26/09: R strategists and freshly turned soil
Ask a gardener or a forester what happens when you turn up soil or a windstorm knocks down a stand of old growth, ask a biologist who studies that level of interaction what happens when you plow through an established ecosystem to put in a power line, a railway track, a roadbed, they’ll tell you: the r strategists move in.
You’ve seem them. A stand of aspen growing where the white pines got knocked down, dandielions taking over a neglected garden or lawn, moles or voles doing the same. Tear up the existing order and something small, simple, flexible about its environment and diet and/or capable of rapid, aggressive increase is going to move in and go nuts. Something similar happens even to established ecosystems when an invasive species for which there is no local predator crosses a natural boundary, or is carried across, usually by human traffic. Purple loosestrife invading a wetland, same deal. Grows fast, spreads fast, wipes everything in its path out. What had been a complex, multilayered ecosystem is profoundly transformed, flattened out. It takes a while—a period of relative stability—for diversity to increase again, as the more specialist K strategists re-emerge and play out their more complicated longer-term strategies, building up their web of allegiances, competitions, and interdependencies.
I find myself thinking of this dynamic looking at this video that surfaced in the wake of US presidential candidate McCain’s selection of his running mate: one Sarah Palin.
It’s actually nothing terribly unusual, this material, if you know the territory at all. In fact, Ms. Palin’s remarks are quite pedestrian for the venue: her deity shall be called upon to assist in the consumation of a civic works project; she’s called upon by her deity to go forth and witness, and so on and so on. The slightly weirder stuff you can find by looking a little harder at Ms. Palin’s church specifically or at the Pentecostal movement in general, it’s also not so much news to some of us. Yes, there are religious movements in which people fall upon the floor writhing, uttering unintelligible strings of syllables, and no, no one’s gonna show up with a wooden spoon to force anyone’s tongue down in response. This is a still common enough oddity that will occur in these movements, and no one’s actually in much danger of suffocating themselves—they’re probably actually in control of themselves. (Or, at least, most of them are. Probably. Most of the time… And once the lot of them get going, odds are, you’re not going to be packing enough wooden spoons to help ‘em all anyway, even if you happen to be in the restaurant supply biz. See again crowd psychology, peer pressure, group manias, the madness of crowds. It’s a bit like an infectious agent transmitted at close proximity, so long as we’re doing biological metaphors. Spreads like wildfire in the badly lit gymnasia and stadia where they hold the mass rallies.)
And yes, they believe in witchcraft and ‘demonic influences’—and no, that’s not some airy metaphor, in this group. The fact that in Africa they still do witchhunts… and like-minded Pentecostals will produce weirdly self-congratulatory videos about such ugliness—and Ms. Palin will speak glowingly of the man who incited such mob anger—might surprise you, but yes, again, it’s of a piece with the whole package. (Tho’ by the way, no, you can’t take my lack of surprise as being lack of disgust, and yes, people—mostly elderly, socially isolated, vulnerable people—die horribly at the hands of mob violence as part and parcel of this ancient madness, in the wilder areas, at least, as hard as it may seem for us to grasp, sitting at our terminals in the early 21st century—and here there is a frightening syncretism—Pentecostal belief in the demonic was in there from its North American beginnings, but in Africa, where the older traditions describe passingly similar dark fantasies, it apparently can all come together with alarming toxicity).
Yes, there are such movements, and yes, there are an awful lot of people involved in them. More than one or two hundred million worldwide within Pentecostalism at large, depending a bit on whether you count certain movements within the larger umbrella. Yes, some of ‘em have got some rather startling beliefs—see also, beyond the stuff about dark forces from beyond, the Assemblies of God’s premillenial eschatology. And yes, there are, within the larger umbrella, some rather explicitly political movements, and speakers who will call for ‘infiltration’ of government and other insitutions at the behest of their deity. And yes, maybe, if you think keeping the explicit endorsement of religious doctrine out of your nation’s legislation is a good idea, you might want to worry a bit about that. They’re an odd bunch, no question, and not themselves universally committed to that principle.
I’m not gonna pound any harder on the ‘scary, scary AOG’ candidate’ nail here, however. At least, no more than I just implicitly did. Seems a bit redundant. If you worry about that sort of thing, you probably already know why you might want to worry, here. You know where to look, you know what’s out there. And if you don’t, you’re probably just gonna yawn, anyway. And that wasn’t really my subject today.
My subject today was R strategists, and why and when you see them. The thing that strikes me most about the AOG and Pentecostalism in general is what their presence probably says about the larger societies in which they exist—the nations and communities where you find them.
The thing is: yes, there are a lot of adherents to these movements. And their numbers have been growing dramatically. That 80 million or so in the US (that’s the overall movement, now somewhat segmented, and yes, that’s around a quarter of the total population) is quite a shocker when you realize that stream of sects only got started just over a hundred years ago. From nothing to a quarter of the population in just over a century, think about that one a second…
Well, where does that come from?
Think of R strategists and freshly turned soil. In cultures and communities in flux, the social equivalent to the dandielion moves in.The original Pentecostal movement flourished among immigrant communities, impoverished freed slaves, the downtrodden of urban Los Angeles. It was admirably and markedly interracial, once, tho’ less so lately, and for a while, did very well in rural areas. As a missionary movement, it’s more recently had some success in Africa. The megachurches preaching their ‘prosperity gospel’ are legendary in suburbs throughout the US. And in the nations of the former USSR, following glasnost, there was a sudden influx of missionary activity, especially on the part of NRMs and the more evangelical sects of Christianity, like Pentecostalism.
Freshly turned soil. Societies in upheaval, communities in anxiety. To borrow the storied phrase from Karl Marx, this is religion as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation… the opium of the people’. And the middle manager parking his minivan containing 2.3 kids in the football-field sized lot at the megachurch in the burbs may not look, at first glance, like he’s got much in common with the sub-Saharan urban poor, but he’s probably almost as anxious. They don’t know where their next meal is coming from. He’s probably got some of that stress, too, only about the second mortgage payment to follow any potential layoff. He may not fall as far and to as small a bowl as they, but he can still fall, and he knows it. Prosperity gospel, indeed.
I’d had this thought a while ago. My parents were working in Nunavut—at a community way up in the archipelago—and they’d got in touch with me with some questions about how the local science teacher might answer some creationists that had surfaced, were making some noise in class. Behind them, it turned out, was the local Pentecostal congregation—another branch of that same tree. They mentioned, in passing: there was a lot of that, up in the isolated northern communities, the places the surviving Inuit were now gathered. And I got to thinking: well, of course. As it is in Africa, as it is in isolated rural areas everywhere. Hell, as it was in at least several of the ‘great awakenings’: this is one of the things communities and societies under stress do. The world changes too fast, you get knocked loose from your moorings, you turn to the simple, to the black and white, to the drastic solution that will save your soul in no uncertain terms, turn you into a spiritual warrior for absolute good, wash you in the blood. That it explains the woes of the world in such simple terms you can actually seem to address on your own—demons to vanquish—only makes it prettier. The real problems of Kiambu, Kenya may be annoyingly complicated to address—a gangster culture well-established with complex and spreading connections to the political and security system is a problem that’s going to take time and effort to deal with. Hounding one woman out of town, that’s an awful lot easier, isn’t it? Similarily, if you’re living in a modern, relatively wealthy industrial democracy, but the system is annoyingly vulnerable to concentration of power, and the local plutocracy has—as they tend to do—rather corrupted the process, made it awfully difficult for the average citizen to get any kind of change to improve their lot—looking for demons is probably relatively more satisfying than is writing another letter to your congressman. You can probably pretend you’ve found and vanquished the demon rather more easily than you can that your congressman will actually read and act on your letter.
I find myself suspecting, too, that some of that same plutocracy, at least, know very well this is how it works, aren’t above deliberately playing to those superstitions to their own political advantage. But this, too, is an old theme, and a complicated one. And how long you can play that game before you start believing it yourself is, of course, an open and interesting question, too.
All of which is to say: as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s much about these religions that disgust me, much about them that annoy me, much, frequently, about their practitioners and the manipulators that play with these superstitions that disgusts, annoys, and frightens me. But I do have some (qualified) sympathy, when I think about where it comes from. And I do think, at the end of the day, most of the time, these things are as much symptoms of deeper problems as they are causes in their own right. You think it might be a little saner for all of us if people stop believing in magical sky daddies and things that go bump in the night, and you’d like to nudge the world in that direction, sure, teaching them critical thought is probably a good part of the battle. But until they live in a world where those comforts and simplifications are a lot less seductive for these underlying reasons, you’re probably only halfway there.
You’ve seem them. A stand of aspen growing where the white pines got knocked down, dandielions taking over a neglected garden or lawn, moles or voles doing the same. Tear up the existing order and something small, simple, flexible about its environment and diet and/or capable of rapid, aggressive increase is going to move in and go nuts. Something similar happens even to established ecosystems when an invasive species for which there is no local predator crosses a natural boundary, or is carried across, usually by human traffic. Purple loosestrife invading a wetland, same deal. Grows fast, spreads fast, wipes everything in its path out. What had been a complex, multilayered ecosystem is profoundly transformed, flattened out. It takes a while—a period of relative stability—for diversity to increase again, as the more specialist K strategists re-emerge and play out their more complicated longer-term strategies, building up their web of allegiances, competitions, and interdependencies.
I find myself thinking of this dynamic looking at this video that surfaced in the wake of US presidential candidate McCain’s selection of his running mate: one Sarah Palin.
It’s actually nothing terribly unusual, this material, if you know the territory at all. In fact, Ms. Palin’s remarks are quite pedestrian for the venue: her deity shall be called upon to assist in the consumation of a civic works project; she’s called upon by her deity to go forth and witness, and so on and so on. The slightly weirder stuff you can find by looking a little harder at Ms. Palin’s church specifically or at the Pentecostal movement in general, it’s also not so much news to some of us. Yes, there are religious movements in which people fall upon the floor writhing, uttering unintelligible strings of syllables, and no, no one’s gonna show up with a wooden spoon to force anyone’s tongue down in response. This is a still common enough oddity that will occur in these movements, and no one’s actually in much danger of suffocating themselves—they’re probably actually in control of themselves. (Or, at least, most of them are. Probably. Most of the time… And once the lot of them get going, odds are, you’re not going to be packing enough wooden spoons to help ‘em all anyway, even if you happen to be in the restaurant supply biz. See again crowd psychology, peer pressure, group manias, the madness of crowds. It’s a bit like an infectious agent transmitted at close proximity, so long as we’re doing biological metaphors. Spreads like wildfire in the badly lit gymnasia and stadia where they hold the mass rallies.)
And yes, they believe in witchcraft and ‘demonic influences’—and no, that’s not some airy metaphor, in this group. The fact that in Africa they still do witchhunts… and like-minded Pentecostals will produce weirdly self-congratulatory videos about such ugliness—and Ms. Palin will speak glowingly of the man who incited such mob anger—might surprise you, but yes, again, it’s of a piece with the whole package. (Tho’ by the way, no, you can’t take my lack of surprise as being lack of disgust, and yes, people—mostly elderly, socially isolated, vulnerable people—die horribly at the hands of mob violence as part and parcel of this ancient madness, in the wilder areas, at least, as hard as it may seem for us to grasp, sitting at our terminals in the early 21st century—and here there is a frightening syncretism—Pentecostal belief in the demonic was in there from its North American beginnings, but in Africa, where the older traditions describe passingly similar dark fantasies, it apparently can all come together with alarming toxicity).
Yes, there are such movements, and yes, there are an awful lot of people involved in them. More than one or two hundred million worldwide within Pentecostalism at large, depending a bit on whether you count certain movements within the larger umbrella. Yes, some of ‘em have got some rather startling beliefs—see also, beyond the stuff about dark forces from beyond, the Assemblies of God’s premillenial eschatology. And yes, there are, within the larger umbrella, some rather explicitly political movements, and speakers who will call for ‘infiltration’ of government and other insitutions at the behest of their deity. And yes, maybe, if you think keeping the explicit endorsement of religious doctrine out of your nation’s legislation is a good idea, you might want to worry a bit about that. They’re an odd bunch, no question, and not themselves universally committed to that principle.
I’m not gonna pound any harder on the ‘scary, scary AOG’ candidate’ nail here, however. At least, no more than I just implicitly did. Seems a bit redundant. If you worry about that sort of thing, you probably already know why you might want to worry, here. You know where to look, you know what’s out there. And if you don’t, you’re probably just gonna yawn, anyway. And that wasn’t really my subject today.
My subject today was R strategists, and why and when you see them. The thing that strikes me most about the AOG and Pentecostalism in general is what their presence probably says about the larger societies in which they exist—the nations and communities where you find them.
The thing is: yes, there are a lot of adherents to these movements. And their numbers have been growing dramatically. That 80 million or so in the US (that’s the overall movement, now somewhat segmented, and yes, that’s around a quarter of the total population) is quite a shocker when you realize that stream of sects only got started just over a hundred years ago. From nothing to a quarter of the population in just over a century, think about that one a second…
Well, where does that come from?
Think of R strategists and freshly turned soil. In cultures and communities in flux, the social equivalent to the dandielion moves in.The original Pentecostal movement flourished among immigrant communities, impoverished freed slaves, the downtrodden of urban Los Angeles. It was admirably and markedly interracial, once, tho’ less so lately, and for a while, did very well in rural areas. As a missionary movement, it’s more recently had some success in Africa. The megachurches preaching their ‘prosperity gospel’ are legendary in suburbs throughout the US. And in the nations of the former USSR, following glasnost, there was a sudden influx of missionary activity, especially on the part of NRMs and the more evangelical sects of Christianity, like Pentecostalism.
Freshly turned soil. Societies in upheaval, communities in anxiety. To borrow the storied phrase from Karl Marx, this is religion as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation… the opium of the people’. And the middle manager parking his minivan containing 2.3 kids in the football-field sized lot at the megachurch in the burbs may not look, at first glance, like he’s got much in common with the sub-Saharan urban poor, but he’s probably almost as anxious. They don’t know where their next meal is coming from. He’s probably got some of that stress, too, only about the second mortgage payment to follow any potential layoff. He may not fall as far and to as small a bowl as they, but he can still fall, and he knows it. Prosperity gospel, indeed.
I’d had this thought a while ago. My parents were working in Nunavut—at a community way up in the archipelago—and they’d got in touch with me with some questions about how the local science teacher might answer some creationists that had surfaced, were making some noise in class. Behind them, it turned out, was the local Pentecostal congregation—another branch of that same tree. They mentioned, in passing: there was a lot of that, up in the isolated northern communities, the places the surviving Inuit were now gathered. And I got to thinking: well, of course. As it is in Africa, as it is in isolated rural areas everywhere. Hell, as it was in at least several of the ‘great awakenings’: this is one of the things communities and societies under stress do. The world changes too fast, you get knocked loose from your moorings, you turn to the simple, to the black and white, to the drastic solution that will save your soul in no uncertain terms, turn you into a spiritual warrior for absolute good, wash you in the blood. That it explains the woes of the world in such simple terms you can actually seem to address on your own—demons to vanquish—only makes it prettier. The real problems of Kiambu, Kenya may be annoyingly complicated to address—a gangster culture well-established with complex and spreading connections to the political and security system is a problem that’s going to take time and effort to deal with. Hounding one woman out of town, that’s an awful lot easier, isn’t it? Similarily, if you’re living in a modern, relatively wealthy industrial democracy, but the system is annoyingly vulnerable to concentration of power, and the local plutocracy has—as they tend to do—rather corrupted the process, made it awfully difficult for the average citizen to get any kind of change to improve their lot—looking for demons is probably relatively more satisfying than is writing another letter to your congressman. You can probably pretend you’ve found and vanquished the demon rather more easily than you can that your congressman will actually read and act on your letter.
I find myself suspecting, too, that some of that same plutocracy, at least, know very well this is how it works, aren’t above deliberately playing to those superstitions to their own political advantage. But this, too, is an old theme, and a complicated one. And how long you can play that game before you start believing it yourself is, of course, an open and interesting question, too.
All of which is to say: as I’ve written elsewhere, there’s much about these religions that disgust me, much about them that annoy me, much, frequently, about their practitioners and the manipulators that play with these superstitions that disgusts, annoys, and frightens me. But I do have some (qualified) sympathy, when I think about where it comes from. And I do think, at the end of the day, most of the time, these things are as much symptoms of deeper problems as they are causes in their own right. You think it might be a little saner for all of us if people stop believing in magical sky daddies and things that go bump in the night, and you’d like to nudge the world in that direction, sure, teaching them critical thought is probably a good part of the battle. But until they live in a world where those comforts and simplifications are a lot less seductive for these underlying reasons, you’re probably only halfway there.
bPer wrote:
I have to wonder, though, about just far this hypothesis can be supported. My brother-in-law lives out in BC in a community that is just saturated with god-botherers. We’ve only visited once because it creeped us out so much. But this is (at least superficially) a nice, prosperous community - little evidence of strife that would support the hypothesis. Maybe the fundies have just congregated there (my BiL and family moved there from the Ottawa Valley). I don’t know.
On another note, are you still interested in meeting at the Clocktower tomorrow evening with fellow Pharyngulites?