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ROAD TO THE
MIDDLE CLASS
Road to the Middle Class
Contents
Chapter 1: After the Welfare State
What will come after the welfare state?
After 120 years, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is clearly
showing its age.
Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
The conventional wisdom among western cultural elites is
that God is dead and we are well rid of him.
Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
The surprise of rednecks debouching from the Appalachians
into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities
has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the
past, now that God was dead.
Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down
The great event of the second millennium was the rise of
the world-historical middle class.
Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up
To the upper crust, the nineteenth century was a
never-ending worry. The old order
was coming to an end, the cyclical world of agriculture and its wealth in land.
Chapter 6: Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century
As we have seen, the nineteenth century was a great age of
religion. While the elite in Europe
and the United States experienced the death of God as their spiritual needs fell
away from the gospel of Jesus Christ, ordinary people in America flocked to
churches and responded in their millions to the preaching of modern prophets.
Chapter 7: The Best Schools
Everyone is in favor of education. But what do they mean? When
Mary Johnston talks about education she thinks in terms of “the best schools,
first grade to college” for the education of her children.
Chapter 8: Mutual Aid
According to the myth of the modern welfare state, the
nineteenth century was a lethal battleground in which the poor and the unskilled
wandered unprotected and forlorn against the power of employers and landlords,
men who occupied the commanding heights of the economy through their two-pronged
strategy of laissez-faire economics and Social Darwinism.
Chapter 9: Living Under Law
In the country, people live under power.
In the city, people live under law.
Chapter 10: Explaining the Culture War
The previous five chapters have described the world that
ordinary people created for themselves in the city before the advent of the
welfare state.
Chapter 11: A Likely Story
Knowledge begins with a problem, with the need to make
sense of the world.
Chapter 12: The Fourth Great Awakening
During the last half of the twentieth century, the United
States experienced a period of unusual spiritual ferment and renewal.
Chapter 13: Repairing The Road
The Fourth Great Awakening gave us a wakeup call.
It called Americans to witness a new generation of people struggling on
the road to the middle class, worthy people acquiring for themselves through
enthusiastic Protestantism, an education, and a rigid regard for rules the
earnest culture of respectability that beckons like a shining city on a hill to
those who struggle in the shanties and the slums of the industrial city.
Chapter 14: The Problem of Power
The project of restoring the road to the middle class is not just a question of ideas, but of assembling
and using political power to implement ideas.
Chapter 15: The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
IN 1909, Charles W. Eliot addressed the students of Harvard on
the “Religion of the Future.
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Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up
rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity