Great article by Rodney Stark debunking two myths. The first is that the world has become more secularized as it gets more modern. He quotes people claiming that over 300 years ago. The second point that he debunks is that Europe was a staunchly Christian during the middle ages. It wasn’t. Most priests could not read or write Latin and didn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer. Most Churches were tiny, way to small to seat a sizable percentage of the town’s population. In fact, only the larger towns and cities even had Churches. Christianity spread rapidly from person to person for its first 300 years or so, but once it became the state religion of the Roman Empire it became corrupted. The Catholic Church was more interested in baptizing kings and cultivating ties to wealth and power than it was in saving the masses. The secular Europe of today is probably more Christian than it was during the Middle Ages.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn’t a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it’s basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It’s very religious.

Read the full article here. It is long but worth the time.

According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.

Contrary to popular belief, many children do not “bounce back” after divorce or remarriage. Difficulties that are associated with family breakup often persist into adulthood. Children who grow up in single-parent or stepparent families are less successful as adults, particularly in the two domains of life—love and work—that are most essential to happiness. Needless to say, not all children experience such negative effects. However, research shows that many children from disrupted families have a harder time achieving intimacy in a relationship, forming a stable marriage, or even holding a steady job.

Despite this growing body of evidence, it is nearly impossible to discuss changes in family structure without provoking angry protest.

The article is long, but tremendous. Take the time and read the whole thing. It was originally printed in the left-leaning Atlantic Monthly, here is a reprint.

Race and Culture by Thomas Sowell is an effective response to the geography is destiny arguments of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. I think Diamond’s book was wonderful, and his arguments about geography and crop domestication changed the way I viewed the world. But nevertheless, culture still matters. Below are just a few highlights from Thomas Sowell’s book.

Middlemen minorities

Middlemen minorities are small business owner and shopkeepers who are of a different ethnicity (and therefore culture) of the groups they serve.

• Some middlemen minorities include: Jews, Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese, Armenians, Gujaratis and Chettyars in India, and Koreans in US.
• Their success shows that there is a niche to be filled, and that the majority ethnic group lacks the entrepreneurial spirit to fill it

Encapsulated minorities
Encapsulated minorities are minorities who are separated from the rest of their culture and surrounded by a complete different culture.

• Examples include Black Sea Germans, Jews, Amish. Surely “geography is not destiny” for the Amish

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