I'm not sure if my job just got easier or harder ;)
Gotta love all those Mainline Protestants and Kennedy Catholics in Massachusetts and Maine who have abandoned religion altogether!
And please note that New York is not a New England State - it belongs to the Mid-Atlantic states, thank you very much :)
2 comments:
Sorry, Stephen. I think it's more complicated than "Kennedy Catholics"; don't forget the terrible firestorm that burst on the scene in New England and led to a terrible loss in Church participation and membership, among both "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics. I hope that's not an overly serious response to what may have been a not totally serious remark.
John - As always, thanks for reading, for commenting, and for your kind words. I suppose I was being more tongue-in-cheek than anything else . . . but your point is well taken. It would be interesting to see if Gallup, who did this most recent survey, has data going back over any length of time . . . ten, twenty, forty years. The comparisons would be illuminating. While I think your point is a good corrective, (and admit that I haven't read this yet) my suspicion is that Philip Lawler's "Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture" would place the clerical abuse crisis AND these current poll numbers BOTH in the broader context of a much broader crisis in American Catholicism: the malaise of suburban cafeteria-Catholicism; of which JFK was both catalyst and symbol. Anyway, this is all just more stuff for me to spend the next six to eight years of my life studying ;)
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