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Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard studied the Nuer, a pastoral people living in the Upper Nile region of Africa, herders who moved with their animals to the tune of the region's rivers. In flood times, Nuer tribes retreated to higher ground, and when the waters receded, the Nuer clans moved to the grassy valleys.
Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.
The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as "men of the earth." Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn't arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man's family.
The "man of the earth" was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.
A man of the earth was a politician.
John McCain and Barack Obama began this campaign running as men of the earth—post partisans who promised to race between the red and the blue, hoeing a line in the turf that would bring the bickering to an end. That's not how these races ended, of course, not just because McCain or Obama changed but because the country didn't.
Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.
Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.
The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn't want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.
Republicans, perhaps, first realized how the country was changing and catered to the division that Americans were creating. By 2008, however, it didn't matter who started it. This was the way we lived. A Guardian reporter in deep-blue Brooklyn found a checkout clerk who wondered, as a "social experiment," what would happen if he donned a McCain button. A nearby shopper admitted she was still concerned about what might transpire on Election Day. "I'm worried about all the ignorant people—I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean uninformed people—who are out there and who will swing it away from Obama," Tamara said.
At McCain rallies, Obama is a "socialist," and a member of the Texas State Board of Education wrote that the Democrat "truly sympathizes" with terrorists and intends to declare martial law if elected. At one East Coast public university, a dean of undergraduate studies sent an e-mail to faculty reporting that there had been "an increase in complaints by students who believe a chilly climate exists for conservative view points. ..." Americans appear ready to end a culture of racism with this election—symbolically, at least—but prejudices based on what others think and where they live run wild.
The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called "men of the earth," anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because "the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends."
What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don't know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a "social experiment" in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.
The danger the next president faces comes from his single-minded friends as much as his political opponents. Politicians need room to do their jobs. They need the authority to make deals with the other side. This isn't a power that's won on Election Day. It can come only from a people who come to realize that their well-being depends as much on the "ignorant people ... out there" as their like-minded and righteous neighbors.
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The model for the modern political campaign is the evangelical megachurch.
This isn't a partisan observation. Both George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama adopted the basic organizing techniques that many ministers have been using since the 1970s to grow their churches to stupendous size. And why not? They work.
The megachurch was built on an idea born in India by an American missionary. Donald McGavran spent half a century overseas, and he used much of that time to discover the way churches could convert large numbers of people to Christianity. McGavran observed that converts didn't come to the church one by one. They came in groups. And those groups were socially coherent—castes, villages, or families. The key to church growth wasn't in bringing individuals to Christianity but in converting groups, peoples. And these groups would come if they were appealed to as a "homogenous unit."
"The individual does not think of himself as a self-sufficient unit, but as a part of the group," McGavran wrote in this 1955 book, The Bridges of God. People don't want to come to a church where they hear a different language or eat strange foods. "Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers," McGavran wrote. McGavran said ministers needed to understand the culture of their constituents and recommended that they use the insights of anthropology to tailor their appeals to homogenous groups.
The church establishment largely ignored McGavran. The missionary arrived in the United States at a time when the pews were crammed with parishioners. The mainline churches needed architects and builders in the 1950s, not some bearded missionary who had spent the last several decades in India. But church membership began to decline quite suddenly in the mid-1960s, and by the ‘70s a new generation of young ministers was looking for a way to stimulate church membership, to fulfill the Great Commission's call to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:16-20). They discovered Donald McGavran and began to use his ideas to create churches in the "homogenous units" (i.e., suburbs) being created on the edges of cities.
One of those young ministers was Rick Warren, who stumbled across an article on McGavran in an old Christian magazine. "As I sat there and read the article on Donald McGavran," Warren wrote in The Purpose-Driven Church, "I had no idea that it would dramatically impact the direction of my ministry."
Rick Warren's story is now megachurch legend. He founded his Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and he used McGavran's techniques to attract members. Warren did his market research, even creating an anthropological composite of the target Saddleback member. He's "Saddleback Sam," a Docker-clad, cell-phone-carrying white guy who doesn't like organized religion and doesn't like neckties. That was the prototype for Warren's "homogenous unit," and so he built a church where Sam wouldn't have to cross many "barriers" to join. Sam wouldn't have to dress up for church, and he could look into the sanctuary and see more Sams, a "homogenous unit" of churchgoers. Warren stocked up on flowered shirts.
Ministers building these churches realized friends and neighbors were the best recruiters of new members. Like attracted like, which was an organizing tradition among evangelists. When supplicants answering the Rev. Billy Graham's altar call streamed to the foot of the stage, each would be met by one of the evangelist's helpers. The pairings weren't random. Graham insisted that young women meet young women. Older men greeted older men. Graham understood that the best way to cement the conversion was to show new believers a reflection of themselves within the church.
And the most effective recruiting tool was for friends to "witness" to friends their personal stories of salvation (Acts 1:8).
The marketing techniques all turned inward—friends talking to friends about their experiences in a church built for "people like us," which was the title of a popular book on church growth. The church wasn't designed to transform but to mirror a way of life. And the techniques worked.
It took until 2004 for what was common knowledge among megachurch chaplains to become the latest gimmick for selling a president. The Bush campaign in 2002 had experimented with different techniques to increase voter turnout, from door-to-door canvassers to the noxious (and utterly ineffective) robo-calls. Their tests found that personal contact with a voter was good but that an appeal coming from a friend or neighbor worked best. If it was clear to voters that the canvasser came from the same social hive, Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd told me, turnout jumped.
The Republican campaign in ‘04 recruited neighbors to contact neighbors, and it enlisted respected community members to serve as Bush "navigators," local surrogates for the president. The Bush organizers I talked with in Oregon and Minnesota instructed their all-volunteer canvassers to "witness" their support for the president. "We weren't there to convince anybody," one Oregon organizer told me. "We were there to give testimony of why we were for George Bush. And that's very religious."
The strategy was to reflect voters' beliefs and ways of life back on to themselves, so that the 2004 campaign wasn't as much about the re-election of a president and his policies as it was an affirmation of a local way of life.
The Democrats learned their lesson—they used paid workers who obviously were "not from around here" to do their canvassing in ‘04—and so this year the Obama campaign recruited an "army of persuasion" based on the Bush neighbor-to-neighbor model. In Wisconsin, the Obama campaign has hunters talking to hunters, women talking to women. At training sessions, "Obama Organizing Fellows" were taught to develop short, personal narratives that will explain to their neighbors how they came to support the Democrat—to witness.
Neighbors witnessing to neighbors is a marketing technique suited to Americans, who are increasingly sequestering themselves in communities, churches, and clubs with those who share similar ways of life and politics. The churches created over the last three decades have become some of the most politically segregated institutions in the country, a result of an organizing strategy built on the intentional molding of a "homogenous unit."
These tactics aren't designed to "sell" people something new or different but to show that the product (a church, a new concoction of PowerBar, a candidate) embodies the community's beliefs and lifestyle. "The message you've got to send, more than any other message, is that Barack Obama is just like us," Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill told the Obama fellows, according to the Washington Post. Exactly.
Politicians have been packaging image from the beginning: McKinley sitting on the front porch, Truman speaking from the back of a train, Madison Avenue selling a new Nixon. In the end, however, the message was the same: "Vote for me." Campaigns today are doing something different. They attempt to manage behavior by creating a social environment that encourages people to vote for themselves. The most important message a campaign has to convey is one of flattery, that the candidate is "just like us."
Self-government, however, is the opposite of self-love. Democracy is about meeting and coming to terms with people who look, talk, believe, and think differently from us. Government might work better if that democratic exercise began for voters during the campaign rather than the day after inauguration.
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Just a few minutes into Friday's debate and Jim Lehrer was already exasperated. The moderator wanted McCain and Obama to talk to each other. (Did he expect the candidates to banter away the next 90 minutes like two buddies in a fishing boat?) And Lehrer was convinced McCain and Obama hadn't stated their "fundamental differences" in how the two approached the financial crisis.
The differences were pretty clear to me—and fundamental was the word. In the first few minutes of Friday's debate, John McCain and Barack Obama placed themselves on either side of a divide that has defined the country for more than a century—two worldviews that are today expressed in church, party, and neighborhood.
When Obama talked about the financial crisis, he said there was a demand for new social controls. McCain spoke about the need for individual responsibility.
Obama's described the financial situation as a failure of "we." The Wall Street debacle was the result of a "theory that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down." The collapse was caused by "an economic philosophy that says that regulation is always bad."
McCain lamented a society that had abandoned personal accountability. He said he would have fired the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We've got to start also holding people accountable, and we've got to reward people who succeed," said McCain. The Republican looked at the collapse of Wall Street and saw an "I" problem.
In the late 19th century, American Protestantism split. The division wasn't denominational. It was about how people viewed the world. On one side was what University of Chicago religious scholar Martin Marty called "Private Protestantism." Private Protestants promoted personal salvation and promised that individual morality would be rewarded in the next life.
On the other side was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society.
Private Protestants thought drunkenness was an individual failing that could be cured by faith. Public Protestants saw alcoholism as a social ill that should be addressed by "blue laws." Public Protestants confronted the new industrial age with the eight-hour day, child labor laws, and the minimum wage. Private Protestant preacher Dwight Moody witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either "these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known."
There were "two types of Christianity" in the country, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong wrote in 1913. The competing views were "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong continued. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social."
The one staged revivals to save souls. The other pushed social reforms to save the world.
Private Protestantism guided the fundamentalist/evangelical church and, eventually, the Republican Party. It's expressed in The Fundamentals, Goldwater, Ayn Rand, the nondenominational church, Reagan, Cato and Heritage, right-to-work, school vouchers, Social Security privatization, the Great Commission, conceal and carry, free trade and the market.
Public Protestantism drove the ecumenical movement of the mainline churches and, in time, the Democratic Party. It was The Jungle, the New Deal and Great Society, the Ford Foundation, Medicare, the National Council of Churches, OSHA and the labor union.
This election was supposed to be about post-partisanship, but it's not even post-19th century. It's a contest between two worldviews that have been struggling against each other in sanctuary and voting booth for more than a century.
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