{"id":66975,"date":"2015-05-19T09:01:38","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T14:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=66975"},"modified":"2015-05-29T10:43:46","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T15:43:46","slug":"the-relative-importance-of-poverty-and-the-culture-war-to-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/05\/19\/the-relative-importance-of-poverty-and-the-culture-war-to-catholicism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Relative Importance of Poverty to Catholicism"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the New York Times<\/em>, Ross Douthat has called\u00a0out<\/a> liberals who think, and declare, that churches today are more focused on \u201cculture war\u201d issues like abortion and homosexuality than on poverty.<\/p>\n

Ridiculous, says Douthat. Religious organizations spend only \u201ca few hundred million dollars\u201d on pro-life causes and \u201ctraditional marriage\u201d but tens of billions on charities, schools, and hospitals. Douthat and his sources, though, lump all spending together rather than separating domestic U.S. budgets from those going to the developing world.\u00a0 But even in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, abortion and gay marriage are largely legislative and legal matters. Building schools and hospitals and then keeping them running \u2013 that takes real money.<\/p>\n

Why then do liberals get this impression about the priorities of religious organizations? Douthat blames the media. He doesn\u2019t do a full O\u2019Reilly and accuse the media (liberal, it goes without saying) and others of ganging up in a war on religion, but that\u2019s the subtext.<\/p>\n

Anyone who tells you that America\u2019s pastors are obsessed with homosexuality or abortion only hears them through a media filter. You can attend Masses or megachurches for months without having those issues intrude.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, the media do not report on the sermons and homilies of local clergy at all, whether they are urging their flocks to live good lives, become wealthy, help the needy, or oppose gay marriage. Nor is there a data base of these Sunday texts, so we don\u2019t know precisely how much American chuchgoers are hearing about any of these topics. Only a handful of clergy get media coverage, and that coverage focuses on their pronouncements about controversial issues.\u00a0 As Douthat says, liberals are probably reacting to \u201creligious leaders who make opposition to abortion more of a political\u00a0<\/i>priority than publicly-funded antipoverty efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of his own Catholic church, Douthat adds, \u201cYou can bore yourself to tears reading denominational statements and bishops\u2019 documents (true long before Pope Francis) with a similar result.\u201d Maybe he has done this reading, and maybe he does think that his Church does not let \u201cthose issues intrude.\u201d Or as he puts it, \u201cThe belief that organized religion is organized around culture war is largely a conceit of the irreligious.\u201d<\/p>\n

But here, thanks to the centralized and hierarchical structure of the Church, we can get data that might reveal what the Church is worried about. As Douthat implies, the previous pope (Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Ratzinger), was more concerned about culture-war issues than is the current pope.<\/p>\n

How concerned? I went to Lexis-Nexis. I figured that papal pronouncements on these issues would be issued in masses, in official statements, and in addresses.\u00a0 For each of those three terms, I searched for \u201cPope Benedict\u201d with four \u201cculture-war\u201d terms (Abortion, Homosexuality, Condom, and Birth control) and Poverty.<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a> \"2\"<\/a> \"2<\/a>
\nAbortion was the big winner.\u00a0 Poverty was referred to in more articles than were the other individual culture-war terms.\u00a0 But if those terms are combined into a single bar, its clear that poverty as a papal concern is dwarfed by the attention to these other issues. The graph below shows the data for \u201cmass.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"1b\"<\/a>
\nThis is not the best data. It might reflect the concerns of the press more than those of the Church. Also, some of those Lexis-Nexis articles are not direct hits. They might reference an \u201caddress\u201d or \u201cstatement\u201d by someone else. But there\u2019s no reason to think that these off-target citations are skewed towards Abortion and away from Poverty.So it\u2019s completely understandable that liberals, and perhaps non-liberals as well, have the impression that Big Religion has a big concern with matters of sex and reproduction.Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>\u00a0and Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the New York Times, Ross Douthat has called\u00a0out liberals who think, and declare, that churches today are more focused on \u201cculture war\u201d issues like abortion and homosexuality than on poverty. Ridiculous, says Douthat. Religious organizations spend only \u201ca few hundred million dollars\u201d on pro-life causes and \u201ctraditional marriage\u201d but tens of billions on charities, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":66979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2083,29,23384,129,23624,42,120,54],"class_list":["post-66975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortionreproduction","tag-class","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-media","tag-media-newsopinion","tag-religion","tag-sex","tag-sexual-orientation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/05\/3.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66975"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67051,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66975\/revisions\/67051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}