Coming Apart 4: The Cognitive Elite

My engagement with this book is now officially completely out of order. This will be the next to last post in this series and focus on the idea of the stratification in contemporary American society not between the rich and the poor but between what Murray calls the “cognitive elite” (the really smart people) and everyone else.

This is a rather simple story, but one that had not occurred to me before. There was an era in America not too long ago when people married someone they had grown up with or around, the high school sweetheart if you will. My own grandparents went to school together from kindergarten on and were married shortly after high school graduation. No one, apparently, told them how limiting this was and they have been forced to enjoy 55 years of marriage with one another, raise five successful children, and are tormented with a retirement of carpentry, gardening, travel, and church service. But I am not making a point about my own generation’s hesitancy to marry before 30, but rather the manner in which who it is that we marry has changed.

Most of my professors for the past two years in graduate school have been married to other professors. It is not uncommon, as Murray points out, for two high-powered lawyers to be married to one another; likewise a law professor and a business professor; a stockbroker and a famous artist, etc. Rarely do we see a CEO marry his secretary or a sociology professor marry a construction worker. In other words, the cognitive elite marry other members of the cognitive elite in a way that they did not do in previous generations. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but the practice of marrying across class divides was far more common in the past than it is today. This is exemplified by the sequestering of the cognitive elites in the SuperZips that I described in an earlier post.

And while I am far from making the claim that people in elite positions—professors, CEOs, lawyers, doctors, artists—are necessarily smarter than construction workers or janitors or TV repair men, most in reality are. The tests bear that out well enough. And even if the street sweeper is smarter than the English professor in terms of IQ, the manner in which they live out their intelligence and the ways in which they will raise their children certainly diverge.

I am really not intending to make gross generalizations here, but the fragmentation between Belmont and Fishtown has to be accounted for in some way. So consider, who is more likely to encourage their children to achieve academic excellence, teach them piano and violin, put them in tennis lessons, pay for a tutor to teach their children French or Mandarin or to help close a gap in some other subject, take them to museums and on trips to Europe, have a well-stocked library in the house: the high-IQ street sweeper or the lower-IQ English professor? There are, of course, exceptions, but the rule seems pretty undeniable. And what this leads to is further stratification and fragmentation. The street sweeper’s children will be smart still, but without the same access to opportunity they start from a disadvantage. This is not to say that they will not in the end reach a position of prominence, but the old American ideal is fading. Expect less farm kids from Iowa to in the future break through the ranks of the elite. If anyone from Iowa makes the jump it will most likely be the children of professors from Iowa City, not from the cornfields around the state. That is the new reality of this country.

And it seems to me the element in Murray’s work least likely to change. As urban, educated whites continue to delay marriage into their late 20s and early 30s they will continue to marry people in the same social strata. To use a common term, they might “slum” it from time to time but actually settling down with someone from a different station of life would be frowned upon by their friends and most would not seriously consider doing so anyway. So as lawyers continue to marry lawyers and professors wed other professors, settling down at night to read Balzac and Dostoevsky over glasses of white wine while listening to violin concertos by Bach, the fragmentation and stratification of the cognitive elite is only likely to grow. And, again, to the detriment of Fishtown.

Coming Apart 3: Religion

I briefly mentioned in the last post that religiosity in Fishtown does not fit the stereotype of the poor fundamentalist clinging to God and voting against his economic interests in blind support of the GOP. I want to focus in a bit more on this issue in this post.

Murray is not a religious man and really has no axe to grind here. But what he does acknowledge—and is hard to deny—is that religion, until very recently, served a great role in our society not merely in terms of spiritual devotion or confirmation classes for youth but also in the way it spurred on other forms of civic engagement.

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, a book examining the collapse in meaningful interpersonal relationships in the United States notes that apart from directly religious activities (church sponsored philanthropy, membership, or volunteering), religious people are also more involved across the board outside of the church. They entertain people in their homes more often, join more service organizations, sports teams, study groups, hobby clubs. In other words, religious involvement seems to correlate quite distinctively with a broad array of social engagement that engenders social capital to adherents (of course this is speaking only in generalizations).

As to religious fundamentalism, Murray found that while more of the already religious members of Fishtown identify as fundamentalist today—there was a rise in identification as fundamentalist from 34% in the 1970s to 46% today—when accounting for the rise in secularism in Fishtown in the preceding three decades the overall population (nonreligious included) of Fishtown is only slightly more fundamentalist than it was in the past (32% as a percentage of the total in the 1970s and 34% today). The rise, then, in religious believers in Fishtown identifying as fundamentalist does not necessarily denote a rise in fundamentalism in Fishtown over the period. As more Fishtown residents dropped religion altogether the ones who were least susceptible to secularization were probably already fundamentalist and remained so. Another plausible explanation, of course, is that of the decline in mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. As the mass exodus from the Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations shows, most people felt these denominations were no longer meeting the needs of average people. Surely some of the rise of fundamentalism can be attributed to this exodus.

What really struck me about Murray’s findings in this area is certainly not that our country is becoming more secularized; I have heard pastors and authors handwringing over this tragedy my whole life. Thinking about this sociologically, and not as a Christian, the striking thing is that as secularization has increased there has been nothing to step in and fill the void left by the lack of church. Questions of theology aside, religious involvement can be extremely important in terms of socialization and community building. As Putnam shows, it also leads to broad engagement in other arenas outside of the church.

And I think people are starting to notice. Today we have the vanguards of the New Atheism talking about how there need to be atheist churches for the unbelieving to get together in community over their unbelief. What is as important to the average person as peace with God is community and ritual. Whether or not this is right, I do believe it to be true on a practical level. So when we lose religion we do not simply lose the former, but we tend to lose the latter as well. And, unsurprisingly, the upper classes and elites seem to be sheltered from this loss of faith (indeed Murray points out that the wealthy are still more functionally religious than the poor in every indicator), while the brunt of the social sea change is borne by Fishtown. Given Murray’s other findings this is unsurprising, but it certainly does not bode well for the future of the new lower class. 

Coming Apart 2: SuperZips

I began this miniseries on Charles Murray’s new book a bit out of order. I jumped ahead to the sociological information that seemed closest to my own heart—the manner in which the changes in social policies and the social contract over the past 50 years have left the upper class elites relatively unaffected while tearing apart the lower classes. While this constitutes the core of Murray’s analysis of the past 50 years, he begins with a much simpler tale: the lack of interaction between classes that prevails today and allows for this fragmentation to go almost unnoticed by the elites.

Murray identifies what he calls SuperZips, which are zip codes meeting specific socioeconomic criteria concerning income and education levels (again, none of this is predicated on political affiliation). Essentially, the criteria for SuperZip status amounts to nearly 2/3 of adults in the zip code having a college education with a median income level of $141,400 in the zip. In other words, they constitute the top 5% of zip codes in America. There are 882 such zip codes in our country containing 9.1 million people. They are substantially whiter and more Asian than the rest of the country. Crime is lower, the inhabitants are more likely to be married, and unemployment is extremely low.

The amazing thing about these SuperZips is that they all seem to butt up against one another. Murray gives the example of Washington, D.C. The D.C. area is a contiguous region of SuperZips abutted by zip codes in the 90th-94^th centiles of all zip codes. I don’t have the space to lay out all of the data, but essentially, and as Murray’s chapter title asserts, what the isolation of SuperZips spells out is a new kind of segregation. Those who live in the SuperZips rarely have any interaction with those from poorer zips and even less often have significant interaction.

The problem here, as Murray is quick to note, is that the residents of the SuperZips are the power brokers in this country, the politicians, businessmen, high-power lawyers, and artists. The major decisions—politically, economically, artistically, socially—are made by a cohort of individuals who for all meaningful purposes are entirely isolated from the majority of the population. And, as I argued in the first post, it is this majority that reaps the (ill) fruit of their decisions.

We all chuckle at the politician in the $5,000 Brooks Brothers suit who claims to be a “man of the people,” but this is the reality of the current sociopolitical situation in America, on both sides of the political aisle. The social upheavals and economic policies that leave the wealthy elite relatively untouched have ravaged “Middle America” in the past 50 years in ways we are just now able to take measure of. And as the availability of blue collar jobs and the pay for such work (not to mention the social capital inherent in such positions) continues to decline the situation only appears as if it will get worse. It truly is a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But there is more than economics at stake here. Another part of what has been undone is any sense of social cohesion. Those who speak for the poor have no idea about the lived realities of the poor; the poor on the other hand are taught to despise the rich for their wealth (and given the growing disparity this often seems justified). America is fragmented in a very real way along class lines in nearly every significant metric. Surprisingly (this is perhaps for another post), against the stereotype of President Obama’s infamous comment about poor hillbillies clinging to “guns and religion,” the reality of religiosity in this country has been felt most prevalently in the lower classes, with people leaving organized religion in droves from Fishtown. Religiosity in Belmont holds strong.

More to come.

Coming Apart I

During one’s final semester of graduate school there is precious spare time for leisure reading. Especially when you do it look I did—three classes taken, one taught, and essentially my entire thesis written all in 16 weeks, on top, of course, of taking care of an infant for two nights a week and various other time-fillers—something I do not recommend. I did read two books extracurricularly: Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. This post concerns the latter of those two. I plan on doing a series of posts on this work (at this point I am not entirely sure how many that will entail), because I think it is extremely important to understand and the statistics it gives are something that must be grappled with moving forward.

Murray is a libertarian and a born provocateur. He co-wrote a book in the early 90s called The Bell Curve that was widely excoriated by nearly everyone (most of whom I don’t imagine made it past the introduction or, hell, the cover flap) for essentially stating the fact of intelligence differences between racial groups. Murray and co-author Richard Hernstein were not dogmatic about the nature of this difference, attributing it to both genetic and environmental factors, acknowledging that the system is unfair and privileges certain groups. In reality, they had bigger fish to fry in their work. But the damage was done. To grab a slightly more contemporary example, you might remember the furor over former Harvard president Larry Summers’ comments about the fact of male and female distribution in the hard sciences. Mr. Summers was run out of Cambridge on a rail for that nasty bit of intellectual enquiry. . Our tolerant society has little room for fact-staters; better to simply hold the right opinion and not ask questions.

Murray’s succeeding work, then, has the taint of the blatant racism unfortunate fact-telling that makes people deeply uncomfortable. Enter his new book, this time on the growing class differences in this country. Coming Apart concerns the ways in which the culture of white America has changed between 1960 and 2010. In short, the sexual revolution, the loss of civic religion, free and easy divorce, and other social upheavals that have taken place in the past 50 years have had a disproportionate effect on the lower classes.

To give an extended example, marriage now has an entirely different function amongst the lower class than it does in the upper class cohort. Murray breaks down the country into two fictitious towns, called Belmont and Fishtown. Belmont consists of the top 20% of income earners while Fishtown contains the bottom 30%. The divergence between the two in the past two generations is staggering. Divorce in Fishtown is rampant: 35% of the residents of Fishtown who have previously been married are divorced; in Belmont that number is somewhere around 5%. In 1960, when Murray started looking at data, Belmont and Fishtown were statistically similar on this score (Belmont: 2%; Fishtown: less than 5%). In Fishtown, nearly 25% of children live with a single parent; in Belmont, around 3% (again, both groups were similar just 50 years ago). Nonmarital births amongst whites are nearly entirely predicated on the educational level of the mother: more than 60% of births where the mother has less than a high school diploma are outside of wedlock; when the mother has at least a bachelor’s degree, the number is 2%. In 1960 nearly 95% of Fishtown’s children grew up with both biological parents, with the number slightly higher for Belmont. Today, 90% of Belmont children grow up in two parent households, while only 30% of Fishtown children have the same situation. Of the Belmont residents who are married, over 60% report very happy marriages; among Fishtown residents, that number plunges below 25%.

Now, obviously this is only data and does not factor in other considerations. The rise in birth control (“the pill” was first approved for use in 1960) and abortion since 1960 surely explains some of this divergence in terms of birthrates; simply put the wealthy have more access to medical technology than the poor. Our wrongheaded War on Drugs has also had a disproportionate effect on the lower classes—can you imagine someone with a Master’s degree going to jail for being found with weed on them?—and the rise of incarceration surely informs some of these gloomy numbers. But the numbers are still real, and Murray’s point in this section is still valid: “The pessimistic title of this section [It’s Even Worse Than It Looks] springs from my belief that families with children are the core around which American communities must be organized—must, because families with children have always been, and still are, the engine that makes American communities work—and from my conclusion that the family in Fishtown is approaching a point of no return” (165).

What all of this goes to show, and what I feel like I have intuited for a long time now, is that most of the social upheavals of the previous generations have benefited or at least not severely harmed the upper classes. As revolutionary as our time may seem, most of the wealthy in this country, whether liberal or conservative, are functioning with at least the framework of 1960 morality. The same simply cannot be said for the poor in this country, a full third of our nation that has been ravaged by these upheavals and made poorer as the wealthy sequester themselves into ever more homogenous communities. I will look at this idea and the burgeoning of what Murray calls SuperZips in the next post. 

Exercises in Missing the Point

Sorry (again) for the long silence around here. I am writing a weekly blog for my church which you can find here. This post just did not have much of a place there, but I felt like I needed to share it anyway. So, it goes here.

I was pointed to this post by one of my favorite liberal bloggers, Andrew Sullivan. He posted it as what he imagined a laudable testament to my generation. I must say I disagree. This was a post written by a man named Ray Downs, criticizing some new television show for having the temerity to represent uncommitted, hookup sex as problematic and awkward. Downs disagrees thus:

I am concerned that Hollywood’s depiction of sex is going from unrealistic romance and passion to exaggerated awkwardness. And this can have a similar, if not more damaging effect on the image of sex. While the over-romanticized sex of Hollywood’s past probably gave many young people unreasonable expectations of what to expect, this new “sex is awkward” theme that they’re projecting seems just as disingenuous. Just because sex might have been awkward for a few people who have been lucky enough to pen their own TV series, does that mean we should be marked as a sexually awkward generation?

Look, I have a lot of problems with my generation: we’re selfish, pretentious, and superficial. But one thing I like about us is that we’re the coolest sexual generation there has ever been in quite a while.

Think about it: interracial sex is totally cool, homosexual sex hasn’t been as publicly accepted since probably Greek times, and premarital sex is pretty much obligatory. All the boundaries that were set in stone merely a few decades ago are gone and we’re a lot freer than we were. And it’s my belief that we’re better at sex — not more awkward. How do I know we’re better at it? Because there are cool sex toy stores like Babeland that have helped make it acceptable and even praiseworthy to make sex better for you and your partner with the help of fun-colored inanimate objects. That’s progress!

Here is the thing that got me in this post, which is an otherwise unspectacular defense of a sexual milieu which seems to be churning up an entire generation: Downs wants to praise our generation for our freewheeling sexual ethic, but he also criticizes us for our selfishness, our pretension, and our superficiality. Perhaps it does not occur to Mr. Downs that perhaps those things are inextricably linked. In other words, perhaps part of why our generation is so selfish, pretentious, and superficial is precisely because, or at least of a piece with our progressive sexual ethic.

As it is, Downs seems to advocate some sort of Platonic body/soul divide so that whatever we do with our bodies does not touch our immaterial souls. If only it were so simple.

How I Spent My Christmas Vacation Reading Horror Fiction

I am not really what you would call a genre fiction type of guy. In school I specialize in the Renaissance period (currently referred to as the early modern period by other people who specialize in the period and almost no one else at all), which is the era of dead white guys who wrote books with titles longer than a Wikipedia article and actually had meaningful scholarly debate on whether fiction writing was a sin. Moreover, the author I focus on in this period is the captain of the literary dead white guy team as far as I am concerned, the one-time Puritan, all-the-time intellectual snob John Milton.

There was no genre fiction in the early modern period. There were no novels in the early modern period. And my appetite for fiction has largely consisted of the type of material one would find Mortimer Adler giving his grave and dignified seal of approval to in the back of his nearly joyless tome on how to read like an intellectual snob, entitled How to Read a Book. So I have read my Dostoevsky and enjoyed it; read my George Eliot and been transported; read my Dickens and laughed and cried; read my Melville and endured it.

Genre fiction was no doubt a delightful pastime for the rubes of the hinterland to enjoy in between episodes of NCIS, but it was not to be indulged in by serious minds such as mine. And then two things happened, serendipitously connected to one another: the first, I read Alan Jacobs’s excellent book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction; secondly, I bought a Kindle.

I had read Dr. Jacobs’s work before, his biography of C.S. Lewis is one of the best books I have ever read about anything, but it came as a revelation. I plan to interact with it more on this here old blog throughout this semester, but one of his main points that is germane to the current post was his idea of Whim being the guiding principle for leisure reading. Too many readers who want to think of themselves as serious readers get trapped into thinking that if a book is not on some distinguished publications Top 100 List of Books to Read If You Want to Feel Better Than Others then it is not worth their time. More than that, perhaps, to read the book is shameful. Jacobs, a professor of English himself and no stranger to the Top 100 lists, will have no truck with this mentality. Life is too short to read books merely because you are supposed to; you should also read what you want to. And there should be flexibility with your reading list. Don’t make long and complicated risks—be willing to let one book lead to the next.

Armed with this new found insight, a couple of days after finishing Jacobs’s work, I received my Kindle in the mail. The great thing about old books is that they are free; out of copyright works can be downloaded for free and read on this remarkable little device. And among the first two that I downloaded were Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s Frankenstein. Fiction is perfect for the Kindle, or, more aptly, the Kindle is perfect for fiction. I have tried reading nonfiction on it, but I still need a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other when I am reading nonfiction. And since it is silly to read fiction with a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other, the Kindle is perfectly equipped for this type of reading. And so I read these two books while I was splitting time between Colorado and Arizona for the holidays.

Also while on vacation I had read an article in The Atlantic Monthly, one of those old and venerated magazines, about the emerging genre of literary science-fiction. Two of the books they discussed were Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a science fiction book with the novel plot construction of a government experiment gone terribly wrong, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. So when I got back to Manhattan I went to the public library and picked them both up. Cronin’s book was nearly 800 pages long and I read it in a few days. I read Whitehead’s (significantly shorter) work in a few sittings.

In my next post I will reflect on what I learned from reading a month of horror fiction, but this post, if you will recall the title, was merely the how. And that is how. I read on the principle of Whim, and I was not disappointed.

Jesus vs Religion

After much radio silence, here is my return to blogging. I have actually been blogging for the past several months for my church's website. This is cross-posted to that site and I will cross-post most of my posts from there for the course of this spring. You can check either site.

There is a certain spoken word poem that made the rounds on that little social networking site called Facebook (oh my gosh, Facebook doesn’t get the red squiggly line from Microsoft Word… it is now a real word!) last week that sets forth the message that Jesus simply hates religion and that if we follow Jesus we should hate religion too. First of all, let me say that I liked most of the poem, and think that this fellow believer’s focus on Jesus and the cross was really exemplary. Furthermore, poetry is an interesting medium, given often I believe to overstatement. One of my favorite religious poems of all time, if I hazard to use the word religious in a non-pejorative sense, a Holy Sonnet by the great English metaphysicist/pastor/poet John Donne ends: “For I/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” And those are some strong words. Given that, I am ready to forgive a bit of hyperbole in poetry.

So, I don’t really want to address or critique this poem directly. If I did I am afraid it would come off as mere jealousy. After all, in my wildest dreams nothing that I ever write will be read by almost 13,000,000 people, the current total for viewers of the video. Also, I believe this video to be an overwhelmingly positive thing. But I do want to address and critique the easy disassociation of Jesus and religion, and this poem and its rapid ascent to coveted viral video status provides a convenient platform for this. Also, I believe this critique will ring true to many readers of this blog and am not trying to be controversial here.

A good portion of this issue surrounds our definition of religion. If, as this video suggests, religion is nothing more than a manmade effort to appease the god(s) then I agree that Jesus is against that. There are many different definitions of religion typically given by a dictionary, though, and none of them have this narrow conception. I don’t want to sound like the third grade book report that begins, “According to Webster’s…”, but according to Webster’s religion can mean “service or worship of God or the supernatural,” “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices,” or “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.” To define religious, for good measure: “relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity” and “scrupulously and conscientiously faithful.” And I think that most people who reject the manmade effort to appease the gods version of religion would gladly support these definitions of religion and claim that the faith they have in Christ resembles something along these lines.

Now that we have a working definition in place—to systematize it, let’s say that religion is a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith and that a religious person is a faithful and conscientious adherer to this system—let’s briefly examine the life of Jesus and see if he was against religion.

It becomes clear that Jesus was against outright excesses of religiosity. He calls the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27, etc.) and berates them for adding to the standards prescribed by God in the Mosaic law (let us not forget in our fervor over religion that it was God, after all, who established the law in the Old Testament), and for neglecting the weightier matters of justice and mercy and the love of God (Luke 11, Matthew 23). And these are all valid critiques of religion (as if Jesus needed my nodding approval). But this is not all that Jesus had to say about religion.

In the Sermon on the Mount, that wonderful collection of the teachings of our Lord, Jesus denies coming to abolish the Law and the Prophets and condemns those who relax even the least of these commandments of God (Matthew 5:17-20). Jesus established the Church, that erstwhile factory of religion. He goes one up from there and established church discipline in Matthew 18. He instituted communion at the Last Supper. And, finally, in his last words to us, the calling from which our movement of churches has received its name, he commands his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…” (Matthew 28:19-20a). He does not want a group of converts, who are “into grace” (I will deal with grace shortly), but a group of disciples who obey what he has commanded. Rituals, obedience, adherence to the law, and discipline. That sounds a lot like religion to me.

The more that I read the Gospels the more it becomes clear to me that Jesus was reacting against what ailed the people of God at his time. The normal faithful Jew was snowed under by the excesses of the law foisted upon them by the religious leaders of their day. And it grieved the heart of Jesus (and angered him immensely). Just as I believe Jesus was angered and grieved for the Catholic Church doing the same thing to the average believer in the pre-Reformation era. But the question that I ask myself is if this is the real problem with religion or Christianity in America today? An excess of religious devotion. Doing too much to try and please God. In some quarters no doubt the answer to that question is yes. I have felt the pull of legalism, as most believers have at one time or another. But overwhelmingly in our nation I do not feel this to be the case. The problem with Christianity in America is not excess of the law, but a general lack of obedience and discipleship. And I think that this is generally the case throughout history. It takes a pretty strong theocratic state to make legalism compulsory and the Church simply does not possess that power in most of our country today (this is a good thing). The problem with our generation, in my admittedly anecdotal experience of it, is that we don’t want to do anything very demanding. And grace, God’s wonderful, redeeming, bountiful grace, is demanding.

Charlie Meyers, one of the pastors in our association of churches, gave a sermon this year at our annual conference on these matters called “Blessed Through the Power of His Grace.” And I believe that Mr. Meyers is spot on in his treatment of grace. Too often we tend to define grace down to forgiveness. But the reality of grace is that it is so much more. The grace that provides us forgiveness and redemption is the same grace that seeks to bring us into conformity with Christ. This is what the saying in the poem sort of glosses over with its line about how the church is not a “museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken.” I understand what he is saying, but the point of any hospital, as my wife the nurse confirmed for me, is to make people better. The goal is not to make someone feel OK with their broken leg but to heal it. The Church should offer understanding, compassion, and a spirit of non-judgmentalism to those who walk through her doors, but the goal of course is that they walk out changed. A significant piece of the hope of the Church is that, by the grace of God, grace in its fullest sense, people can change. And the hope is not that they change into people obsessed with rules and who seek to add to what God already did, but people who steadily become more like Jesus into whose image we are destined to conform.

And often the way that we do that is through rituals, customs, and other measures of obedience. I really did like most of this poem. And I believe the man who wrote it probably has some sort of system for reading his Bible, regularly partakes in the Lord’s Supper, was baptized to signify the death of his old self and his union with Christ, and wishes that he prayed more. Just as I do. Just as most faithful followers of Jesus do. And that is religion. Good religion. Religion given to us by God and God-in-the-flesh. Religion that remembers the weightier matters of justice and mercy and love of God. Religion that gets grace and knows that we are worthless sinners apart from God and that it is only by his mercy and for his glory that we have any hope in this world, and that our loving and faithful response to this scandalous grace is to want to be more like him day by day. And that this end, frankly, does not come easily.