Education and Income by Faith Traditions

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, through ongoing polls, produces data that begs interpretation. For example, 2007 and 2010 polls charted education and income among a variety of faith traditions.

As might be expected, there are strong correlations between income and education. Hindus, Reform Jews, and Conservative Jews head the list. Among the faith traditions, they have the highest percentage of college graduates and the greatest number of households with income above $75K. Most persuasively, this poll shows how education and income correlate and surely suggests that each half of the equation is self-reinforcing.

Of course, I’m interested where Unitarians fall in these polls. One commentator designated Unitarians as an outlier (with Buddhists and Orthodox Christians), who are less affluent than their education might predict. According to this commentator, “One possible explanation is that some religions are likely to produce, or to attract, people who voluntarily choose lower paying jobs, like teaching.”

It appears, Unitarians, as a group, value education over wealth. This comes with a certain attitude about money, both scrupulous and laissez faire. While this may cause our congregations to struggle in financing their operations, there’s something noble about “choosing lower paying jobs,” particularly when those jobs benefit society and/or lead to a satisfying personal life. This may involve values and integrity that designate a strong set of Unitarian values.

In this regard, in the midst of the boom that preceded the Great Recession, in my Hinsdale Unitarian congregation, there was considerable interest in “your money or your life” and the notion of “voluntary simplicity.” Now I can say with confidence, “How Unitarian!”

The Soul Is Dead, But the Spirit Lives On

I always read David Brooks’s op-ed pieces in the New York Times. His politics are too right of center for my own point of view; however, he’s always well-reasoned and even more importantly, draws upon much of the scientific research that I find authoritative regarding the human condition. Brooks has an interest in morality, as do I. He often cites evolutionary biologists and psychologists, as well as neuroscientists, who explore the landscape of the mind.

I’ve long been convinced that these areas of science have successfully challenged traditional philosophy, ethics, and theology. The popular writer Tom Wolfe, relatively early on, recognized the impact the new sciences, neuroscience, in particular, would have in a 1996 article “Sorry Your Soul Just Died.” In it he wrote, “Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: ‘The self is dead’—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: ‘The soul is dead.’ He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: ‘The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.’”

Today, Brooks has an article “Nice Guys Finish Last” in which he makes a case, based on recent scientific thought that human beings are intrinsically moral, though programmed by evolution to be selfish. Is this an oxymoron? No. Because evolution also involves complex equations to be cooperative and part of a community.If the group benefits, so the individual benefits, reasons Brooks.

He writes, “In his book, ‘The Righteous Mind,’ to be published early next year, Jonathan Haidt joins Edward O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and others who argue that natural selection takes place not only when individuals compete with other individuals, but also when groups compete with other groups. Both competitions are examples of the survival of the fittest, but when groups compete, it’s the cohesive, cooperative, internally altruistic groups that win and pass on their genes. The idea of ‘group selection’ was heresy a few years ago, but there is momentum behind it now.

In the end, Brooks makes a conservative pitch for religion and ethics, saying, “[T]he big upshot is this: For decades, people tried to devise a rigorous ‘scientific’ system to analyze behavior that would be divorced from morality. But if cooperation permeates our nature, then so does morality, and there is no escaping ethics, emotion and religion in our quest to understand who we are and how we got this way.

If I could question David Brooks, I’d ask him to name the “people” who sought a scientific system divorced from morality. Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. I’ve never seen science (scientists) wanting to diminish morality—or religion or God. Such a judgment comes from the religionists or traditionalists who become defensive.

My bottom line maintains that we human beings, by virtue of millions of years of creaturely evolution are hardwired to be moral. A few years ago Jonathan Haidt, a leading evolutionary psychologist, described five moral colors, which he describes on his web site’s home page as

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulate the theory in 2010 based on new data, we are likely to include several forms of fairness, and to emphasize proportionality, which is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Remarks in the previous blog regarding First Nature and Second Nature have relevance here. I’m thinking Second Nature is the rationalization and application of First Nature instincts, including the five moral colors. To these five instincts, I certainly add the mammalian bonding instinct which has resulted in a cornucopia of the various fruits of love.

To return to Wolfe and the soul, the soul may be dead, but the human spirit is more vibrant than ever—a source of awe and wonder.

First and Second Nature

When I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to be thinking about the notion of free will, one of the great philosophical/theological questions. But a NY Times article about the so-called housewives reality shows that plague the contemporary television landscape nudged me in that direction.

Critic Neil Genzlinger wrote, “’One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on,’ the great religious scholar P. J. O’Rourke wrote in Rolling Stone in November 1989. ‘And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.’

“We are faced with two possibilities. One is that there is no free will, which means that God actually planned for there to be a 'Real Housewives of New Jersey ' and for people to watch it. Contemplating a universe built on that premise can lead only to collective insanity, and therefore the notion must be rejected.

“Thus we must embrace the other possibility: that there is free will, and that the enablers who make “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” possible could transform the show from the lame caricature it is, if only they — in Mr. O’Rourke’s formulation — looked at their driver’s licenses. That they have not done so suggests a need for some forcible action.”

Though tongue-in-cheek, this article led me down the Unitarian Universalist path of freedom and responsibility.

Personally, I don’t put God into the free-will equation. I am a Religious Naturalist and frame my musings by the insights of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. From these perspectives, I see both determinism and free will. For some years, I’ve mused about a First Nature and a Second Nature.

Our First Nature is our creatureliness—what has evolved over billions of years to become the Human Species that bends us toward generally shared behaviors that seem determined. (Anyone sexually attracted to another knows how powerful First Nature influences are.)

Our Second Nature emerges from the workings of our incredible, highly evolved mind—its consciousness and self-consciousness. Through reason, we make choices that counter our First Nature instincts, and can be called a result of free will. (Though sexually attracted to another person, we might choose not to act on the urge for a variety of reasons, including a vow of exclusivity to another.)

Metaphorically, human nature describes a realm somewhere between angels and animals. The phrase “angels of our better nature,” speaks to what I understand as our Second Nature possibilities.

In the end, I maintain that each of us is responsible for her or his actions. O’Rourke has it right. When we begin to assess the source of our problems, the place to begin is one’s self. Look at the face on your driver’s license. Or remember Michael Jackson’s reflections on “Man in the Mirror.”

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
(Ooh!)
I'm asking him to change his ways
(Change his ways-Ooh!)
And no message could've been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
(If you wanna make the world a better place)
Take a look at yourself and then make that...
(Take a look at yourself and then make that...)
Change!

Bin Laden in Hell?

One of those manufactured for the news cycle polls, conducted a few days ago by CNN asked whether Osama bin Laden was going to Hell. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said they thought he was in hell with 24 percent saying they didn't know and 10 percent saying no, they didn't think so. Five percent of respondents did not believe in hell.

To be fair, the poll responded to an incendiary Daily News front page that screamed "Rot in Hell" alongside Bin Laden's photo, the day after his killing by Navy Seals.

Hell's getting a lot of interest these days, as a new universalism seeps into the Evangelical community. Ross Douthat, a NY Times opiner, wrote an April 24 piece about "A Case for Hell." I responded in an unpublished letter to the editor:

Full disclosure: I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist minister since 1977, and I interned at an historic Universalist church in 1976-77 in Syracuse New York, so I have a bona fide Universalist identity.

I’m amused by the contemporary brouhaha over the doctrine of universal salvation that my thoroughly liberal faith tradition resolved in the first few decades of the 19^th century. And I’m also amused by Ross Douthat’s recent op-ed piece “A Case for Hell,” in which he seems to argue that moral choice and its consequence of heaven or hell makes us more fully human.

His reasoning is thin from the perspective of traditional theology, which for the old Universalists turned on a doctrine of the Atonement along with the notion of a loving Father. For them, free will mattered and their choices responded to God’s overarching Love. Therefore, it can be argued, in contrast to Mr. Douthat’s reasoning, that choice can operate in a system of universal salvation through the agency of love.

Such nuances of theology seem so antique and irrelevant, relative to a progressing understanding of the human condition increasingly grounded in the sciences, especially neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and moral psychology. Mr. Douthat dismisses this sort of scientific materialism along with universal salvation as forms of determinism that steal our free will. He appears to be defending a higher notion of the human condition by declaring, “The doctrine of hell… assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make.”

Rather than resorting to time-worn theologies of universal salvation and hell to get his point across , I’d love for Mr. Douthat to deal directly with the deep issues, the notion of free will and doctrine of the human condition, from a contemporary point of view.

Actually, the question of the CNN poll offers an opportunity for serious religious conversation. Poll a group of Muslims, say in Saudi Arabia, if bin Laden is in Heaven and you'd probably have an overwhelming majority giving a resounding "yes!"

Which point of view is true in an absolute sense? Neither. Heaven and Hell are irrelevant, and such partisan doctrines only cause grief in the world, because it leads to belief that God is partisan, too.

Back in the day Bob Dylan sang, "And you don't count the dead when God's on your side."