the vote in India.
By the end of the 1970s this counter-revolution was in full swing. America had elected its first proudly born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter; Jerry Falwell had founded the Moral Majority; Iran had replaced the worldly shah with Ayatollah Khomeini; Zia ul Haq was busy Islamising Pakistan; Buddhism had been formally granted the foremost place in Sri Lanka's constitution; and an anti-communist Pole had become head of the Catholic church.
What caused this shift? Believers inevitably see a populist revolt against the overreach of elitist secularism—be it America's Supreme Court legalising pornography or Indira Gandhi harrying Hindus. From a more secular viewpoint, John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian, points out that much religious politics dates back to the 1970s, a time when more worldly “isms” seemed to fail. By then, the Soviet Union's evils had made a mockery of Marxism, and capitalism had also hit some buffers (the oil shocks, hyperinflation). More generally, politicians' ability to solve problems such as crime or unemployment was questioned: faith in government tumbled just about everywhere in the 1970s—and has stayed low since.
But why has religion's power seemed to keep on increasing? The first reason is a series of reactions and counter-reactions. Fundamentalist Islam, for instance, has helped spur radical Judaism and Hinduism, which in turn have reinforced the mullahs' fervour. Hamas owes much to Israel's settlers. Without Falwell, Messrs Hitchens and Dawkins would have smaller royalties.
Second, the latest form of modernity—globalisation—has propelled religion forward. For traditionalists, faith has acted as a barrier against change. For prosperous suburbanites, faith has become something of a lifestyle coach. It is no accident that America's bestselling religious book is called “The Purpose Driven Life”.
A hitch for the Hitch
Whatever the exact cause, two groups of people in particular have struggled to come to terms with this new world. The first is politicians, especially practitioners of foreign policy. Realpolitik does not easily cope with the irrational. For instance, religion does not appear in the index of “Diplomacy”, Henry Kissinger's 900-page masterpiece on statesmanship (a mistake, admits the former secretary of state, who now sees some “depressing similarities” with 17th-century Europe).
Mr Kissinger is not alone. Before September 11th 2001, most “big books” (with the exception of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilisations”) predicted a secular end to history. The Economist was so confident of the Almighty's demise that we published His obituary in our millennium issue. Madeleine Albright recalls a meeting at the State Department about Northern Ireland in the late 1990s when a diplomat asked despairingly: “Who would believe that we would be dealing with a religious conflict near the end of the 20th century?”
September 11th has changed that. A decade ago, a proposal by the CIA to study religion was vetoed as “mere sociology”; that would not happen now. But mistakes are still made. When America went into Iraq, people worried about George Bush's God-directed foreign policy; in fact it would have helped if Donald Rumsfeld et al had understood more about religion—especially the difference between Shias and Sunnis. “Everywhere we look, we have religious problems,” admits one (born-again) member of the Bush team. “And it is not just Islam. There are the Orthodox in Russia, Hindu nationalism in India, Christians in China...the list is long.”
The other group struggling to deal with religion's role in public life are liberals. When religious belief is plainly unreasonable—for instance, when schools teach creationism—it is easy to fight. But in many disputes there are liberal answers on both sides. Those who are embracing religion nowadays are doing so out of choice. Is it liberal to stop a British Airways worker from wearing a crucifix? Whose rights are being infringed when a majority of people on a Turkish bus ask the driver to stop so they can pray?
A schism in Western liberalism that dates back to its two founding revolutions seems to have reopened. In France, where the Catholic church was the sole faith, the revolutionnaires detested God as a crucial part of the ancien régime: politics, they declared, henceforth would be protected from this evil. By contrast, America's Founding Fathers, used to many competing faiths, took a more benign view. They divided church from state not least to protect the former from the latter.
This special report is an attempt to tease out these conflicts. It comes with three health warnings. First, many numbers in religion are dodgy: most churches inflate their support and many governments do not record religion in their censuses (in Nigeria the best source is health records). Second, in a field where many believers claim to know all the answers, it poses mainly questions. And lastly, given the emotion the subject arouses, the chances are that some of what follows will offend you.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Evangelicals: A schism in the Republican base
Evangelicals: A schism in the Republican base - The Week
As pastor of Wichita’s Immanuel Baptist Church, Terry Fox was one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in Kansas. His fiery sermons, broadcast on local TV and radio, made Kansas the epicenter of the pro-life movement and helped compel state legislators to outlaw gay marriage. But in August, his board of deacons fired him. They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff! a stunned Fox said. Fox’s unseating, said David Kirkpatrick in The New York Times Magazine, is among the most visible signs that the evangelical movement is coming apart. As perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America, the religious right played a decisive role in setting the conservative agenda, with its votes twice electing George W. Bush as president. But now, deeply disappointed by Bush’s many failures and unable to agree on a successor, they’re divided, angry, and adrift. The Republicans,’’ says Marvin Olasky, editor of the evangelical magazine World, have blown it.
There are good reasons for this disintegration, said Frank Rich in The New York Times. Evangelicals were naturally dismayed to find out that many of their self-appointed moral emperors had no clothes: The Rev. Ted Haggard got caught paying for massages’’ from a gay prostitute, and anti-gay-marriage crusaders Sens. David Vitter and Larry Craig were caught in extramarital pursuits. In the past two years, disgusted evangelicals have been tacking to a different course than the values hacks’’ who claim to lead them—James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. That’s especially true among younger evangelicals, said Terry Mattingly in the Knoxville, Tenn., News-Sentinel. Insofar as they’re political at all, they believe Jesus would want them to help the poor and the powerless, not condemn gays or clamor for war. And unlike their elders, these 20-somethings have little inclination to fill their bookshelves with Left Behind novels or sing pseudo-romantic praise choruses in sprawling megachurches.
The upshot of this realignment is already apparent, said Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. Five years ago, a Pew Research Center poll found, nearly 90 percent of white evangelicals approved of Bush; today, only 49 percent do. Only 60 percent are planning to vote Republican in 2008. Dan Hopkins, a 56-yearold Dallas real estate developer and lifelong Republican, is typical of these disaffected Christians. Furious with Republican politicians for ignoring the plight of illegal immigrants and taking the U.S. into a savage war in Iraq, Hopkins is considering voting Democratic for the first time in his life. The old guard of the religious right, he says, had ‘‘the same level of fanatics as in the Middle East.
Most evangelicals wouldn’t go that far, said Naomi Schaefer Riley in The Wall Street Journal. While they have clearly lost their enthusiasm for the GOP,’’ that doesn’t mean they’re all turning into liberal Democrats. Instead, their votes are now up for grabs. To understand the new evangelical view of politics, there’s no better example than the Rev. Gene Carlson of Wichita, said Kirkpatrick in the Times. Once deeply involved in conservative politics and the anti-abortion movement, Carlson, 70, has soured on politics— when you mix politics and religion,’’ he says, you get politics’’— and now considers himself an independent. He leans left on social-welfare issues and considers it his Christian duty to protect the environment and stop global warming. The religious right peaked a long time ago,’’ Carlson says. “It has seen its heyday. Something new is coming.’’
As pastor of Wichita’s Immanuel Baptist Church, Terry Fox was one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in Kansas. His fiery sermons, broadcast on local TV and radio, made Kansas the epicenter of the pro-life movement and helped compel state legislators to outlaw gay marriage. But in August, his board of deacons fired him. They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff! a stunned Fox said. Fox’s unseating, said David Kirkpatrick in The New York Times Magazine, is among the most visible signs that the evangelical movement is coming apart. As perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America, the religious right played a decisive role in setting the conservative agenda, with its votes twice electing George W. Bush as president. But now, deeply disappointed by Bush’s many failures and unable to agree on a successor, they’re divided, angry, and adrift. The Republicans,’’ says Marvin Olasky, editor of the evangelical magazine World, have blown it.
There are good reasons for this disintegration, said Frank Rich in The New York Times. Evangelicals were naturally dismayed to find out that many of their self-appointed moral emperors had no clothes: The Rev. Ted Haggard got caught paying for massages’’ from a gay prostitute, and anti-gay-marriage crusaders Sens. David Vitter and Larry Craig were caught in extramarital pursuits. In the past two years, disgusted evangelicals have been tacking to a different course than the values hacks’’ who claim to lead them—James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. That’s especially true among younger evangelicals, said Terry Mattingly in the Knoxville, Tenn., News-Sentinel. Insofar as they’re political at all, they believe Jesus would want them to help the poor and the powerless, not condemn gays or clamor for war. And unlike their elders, these 20-somethings have little inclination to fill their bookshelves with Left Behind novels or sing pseudo-romantic praise choruses in sprawling megachurches.
The upshot of this realignment is already apparent, said Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. Five years ago, a Pew Research Center poll found, nearly 90 percent of white evangelicals approved of Bush; today, only 49 percent do. Only 60 percent are planning to vote Republican in 2008. Dan Hopkins, a 56-yearold Dallas real estate developer and lifelong Republican, is typical of these disaffected Christians. Furious with Republican politicians for ignoring the plight of illegal immigrants and taking the U.S. into a savage war in Iraq, Hopkins is considering voting Democratic for the first time in his life. The old guard of the religious right, he says, had ‘‘the same level of fanatics as in the Middle East.
Most evangelicals wouldn’t go that far, said Naomi Schaefer Riley in The Wall Street Journal. While they have clearly lost their enthusiasm for the GOP,’’ that doesn’t mean they’re all turning into liberal Democrats. Instead, their votes are now up for grabs. To understand the new evangelical view of politics, there’s no better example than the Rev. Gene Carlson of Wichita, said Kirkpatrick in the Times. Once deeply involved in conservative politics and the anti-abortion movement, Carlson, 70, has soured on politics— when you mix politics and religion,’’ he says, you get politics’’— and now considers himself an independent. He leans left on social-welfare issues and considers it his Christian duty to protect the environment and stop global warming. The religious right peaked a long time ago,’’ Carlson says. “It has seen its heyday. Something new is coming.’’
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