Culture of poverty, culture of success

Crunchy Con (Rob Dreher): Culture of poverty, culture of success

Writing in The New Republic, Brink Lindsey shows why personal and familial culture is the greatest determinant of whether or not someone gets out of poverty. He surveys studies showing that a family's income is a peripheral contributor to the success of their children — which means that pouring more money into education is not likely to help raise student achievement much. …

…Don't get me wrong: I believe we have a moral obligation to provide for the basic needs of these citizens. But I don't believe all the government programs we could possibly imagine will fundamentally change their condition, because their condition is not fundamentally a matter of material deprivation.

Culture is more important than politics, as Moynihan said. But he also said that politics can save a culture from itself. What kind of politics could save inner-city black culture from itself? Ideas? Because we certainly need them in society at large, not just the black inner city….

…It's the culture, stupid. It's the stupid culture. Since the 1960s, we've torn down almost every fence our moral and religious tradition erected to help people thrive over generations, especially those in adverse material conditions. Surprise!

Here's what I don't understand: where are the churches in all this? By and large, the only churches I see doing anything about this at the congregational level are the Evangelicals. Often their efforts at chastity-promotion look goofy, but at least they're trying. I almost never saw the challenges even acknowledged straightforwardly in the Catholic parishes of which I'm a part. The biggest misconception non-Catholics have about the Catholic Church, at least in America, is that it talks about sex constantly. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least in my experience.

And though I'm still new in Orthodoxy, I'm not aware of any efforts to counter the challenges of a highly sexualized culture (esp. youth culture) directly. Seriously, if you're Catholic, Orthodox or mainline Protestant and know of such programs, or clerics that take this seriously, by all means let us know in the comboxes — these priests and parishes need to be praised and encouraged.

Where is the black church? Seriously. It's 2008, not 1958; white oppression is not what's keeping poor and working-class black folks down. It's poverty culture, and its poisonous fruits. Are these values being confronted with the Gospel, or is black Christianity analogous to much of contemporary white Christianity, and saturated with sentimental bromides that avoid hard teachings?

In the Hispanic community, are Catholic priests as mum about sexual matters as their white counterparts? How about among Latino Protestants? I know a Latina immigrant from Mexico who holds on to her Pentecostal congregation as the only anchor she and her girls have to moral sanity. That church is working for her. How common is this? Again, I mean these questions seriously, not rhetorically.

And in case you missed the most important line in the article:

Here's what I don't understand: where are the churches in all this?