A reader writes to Jay Nordlinger:
“Jay, in your Impromptus about conservative caring vs. liberal caring, there is a whole arena that you don’t touch, and understandably so: that of religion. Over my life, I have attended three churches: a liberal church in a liberal denomination, a moderate church in a liberal denomination, and a conservative church in a conservative denomination. Need I answer any of the following questions? Which church gives the most to missions? Which has the most volunteers for missions and community services? As a bonus — which is the most ethnically diverse?
I was thinking about this today myself, interestingly enough. We’ve been attending the same evangelical church for three years now, and only this morning did it occur to me that we have a rather large percentage of black people attending regularly. The reason this hadn’t occurred to me before is that I know most of these people, and I’ve tended to think of them separately as “the Brazilians”, “the French-speaking family”, “the real Africans” and so forth instead of lumping them together into one big group. You simply don’t confuse a French-speaking man from the Ivory Coast with a man from south Minneapolis just because they both have dark skin, after all.
And you’ll never confuse anyone with the Brazilians, who are probably the largest single group there. They’re just as exuberant as the stereotype imagines them to be, they won’t sing without dancing and they throw in enough “glory to Gods” and “amens” during the sermons to put a fifth-generation Southern Baptist to shame.
Meanwhile, you can’t find anyone who is more than three generations removed from Scandinavia at your average pro-gay, left-wing Lutheran church.
But it’s the evangelicals who are the racists, of course. This we know, for the media tells us so….