U.S. Census

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Life, death, eternity, golf: Can reporters spot Baby Boomer religion ghosts at The Villages?

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Life, death, eternity, golf: Can reporters spot Baby Boomer religion ghosts at The Villages?

I think it was “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau who summed up the Baby Boomer aging process by saying it would be really depressing to have a heart attack while wearing your faded 501 Levi jeans.

I get that, as a Boomer who was born at the peak of that demographic wave (think January 1954). It seems like 75% of the ads during every noon ESPN Sports Center broadcast are aimed at me and my Medicare benefits. On top of that, I also spent several years in South Florida (I turned 50 there), where half the houses (it seemed to me) were in a development with “villages” in the name.

Thus, I understand why people are reacting to that recent feature. “Shadow on the Sun,” that ran in The Lamp Magazine, “A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc.” This long article by Sam Kriss isn’t a “news” feature, but I would argue that religion-beat journalists should dig into it.

Why? Well, as the Grateful Dead prophet Jerry Garcia put it — “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And for millions of Boomers, the end of that trip is getting closer (like the Firesign Theater’s Antelope Freeway exit that never seems to arrive). Thus, there are lots of news hooks in this piece linked to death, dying and the Boomers, especially for reporters in Florida.

This brings us to The Villages, the largest retirement community in the world. The feature opens with a real-estate agent named Jason at the wheel during a tour.

Scholl Foot Care. Urology Associates. Cracker Barrel. Jason told me about The Villages. He explained that The Villages occupies around eighty square miles of central Florida, which makes it substantially larger than the island of Manhattan. It’s home to some one hundred forty thousand happy, active retired people, with more constantly arriving: this is the single fastest-growing metro area in the entire United States. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, four gun ranges, two one-thousand-seat concert venues, and eight vast churches. It has more than fifty free golf courses, enough for you to play on a different range every week of the year. Ninety swimming pools, not counting the ones in people’s backyards. Twenty of them are Olympic-sized. Something like ten million square feet of commercial space, including a dozen sprawling shopping centers and over one hundred restaurants and bars. Residents also have their pick of around three thousand community social clubs. The Acting Out Theater Club produces its own original musicals. The Red Sox Nation Club has more members in The Villages than it does in Boston. The MAGA Club has hosted members of the Trump family. You can sail or scuba dive or line dance or learn the ukulele or discuss Ayn Rand. The Villages has its own radio station (W.V.L.G.), TV channel (V.N.N.), and newspaper (the Daily Sun), and somewhere north of eighty thousand homes. Jason couldn’t give me a more precise figure because it’s constantly changing. The Villages builds four hundred new houses every month.

What does this have to do with religion, morality and culture?


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Here is a strange question: Why doesn't the U.S. Census ask questions about religion?

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Here is a strange question: Why doesn't the U.S. Census ask questions about religion?

QUESTION:

“Why doesn’t the U.S. Census ask about religion?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Most Americans may never have thought about this, an odd omission considering that religion is such an important aspect of society. Canada’s government, for example, has asked about religious affiliations since 1871.

But from the first once-a-decade U.S. Census conducted in 1790, the federal government has never directly asked all Americans about their religion (or lack thereof). Responses are anonymous, which should remove any sensitivities about answering such a question. The usual explanation is that “separation of church and state” forbids such questionining by a government agency, which is debatable.

Much of the history below draws upon an April 12  article about the Census by the Pew Research Center that has further detail for those interested, available by clicking here.

Instead of church-and-state entanglement, The Guy offers a different sort of objection to Census involvement. Religious affiliation or identity may be too complicated a matter for government nose-counters to deal with accurately.

Several non-government agencies with more expertise in this area collect standard data on Americans’ religion, with numbers that regularly conflict due to differing methods, assumptions and definitions.

One of the most important is Pew Research’s own Religious Landscape Study, last issued in 2014. www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/Groundwork for the next round has already begun. Pew’s precision on religious factions and identities is vital because Protestant categories like “Lutheran” or “Presbyterian” mask big differences among groups with that label.

That sort of specificity is also provided in the “U.S. Religion Census” conducted each decade since 1990 by experts in religion statistics.


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Podcast: AP fails to connect religion dots in latest surge in homeschooling statistics

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Podcast: AP fails to connect religion dots in latest surge in homeschooling statistics

If you know anything about the history of homeschooling, you know that battles about parental rights, morality, religious motivations and faith-centered school content have been a big part of this drama since Day 1.

Connect a few dots in almost any trend linked to homeschooling and, sooner and later, you will hit religion.

It doesn’t matter if you are talking about mainstream groups such as the National Home School Association or aggressive activist groups such as the Home School Legal Defence Association. Needless to say, when you see a headline like this one — “The Frightening Power of the Home-Schooling Lobby” — or this one from Europe — “Home education: Court rules against German Christian family “ — you will almost always run into lots of content about religious fundamentalism (of various kinds), big families and other signs of countercultural behavior.

As I noted 20+ years ago in an “On Religion” column about a homeschooling convention inside the D.C. Beltway:

These are not business-as-usual families, cookie-cut into the sizes and shapes on display in shopping malls, mail-order catalogues and, especially, prime-time television. They have unique priorities when they budget their time and money. They have radically different family values that often defy simple political labels.

In a strange way, home-schoolers are creating a new counter-culture outside the American mainstream. It's the Anti-Woodstock Generation.

All of these issues came up for discussion during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on a recent Associated Press feature with this headline: “Homeschooling surge continues despite schools reopening.” Here is the overture for that story:

The coronavirus pandemic ushered in what may be the most rapid rise in homeschooling the U.S. has ever seen. Two years later, even after schools reopened and vaccines became widely available, many parents have chosen to continue directing their children’s educations themselves.

Homeschooling numbers this year dipped from last year’s all-time high, but are still significantly above pre-pandemic levels, according to data obtained and analyzed by The Associated Press.

Families that may have turned to homeschooling as an alternative to hastily assembled remote learning plans have stuck with it — reasons include health concerns, disagreement with school policies and a desire to keep what has worked for their children.

Now, there’s no doubt that what parents saw on Zoom screens during the COVID-tide played a big role in these numbers. But what did they see and hear?


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The U.S. Census story and its hooks for religion news (plus a personal note about Rachel Zoll)

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The U.S. Census story and its hooks for religion news (plus a personal note about Rachel Zoll)

The first round of 2020 U.S. Census data (with much more to come) is big news as states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House and politicos enter the wild decennial joust to gerrymander federal and state district lines to their advantage.

But here's another journalistic thought: What does the Census mean for religion?

Tony Carnes of the "A Journey Through NYC Religions" website provides an early example, analyzing possible implications for New York City that other writers could emulate for their own cities, towns or regions.

Editor Carnes (disclosure: a personal friend) is a professional sociologist leading a team that has spent years tracking religion developments in Gotham, notably at the neighborhood level. Despite the town's secular image, Carnes and company have documented that, starting in the late 1970s, thousands of new churches, synagogues, mosques and temples have been built. Such activity was continuing until the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Carnes counts the populations moving in and moving out from the American Community Survey between 2010 and 2014 as updated by Census numbers for 2018. This shows a city gradually becoming less African-American (population down 96,000) and Hispanic (down 50,000). The gainers are non-Hispanic Whites (up 200,000) and Asians (up 97,000). We'll soon know if these trends continued in 2020.

Carnes calls that "a startling change in the racial/ethnic profile of the city, and it is also found in other cities in the United States."


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