The Affluentialist

In my last blog post, I addressed the issue of wealth and race. In this post, I thought I’d take on a slightly lesser charged issue: wealth and religion.

Forgive me for so blatantly putting my head under the guillotine—I mean no harm. I’m just trying to follow the trail of affluence in our modern society. Also, a little bit of data makes me brave, perhaps a bit dangerous.

To wit: While surfing Pew Research’s Web site for data about race and money, I stumbled upon this report: “World Publics Welcome Global Trade—But Not Immigration.” The report considers how the populations of various nations view economic globalization.

As I skimmed the summary, I was stopped by this paragraph:

“The survey finds a strong relationship between a country’s religiosity and its economic status. In poorer nations, religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations. This relationship generally is consistent across regions and countries, although there are some exceptions, including most notably the United States, which is a much more religious country than its level of prosperity would indicate.”
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The Pew Research Center recently released some interesting yet controversial poll results about the African-American community. In it, Pew reports that “we see a widening gulf between the values of the middle class and poor blacks,” and goes on to state that 37% of African-Americans believe “blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.”

This was enough to get Henry Louis Gates, who heads Harvard’s African American Studies program, to put out a widely published opinion letter entitled “Forty acres and a gap in wealth.” He decries the survey findings as a loss for the black community and a threat to its shared history as embodied by civil rights giants such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. He quotes the following statistic from the report: “by a ratio of 2 to 1, blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade.” He suggests that this trend is potentially dangerous to the cohesion of the African-American community

My own research into the nature of wealth and money suggests a more nuanced view of the Pew results.

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