And This is how Feminism Dies in the Academy

Not from conservative attacks from the Right.  Not from evolution-from-within to a broader humanist or critical theoretical philosophy. But from people with real power, real influence, simply ignoring its claims.

Just this week I read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that proceeded as though decades of scholarship on work and family and decades of feminist critique of masculinist workplace practices had never existed.  [Turns out, the author and the male faculty he interviewed are dismayed by the lack of "collegiality" of those who work at home or won't stay till 9 pm for evening activities. . . and yes, before you double-check your calendar, it's 2017.]

I said most of what I wanted to say about the Chronicle piece in my letter-to-the-editor, which they published online today.

What I was thinking about while driving in to the office was how often this happens in our scholarship, too.  In my own subfield, decades of feminist scholarship on religion is generally overlooked by the more influential scholars who do not cite it in their work or take its theoretical critique into account in formulating their own analytical approach. Everyone is happy the feminists are there, of course.  They congratulate themselves at the number of feminist and queer theoretical sessions on the conference program -- sessions they never go to, profiling books and articles they couldn't be bothered to read. 

How do we fix that problem? How do we create graduate training programs that don't segregate critical theoretical approaches into an "oh-by-the-way" ghetto?  How do we train journal editors to expect more of their reviewers, their most influential authors?  Because this granting of a small territory on the side (not the good ground, mind you, not the ground by the river, but highlands, where it's hard to grow things) -- it's not enough anymore.

There was no "evangelical" vote - Sociological Silence about Race in the Study of Religion

Recently, I've had two opportunities to write about the role of religion in mobilizing voters in the 2016 Presidential election. In an earlier blog post, I discussed a piece I wrote for The Society Pages on why reporters and other commentators tend to talk about "evangelical" or "Catholic" voters, missing the importance of race in shaping how religious beliefs and identities affect political behavior (voting, party membership) and attitudes towards social and political interests. 

Sociologists, too, have a disturbing tendency to ignore the "White" in "White Christian America," and have provided much of the research that informs how journalists and other commentators write and talk about religion and politics.  Schooled in Durkheim and Weber, sociologists focus on religion as an independent locus of identity and community, or look at how religious ideas and beliefs motivate social groups to act.  This is not wrong -- religion influences a variety of social behaviors and anchors meaningful identities for many in the late-modern world.  People draw on religious beliefs and symbols to make sense of their world, and doing so shapes understandings of social policy, community life, and political alignments.

But it is essential to move beyond thinking of religion as a set of beliefs or an aspect of identity that is divorced from race, gender, and social class.  Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the study of religion and politics.  Sociologists cannot afford to ignore the facts or twist the evidence.  To take the 2016 election as a case in point, sociologists of religion must lead the way in critiquing popular discourse about "the religious vote" or "the evangelical vote" and do our best to place front-and-center in public discourse the stark fact that it was White evangelicals and Catholics who supported Donald Trump.  Black and Latino evangelicals and Catholics did not, despite having the same concerns about abortion that motivate White religious conservatives (if not more so, in the case of religiously conservative Latinos).

It is very clear to anyone who is willing to take an honest look at the data that social location -- a person's race, her gender and social class -- shape how religious beliefs are interpreted and applied to social and political life.  In a forthcoming piece in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, authored with Jacqueline Frost, I show that attitudes toward racial equality can only be explained by understanding the intersection of religious belief and identity with race, gender, and other aspects of social location.  In a new editorial, just published in Sociology of Religion, I use the case of the coalition of support for Donald Trump in 2015-16 to argue more broadly for an intersectional approach to the study of religion.  In new work with Jack Delehanty and Evan Stewart, we develop an argument that it is a commitment to Christian nationalism that affects how people interpret the link between specific religious beliefs and identities and understandings of the public good.

What does an intersectional approach  mean, and why is it so controversial in the sociology of religion?  Theoretically, it means that we have to stop thinking of religious beliefs and religious identities as master statuses that override gender ideology, class interests, and racial interests in forming attitudes about the social world and one's place within it. Practically, it means moving away from thinking of a unified "evangelical effect" or "Catholic effect" on people's attitudes and behaviors and asking how and why particular religious beliefs are appealing to particular people because of their gender identities and racial and class interests.  Ethically, it means upholding our promise to maintain our "outsider" status, and to take Weber's Verstehen approach seriously -- understanding insider religious discourse on its own terms, but also interpreting it through a critical theoretical lens.  

Fortunately, in this, we do not have to reinvent the wheel.  The work of Patricia Hill Collins and  Dorothy Smith, pioneering feminist social scientists, offers us a good model for the work ahead.

And move ahead we must, or risk becoming irrelevant to some of the more critical issues of our day.

If you want to read more, check out the editorial, in the latest issue of Sociology of Religion.

Gender Differences in Atheist Identification -- From Existential to Social Risk

I am excited to share with you new research, online now at Social Currents and co-authored with Jacqui Frost and Evan Stewart, that uses American Mosaic Project data to analyze gender differences in atheist identification.  In this article, we show that non-religious women experience more discrimination than non-religious men and we argue that this is why non-religious women avoid the more stigmatized forms of non-religion -- especially identifying as an atheist -- and instead claim more socially acceptable non-religious identities such as "spiritual but not religious."

This work continues a strand of research published elsewhere, including new work with Jacqui Frost forthcoming in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, that argues for an intersectional approach to the study of religion, race, gender, and other aspects of social identity.  I'm particularly excited about this new Social Currents piece, though, because it also centers the study of religious identification firmly in a consideration of power and privilege, a focus too often ignored in the sociology of religion, which tends to unproblematically reproduce talk about religious "choices" as though choices were unconstrained.  We also take on and critique the argument that women are "naturally" more religious because they are "naturally" more risk averse, and are unwilling to take the existential risk of nonbelief.  Instead, we offer a new concept -- social risk -- that we believe will be useful in answering a broader set of questions about how power and stigma influence religious identification.  

"Seeing the White in Christian America" on The Society Pages

Here at the U of M sociology department, we are fortunate to host The Society Pages, a website where people write and post about sociological research and its relevance to real-world problems.  

Today, there's a special feature on the TSP website, a post that I wrote called "Seeing the White in Christian America."  I argue that the press coverage of "the evangelical vote" for Mr. Trump has de-emphasized the role of race in motivating the White evangelical vote.  

In doing this, journalists and pundits are not so different than many sociologists of religion, who have tacitly endorsed a race-blind way of analyzing how religion and race intersect for White evangelicals and White Catholics, reproducing an insider discourse that systematically elides the role of race in shaping the religious beliefs people choose to emphasize and act upon.  (For more on the latter, look for forthcoming work with Jacqueline Frost in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion on the intersection of race and religious identification, which follows up on earlier American Mosaic Project research on religion and racial attitudes and the role of race in shaping a preference for "cultural" Christianity in the U.S.)

Interview with Freethought Radio

I had the pleasure of giving an interview last week to the folks at Freethought Radio, sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  We talked about new research from the American Mosaic Project here at the U. of M. that examines Americans' attitudes towards the nonreligious. In our 10-year followup to our 2003 survey we asked people how they thought and felt about atheists and the spiritual-but-not-religious, and whether it's a good or a bad thing that more people are claiming no religious identity.  We found high levels of anti-atheist sentiment and high levels of concern about the rising % of those who claim no religious identity, driven largely by moral concerns. . . . Our research is coming out in the December issue of Social Forces, and you can find the full text of the article on my Research and Publications page.  

Here's the link to the interview on Freethought Radio:  interview link.  I'm interviewed in the second half, starting around 20:07.

Love Fights Back

There's been a lot of talk in the last week about the division and rancor in this election cycle.  From the left, I hear that we need to understand Trump supporters -- especially working-class Whites -- as suffering human beings with serious unaddressed needs.  People on the right talk about the need to support the President-elect and move forward together. Social media are filled with memes like "love trumps hate" and calls for everyone to move on and get along.

It's churlish to reject calls to love one another.  It's counterproductive to demonize Trump supporters. And, Democrats do need to figure out why Clinton lost the Electoral College, the latest in a series of defeats for the Party at both state and federal levels.

I get it.

I also get that much of what I've heard is a kind of cheap sentimentalism.  Calls to "get along" are often motivated by a desire to avoid difficult conversations.  They are offered to justify complacency and an unwillingness to invest the time necessary to stay informed and get involved.  And from the right, these calls are often a justification for avoiding responsibility for the outcomes of the election, which include the normalization of racism, violence, misogyny, and xenophobia.

Love won't "trump hate" unless good people take a principled stand against the misogyny that is at the heart of President-elect Trump's statements about and actions toward women.  

Love won't "trump hate" unless good people take a principled stand to renounce and fight back against the post-election wave of racially-motivated violence.  Good citizenship requires not only progressives but also conservative Trump supporters to protest the elevation of Stephen Bannon to a position of influence in the center of our government.  Trump himself may or may not be racist, but he whipped up racial resentment for months, accepted a KKK endorsement, courted fringe alt-right groups and activists, and normalized xenophobia.  His comments on 60 Minutes were a very small - and very easy - start on what he needs to do to earn the respect and trust of decent people on both the right and the left.  Not all Trump supporters are racists, but every single person who voted for him is morally and politically accountable for the violence and hate which is a direct result of his campaign and, now, his election.  Adults accept responsibility, especially when they win, when their side has some power.  History will judge Trump supporters by what they do next.

Love won't "trump hate" unless people who are against enshrining conservative Christian religious beliefs into law are free to speak out about how oppressive that is to non-religious Americans and Americans who are religious but don't share the same theological views (about 70% of Americans, total).

Love is not an easy sentiment. It is not an internet meme.  Love is not passive.  Love is not co-dependent and it doesn't appease those who would bully or avoid responsibility. Love acts with power and empathy in the service of core values.  

In this political season, love fights back, protecting the vulnerable.  Love fights back, championing democratic values and resisting demagoguery.  Love believes we can be better, that we can get beyond rancorous division, but not because those who are morally troubled by the character and policy preferences of our President-elect are bullied into silence by those who cannot tolerate principled disagreement.

Strongly worded political statements are uncomfortable to hear because they are calls to take action.  They ask people to risk being uncomfortable, to think about difficult things, to put themselves out.  Right now, these statements are necessary, because the heart and soul of our country is at stake.  

To call out oppression and demand accountability -- this is not hateful.  It's the instantiation of the kind of love worth having - love for the country, love for the vulnerable, love for the dignity and humanity and autonomy of women, love for those who don't share one's political convictions.

Getting along is only valuable if it is not bought at the price of turning a blind eye to that which is hateful, damaging, and small.

Love fights back.

So What's the Way Forward?

So what’s the way forward?  The route depends on the destination, and so first I have to articulate what I want.

I want a progressive government that champions women’s rights and racial justice, and that continues our tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrants into a shared culture that includes pride in our freedoms, strength in the face of threats, and optimism about the future. I want a government that makes economic justice a paramount goal, recognizing that, along with a celebration of pluralism and the protection of minority rights, economic opportunity is a cornerstone of stability in a democratic society.  I want us to pour resources into clean energy development and to take the international lead on fighting global warming.  I want an engaged and global, but not hawkish, foreign policy, and I want us to scale back our military projection capabilities as we reduce our dependence on (and need to protect access to) foreign oil.

You want to know why we’re so divided right now?  Not why we’re so different or how we're different (anyone paying attention ought already to have known the answer to those questions).  I mean, why are our differences tearing us apart? Because since at least the 1970s, both Democratic and Republican leadership have favored laws that break unions, de-regulate banks and the financial industry, create tax loopholes for the rich, and gut the social safety net.  It is true that Republicans and Democrats have different constituencies and on many issues their policy prescriptions are different. But they have both supported policies which have resulted in an obscene and historically unprecedented wealth disparity.  And so the differences between us have become more hate-filled as the pie shrinks.  Rural whites are left to resent the well-off cities - with all their liberals and people of color and their economically independent women. 

We liberal city-dwellers resent them right back, by the way. The untold resentment-and-fear story in the last decade or so involves not the top 1% but the next 14% right below them.  These folks, who make up the bulk of our society's professionals and mid- to high-level managers, make money that working-class rural folks envy, and yet they feel tenuous because no matter how hard they work their retirement is not secure and they worry about passing on their comfortable lives to their children.  And so, they have been (we have been) willing to tolerate policies that hurt the lower 85% because those policies will help their (our) stocks keep rising, and protect their (our) mortgage tax credits and tax-free college savings accounts.  Progressive, liberal, and centrist leadership – in government and the media, but in other institutions, too – have for a long time felt self-congratulatory for having the “right” stands on race and women’s rights and the environment and religion (liberal, tolerant, or none at all), all the while they watched their 401ks and 403bs grow and tolerated mass incarceration as a means to control people of color (especially African Americans - Ferguson didn't happen in isolation).

There is an additional reason, too.  The geographic distribution of the left/right split is compounded in an era of de-regulation of the media with a knowledge-universe divide.  And for this, also, our leadership has much to answer.  The mainstream media simply ignored or laughed at the alternative universe built by the alt-right (and even mainstream-right) media.  We have tolerated a culture of climate-change denial, looked at images of our first Black President and his family depicted as apes and shrugged our shoulders as if to say, “Well, you know, that’s them and they’re just ignorant,” and then gone back to business-as-usual.  It’s been more entertaining – and more profitable – for the mainstream media to accept this split universe and normalize it.  Even NPR has been seeking out “conservative viewpoints” on issues and then promoting the dangerous fallacy of false equivalency by treating demonstrably untrue statements as “another point of view which we must respect.”  (There is a respect problem, but more on that below).

I think there’s an additional piece, too, which is harder to write about because it’s more amorphous, and doesn’t map neatly onto voting blocks or constituencies, and because no one wants to see himself, or herself, implicated in this part of it.  Sexism, racism, xenophobia – these appeal and resonate beyond the hard-core conservative Republican base, beyond the white working-class men and women who supported Trump in the swing states.  How many men cheered inside when they heard Trump boast about grabbing women?  How many women who live in a culture in which powerful men are protectors (and in which they need that protection) are willing to live with his behavior toward women because they believe it will ultimately bolster the status of their own male protectors?  And let’s be honest, here – Driving While Black is not just an offense in the rural south or small-town Appalachia.  This explains, in part, the remarkable staying power and organizing power and mobilizing power of the Christian Right in an era in which 50% of Americans no longer even pretend for survey takers that they go to church and about 40% of those under the age of 35 won’t identify with any religious label.  The Christian Right rhetoric about lifestyle and values and women’s roles resonates far beyond their base who care so much about abortion.  That rhetoric is interpreted by many who don't really care about religion per se as signaling a like-mindedness on gender traditionalism, on the value of white supremacy, and on resentment about the decline of a rural, culturally white and Christian way of life.

So what do I do, going forward? What do we all do, all of us who want the same things that I want?  I think there are things that everyone can do, and things that leadership in the Democratic Party, the media, and other influential institutions can do, as well.

Everyone can . . .

·       Figure out what you actually want and name it, commit to it, and make it a part of your life by putting in time, getting involved, and staying informed.  I have lost patience with friends who started saying, “Oh, now we should all get along” on November 9th.  It’s not that I don’t want unity.  We desperately need real unity, but real unity is difficult and takes time and hard work. What I won’t tolerate is co-dependency and appeasement. And I won't tolerate cheap sentimentalism used as a shield of one’s own personal comfort at the expense of a functioning democracy.  My connections who are saying that now that we should "get along"?  Here's what they mean: “I hate politics and having to think about difficult things and I never want anyone to disagree with me and anyway, I’m white and live in a city and have a decent job (that I’m worried about keeping and I still somehow don’t seem to be able to relax about retirement) and can’t you just leave me alone with all your calls for action so I can just go back to pretending that it doesn’t matter that we just elected a racist, sexist, xenophobic demagogue because I’m a good person and if I admit what just happened I’d have to do something and can’t you see I’m busy and comfortable and don’t want to be bothered and anyway in four years everyone will see their mistake and it will all be okay?”  To which I say you are part of why we are sitting here in this mess.  As, honestly, I have been part of the problem, too.

·       Call out the lies.  Climate change is happening, it’s driven by man-made causes, and we can effect change.  Racist incidents, violent ones, are happening all over the country and it is directly because Trump courted and validated the previously-fringe ideas of the alt right.  Your taxes, and mine, will go up under Trump’s plan, while his go down.  Deregulation of business will hurt the environment and the economy.  Women’s rights to their own bodies will be taken away, not because a majority of Americans want it but because Trump will most likely honor his pledges to the Christian Right, and so their values will become enshrined in law in a nation in which they are increasingly out of step with the values of the majority.  Call out anyone who denies these truths or others.  Call them out.  Now.  A year from now.  Three years from now.  When he’s up for re-election. Keep calling them out.  If you don’t – then you’re part of normalizing the alternative knowledge-verse, and it’s a scary place in there.

·       If you’re white and economically comfortable like me, you can do something for racial justice in your community (you do have the time, you're not scrambling to make rent money or buy the kids shoes). Give money to organizations that work for the rights of people of color (POC) and immigrants.  Do support Planned Parenthood and do volunteer as a clinic escort. Find out if your community is doing anything to promote better relations between the police and people of color who live there and if so, go to those meetings and see if you can help, even if it’s just bringing donuts and showing up. Sure, you can’t do everything – but pick one thing and go do it. Because the complacency of privileged white educated people has been a big part of the problem, the feeling that history is on your side so you don’t really have to do anything to bring about the changes that you want. If you’re a person of color, I am loathe to advise you because I'm aware of just how privileged I am; my hope is that POC go to local Democratic Party events and demand that they start representing your interests in more substantive ways.

·       We have a two-party system and to those who want a third party, I’d say that the best thing you can do is to work hard to get Democrats back in power. They are the only ones who are likely to help you work on legislation that will help make that a realistic possibility.

·      To everyone else I say work as hard as you can to get the Democrats back in power.  BUT demand that the party change in important ways (see below).

Party Leaders, Media Elites, and Other Influencers can . . .

·       If one more person says that Hillary got more votes than anyone except Obama and then just leaves it at that, I think my head will explode.  It’s not “natural” that African-Americans voted for Obama at higher rates.  It’s that for a long time the Democratic Party has treated people of color like the Republican Party has treated evangelicals – like folks who have nowhere else to go.  The Democrats desperately need to start now on a grass-roots plan to get more people of color involved in local and state party organizing, to run more POC candidates, and to consult more substantively with POC representatives on policy initiatives.

·       In the Rust Belt swing states, the Democratic Party has to reach out and start convincing people that they have more to offer than better management of the same old corporate-cozy, global-capitalism-cheering way of doing things. The populist fervor of the past 18 months is not going away.  It will sweep Trump into a second term if the party doesn’t respond, now, by building more grassroots support among working-class whites, not only in the Rust Belt but beyond.  People who say Sanders is “the problem” this year should take a long, hard look at the Michigan primary results and remember that he had things to say to people that resonated with their sense of despair.  And they are despairing in Michigan, and in Ohio and Pennsylvania and in small rural towns in northern Minnesota and in the vast red swath of the middle states.  Democratic leaders need to understand that people who feel they have no options have no reason not to burn down the house.  And they have to understand that in many (not all) of those places, there is real discomfort with Trump as a person and with the more hateful parts of his message.  There’s an opportunity, here, to step in and position the party for 2020 but the clock is ticking.  The media can help – not by denying that racism and sexism and xenophobia are part of the problem, or by writing navel-gazing pieces “discovering” the poverty of rural America, but by writing cold-eyed analytical pieces about what kinds of economic policies will actually help the economically dispossessed.

·       Understand that the message of the Christian Right on women’s roles resonates far beyond their base.  There’s more than one way to think about what feminism means.  Germany, for example, has a much more pro-family, pro-child version of feminism.  The feminism in the US has been more about focusing on equal political and economic rights for individual women, which is interpreted by many cultural conservatives as insensitive to valued differences in men’s and women’s domestic roles and as unresponsive to the loss of economic and cultural supports for valued gender identities.  I have benefited enormously from the US brand of feminism, and am NOT arguing that it should be rejected or vilified.  But the conception of what it might mean to have policies supportive to women has to expand, and party leaders, change makers, and influencers must try to understand why so many women in this election didn’t break Democratic simply because the head of the ticket was a woman. Sexism is of course a big part of that, and might not be all that easy to change. But it’s not the whole story; a lot of women don’t see themselves as sole political or economic actors, but rather as embedded in families and communities in which running for political office, having your own independent retirement account, or having a shot at the high-powered job are not the relevant issues.  So, if Democrats want to get “the woman vote” in bigger percentages, there needs to be a discourse that makes women who are not just like me (a Ph.D. tenured professor at a major R1 flagship university living in one of the most progressive cities in the country) feel like they have a reason to support Democratics over Republicans. The good news? There are lots and lots of reasons for them to do that, if the Democrats start now convincing them that their concerns are heard and addressed. 

It is worth remembering not only that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but that most Americans agree with her views on climate change and abortion rights. Most white Americans, I truly believe, understand that racism is a problem (perhaps I am blind on that, though, because I don’t want to believe that my people are evil).  Most favor expanded rights for women, and are happy with same-sex marriage.  Many want universal healthcare.

But right now, that should not be comforting.  Because despite that, the Democrats lost an election to a man that party elites, media elites, and opinion influencers either didn’t see coming or dismissed out of hand.  And right now, these powerful people are in danger of repeating their mistake by spending a lot of time focusing on themselves and defending the party establishment that so completely dropped the ball  by ignoring a historic wave of economic populism and by taking their core constituencies for granted.  I know why Trump supporters think the liberal elite are smug and out of touch. I also know why many Democrats and Independents are so complacent and politically indifferent. 

I can’t do anything about those died-in-the-wool religious conservatives who truly believe that abortion is murder.  I don't agree with them, but I respect their values-based decisions, including voting.  I can't reach or persuade the hard-core alt-right racists who will never rest until they take away the rights and freedom and safety of people of color, and although I repudiate them I know that won't change their minds.  (I will still repudiate them.)  

But the rest of us – the rest of us can’t rest until we beat back this rising tide of hate and resentment.  And if we fail now, this is just the first shadow of the oncoming darkness.

New Work on Religion and Social Exclusion

I don't usually use this blog to "toot my own horn," but I am excited to see some of the work on the Boundaries in the American Mosaic Project finally seeing the light of day.  In addition to work on whiteness and colorblindness by colleagues Doug Hartmann, Paul Croll, and Alex Manning, I have just received word that an article co-authored with Jacqueline Frost has been accepted for publication (minor revisions) in JSSR.  This article elaborates our theoretical understanding of religious belief and practices as formative of symbolic boundaries that anchor identity and play a key role in status politics and claims-making for public resources. Specifically, we look at how different religious beliefs and identities intersect with structural location to shape attitudes toward racial inequality (explanations for African-American inequality and preferences for particular solutions).  I also just received word that our paper on anti-atheist sentiment, a 10-year-followup to our ASR piece, has been accepted by Social Forces (shout out here to co-authors Doug Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis).  This proceeds from a similar theoretical anchor and it explains why anti-atheist sentiment is persistent and durable, shows how it is rooted in specific moral concerns that many Americans have about atheists, and explains why it "spills over" to shape attitudes toward other non-religious persons and groups.

I have several reasons to be particularly excited about this happy turn of events.  First, it is quite satisfying to continue my work on religion as a basis for social inclusion and exclusion, something that has motivated my research since my long-ago dissertation project (published as Congregations in Conflict and a piece in Social Problems on race discourse in local churches) and continued through the project that led to publishing Religion and Family in a Changing Society.  To look back across 25 years of work and see your ideas grow and change and lead to a coherent statement on an issue you think is important -- this, of course, means that one is getting older (grin), but it also means all that time and work added up to something substantial.  We don't talk about this enough in academics, I think.  Especially now with all the pressures on the University, the tendency to ask "What have you done lately?" instead of "What are you building?" is something we should perhaps resist more ardently.

Second, it is great to work with the team of folks here at Minnesota, who are constructive and hard-working - and smart as hell.  We raise each other's games, and that's priceless, and the most satisfying thing about making the move here way back in '02.  

And finally, it is incredibly gratifying to mentor and work with such genuinely gifted graduate students (Jacqui Frost and Evan Stewart, and also Jack Delehanty and Alex Manning and Ryan  Steel, and the other terrific students involved in the project).  You should keep an eye out for their work, some of which draws on project data and much of which is entirely their own.  A new "Minnesota School" is not entirely out of the question, I think, anchored in a critical approach to the symbolic and moral dimensions of solidarity that also engages seriously with questions of power, politics, and material inequality.  

Exciting stuff going on here. Stay tuned.