I Am an Exile

 A while back I found a book by David Kinnaman, of the Barna Research Group, at a thrift store.  The title is "You Lost Me" and it is about the departure of Millennials from the traditional churches.  [Barna Group prefers to use the term "Mosaics" for that generation "because it reflects their eclectic relationships, thinking styles, and learning formats, among other things." p.246]  Kinnaman actually sorts these wanderers into three distinct groups.  Some are what he calls "Nomads"--younger people who have drifted off after growing up and leaving their parents' home for college or work, but are likely to drift back as they marry and start families.  Many  people of previous generations followed that pattern.  A second group he calls "Prodigals"--people who grew up in the church, but have now rejected the faith and have no intention of coming back.  The third group he labels as "Exiles" which he defines as "those who grew up in the church and are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but who also remain energized to pursue God-honoring lives....One hallmark of the exiles is their feeling that their vocation (or professional calling) is disconnected from their church experience." [p.75]

I am not a Millennial or Mosaic; I am part of the post-WWII Baby Boom generation.  But I am an Exile, by Kinnaman's definition, and have been for a while.  Even during my many years in churches, the only "vocation" that got much attention, in nearly all the congregations I was part of, was being in "ministry"--preacher, missionary, Bible college professor, and in later years, worship leader.  Nobody seemed to care what the rest of the people did from Monday through Saturday, as long as they tithed their income to the church.  Even when they did a sermon or teaching series on "spiritual gifts" most people got excited about the "gifts" that would get them up on the front platform, not things they could do outside of the building during the week.  When I was finishing high school and preparing for college, at the church my family attended in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, those of us in the youth group who planned to go to Bible college were a notch above the others.  The rest were just going to college or jobs--we were going into "full-time Christian service."  That was the prevailing attitude in many churches in the area in those days.

Over time, it turned out my "vocation" was something else.  In my late 20s, my wife and I bought a run-down house and fixed it up.  "Rehabbing" was a big thing in the older neighborhoods of Cincinnati in the '70s, and back then it was focused on homeowners doing it themselves.  Most were younger people like us, and they did not have the money to hire contractors to come in and fix stuff.  (If they did have the money, they could have bought a fancier house elsewhere.)  But I found that I liked doing it.  And I had learned how to do research in high school, so I was able to learn to do more and more.  By the time we were halfway through our second house, I was working on other people's houses and getting paid for it.  It turned out I was good at sorting out problems in houses and finding ways to fix them.  Even now that I am mostly retired, I still do some of that for family and friends.  I may not do all the fixing, but I can help them figure out the problem and how to solve it.

There's a saying attributed to the Amish:  "Work is worship."  I am afraid that attitude was mostly missing in the churches I grew up in, and still is in the majority of churches today.  All too many Christians do not have that idea.  In the years between graduating from Bible college and learning to work on houses, I had jobs under two different men in a franchise organization.  The first, in Cincinnati, held to more of an Amish view:  for him, being a Christian in business was about servicing his customers well and treating his employees well.  The second, who I worked for in Indianapolis for a year, thought being a Christian in business meant going to all of the Christian Business Men's Committee functions.  He eventually became a bigwig in their organization.  By the time I left that job, it was obvious to me that both his customers and his employees had little respect for him.  But he is still highly regarded by the CBMC and his local church.  I guess he has his reward....I personally prefer, mentally at least, to take the Amish approach.

The Decline Continues

 The decline I am talking about here is that of the American church.  For my thoughts on political stuff, look for my posts at https://www.aleksandreia.com/--"Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization."  I am likely to go back to keeping my posts here less political, and do my politics over there.

Back to the church:  I have posted back in the early years and my recent posts about the weakness of the church in America.  I am still seeing more signs of this condition.

About a week or two ago, I saw a news item about the United Church of Christ.  This is one of the mainline "Seven Sisters" denominations--part of their roots are in the Puritans who settled New England in colonial times.  The Puritans eventually adopted the name "Congregational."  In the 1930s they merged with another group, one known as the "Christian Connection" to become the "Congregational-Christian" denomination.  In 1957 they merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and re-named themselves "United Church of Christ."

Anyway, the news item said they were selling their national headquarters building in Cleveland, Ohio.  The article also revealed farther down that they had moved to Cleveland from New York City in the 1990s to save costs (both commercial real estate and living costs were cheaper in Ohio).  But now, the 9-story office building they had needed for their 300+ staff was too big and too expensive for the 100 people that their national office was down to.  So they are moving to something smaller and selling the old office.

The article does not mention their decline in membership, but it has been substantial over the years, just like most of the other mainline groups.  Most of the Seven Sisters--the UCC, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the United Methodists, the American Baptists, and the Disciples of Christ--are around half of the membership they had in the 1960s.  Some of their loss has been because of the growing secularization in our country, but a lot of it has been people leaving for other churches that are more conservative on theology.

I have a little bit of background in the UCC myself.  When I was in elementary school, my family attended one of their churches near a little crossroads called Five Mile, Ohio.  It wasn't because my parents were into the UCC--it was just the closest church to us, and my parents felt at home with the people.  It was a little country church, a simple building--no separate classrooms, just a big room with a coal stove on one side for heat, an old organ on one side and a piano on the other, with two sets of pews and an aisle between.  There was no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse out back (a fair number of the neighboring houses didn't have indoor plumbing yet, either).

They didn't have a full-time pastor, just an older retired preacher who came out on Sundays to preach.  When he quit, they went together with two other small churches in the area to hire a Methodist student from Kentucky to come out and preach on Sundays.  Occasionally, the UCC sent a couple of people out from the district headquarters, who lectured the local farmers about their current hot thing, the Civil Rights Movement.  It didn't go over all that well...not because the farmers were for segregation, but because it just was not part of their lives.  Ohio was never a slave state--the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that set up how the Northwest Territory was to be organized, settled, and formed into new states, actually banned slavery in the Territory.  And now this was Brown County, 50 miles east of Cincinnati, a rural area with few blacks living in it.   In the six years I went to school at Greenbush, a few miles away, we had one black student in our class for a year or two--no others.  There had always been free blacks in Cincinnati itself, and there may have been some in Ripley or other small towns along the Ohio River, but we were about 20 miles north of the river.  Five Mile itself was a little crossroads, named because each road took you to a larger town five miles away.  At that crossroads there was a general store (oldstyle, not like today's convenience store) with one gas pump.  On the opposite corner there was a small barn; the other two sides of the corner had farmhouses.  That was it!  Even the church was about a half a mile down the road; our house was about halfway between the crossroads and the church.

The church itself was small in numbers, maybe 40-50 people most of the time.   There was an old-style placard on the wall with places to post the attendance for the last couple of weeks.  It also said there were 64 (if I remember correctly) church members.  The standing joke was some of those were only there in spirit--they were out in the cemetery, not in the building!

We moved back to Cincinnati in 1962.  My father was working at a Ford Motor factory on the northeast side of Cincinnati, and the fifty-mile drive each way was hard on him and on cars.  But in 1972, when my grandfather died, my parents went back to Five Mile and bought a cemetery plot with space for 6 graves.  They buried my grandfather there; my grandmother was put beside in in 1979.  When my father died in 2010, he was interred there, and my mother in 2012.

Why did they do that?  I don't know for certain, but I suspect that in terms of community feeling and neighborliness, that little church was better than anything they had known since.  When we left there, we moved to a new suburban development on the north side of Cincinnati--a place that had recently been farmland, and was now growing rapidly with new houses and streets.  The schools were bigger.  The churches were bigger and fancier; but there was not as much love for your neighbors.  There are some things that growth alone cannot do.

The UCC finally gave up and sold the church building, I believe sometime in the 1980s.  A startup church bought it from them.  The old members from the area kept coming to church there.  If I recall correctly, it was some kind of independent charismatic church.  But the new church took off and grew.  First they added a kitchen and bathrooms to the building. and maybe some classrooms.  Finally they outgrew even the expanded building, and bought land and built a new church not far away.  When my father was buried in the cemetery, another startup church was using the old building.

If this pandemic slows down, I want to go back there.  I haven't been back for some years--it's 150 miles each way, a third of it not reachable by Interstate highways.  But I would like to stop by to pay some respect to my family, and to the community that they loved in that place.

A Question of Value

Behind what is going on in the news--the Afghanistan pullout, the riots in major cities the past year, the controversies for years over abortion, and more--is an issue that most people largely ignore.  What is the worth of a human life? 

It often seems to me in reading the news the past few years that as a nation, our thoughts on this are rather skewed.  For instance, George Floyd's life seems to be regarded as quite valuable, to judge from the riots in so many of our nation's cities.  On the other hand, the life of David Dorn, a retired police chief--and also black--who was murdered in St. Louis during the Floyd riots there, seems to be accorded little value by the same people who got so upset over George Floyd's death.  On a more recent note, during the Afghanistan pullout, we had the possible death of a suspected terrorist, who was spotted and locked by a drone, but the authorities refused to allow the kill; the terrorist went on to kill himself, but he took a large number of other Afghans and thirteen American service members with him, besides an even larger number of Afghans and Americans injured in the explosion.

What is the value of human life?  For much of the world, there seems to be no real concept of it.  Of all the world's religions, past and present, only two set any real value on human life--Judaism and Christianity.  No others put much if any value on human life.  As for atheism, its most famous proponents--Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and more--put no real value on life--all people in their way were expendable.

But why should human life have value?  It depends on what a human is.  What follows is an insight I read from C. S. Lewis; I can't remember which of his books it was in, and a brief search did not turn it up.  But here is the distinction I remember reading from him:

If a human being is simply an animal that lives for seventy years or so and then dies, then a state that can last for hundreds or even a thousand years is worth more than any one person.  But if a human being is a spiritual animal that can live briefly in this world but then potentially forever in Heaven, then the state by comparison is a minimal, temporary thing.

I would be the first to acknowledge that even many Christians do not seem to understand this.  But our secular neighbors do not get it at all.  But this is a part of the philosophical and religious divide we have to live in during our present times.

Change Happens

 Things do change over time, and people and what they get into also change over time.  And I am toying with changing the name of this blog.  Apparently it's possible; it may be a bit of a hassle.  I don't have a lot of followers anyway--I can notify them if I do it.

When I started blogging, "postmodern" was a thing.  It hadn't totally taken shape as to what it was.  And I guess I had some hope maybe I could shape it a bit myself.  My blog did not turn out to be that influential over time anyway, even before I stepped away for a few years.

Now I am back to doing some blogging, and a lot has changed over the years I was away.  I am now divorced, after 48 years of marriage (long story, and I won't go into it here--maybe some other time).  My parents passed away in 2010 and 2012, and my in-laws in 2018.  So I am now the patriarch of my family--still getting used to that, in some ways.  At least we are all here in the same city in Indiana; for a few years my daughter and her family lived an hour away in a rural area, my older son was in Seattle, and my younger son was in Naples, FL.  In 2015 and 2016 they all moved back into this area.  Some of my friends have passed on, some have moved away, and I have more grandchildren than I did when this blog started (ten, ranging in age from 4 to 20 years old).

And the grandchildren have caused some changes in perspectives and what we look at, and one thing that years ago seemed so minor I didn't even think of putting it in the blog name but now is a factor we have to deal with a lot of the time.

That factor is called autism.  In 2005, my older son found out about what was then still called "Asperger's Syndrome" and passed some printouts he'd made on to me.  For both of us, it was like a light coming on for a lot of things in our past.  My son later seemed to lose interest, kind of like saying "That's nice" and moving on.  My daughter found the book "Aspergirls" by Rudy Simone in 2007, and the lights came on for her.  (For a long time, it was assumed that Asperger's only affected boys; it was later figured out that some girls have it too, but they manifest it differently from most boys.)

But my kids married and had kids--and the kids started getting diagnosed as being on what is now called the Autism Spectrum.  (Asperger's is now considered as being on the "high-functioning" end of the Spectrum.)  As parents, my kids started having to do some research on the matter.  I looked at what they found, and did some more research myself, and we pass what we learn around.  And we have learned a lot.

Just to clear the air if anyone who reads this post is unaware of the current state:  No, it is not caused by vaccines or chemicals or what you eat.  It is genetic--you get it from your parents!  The CDC has a section about it on their website, and they pegged it as being 70-80% genetic.  That's actually the conservative estimate; there is an Italian study I heard of, but have never seen the details, that put it at 90% genetic!  There actually is a difference in how our brains are structured internally compared to what are now being called the "neurotypicals."   Autistic people have started calling themselves "neuro-diverse" because we are not only different from the neurotypicals, we can also be quite different from each other.

And no, there is not any "epidemic" of autism.  In the 1940s Hans Asperger first identified what later came to be called Asperger's Syndrome in Vienna, and German-Jewish immigrant physician Leo Kanner in the US first labeled a few children as "autistic."  A lot of Kanner's ideas about causes and treatments started being rejected by the 1980s.  In the last 20 years or so, they have gotten a lot better at identifying us.  But mostly they are finding the children.  They are only beginning to catch up with the adults like me.

How many are there of us?  Nobody really knows.  Like I said above, they are only beginning to deal with adult autistics.  The conservative estimate is that there are as many of us in the US as there are Jews--about 2-3% of the population.  The all-out, wild-and-wooly guess is that we may be as much as 15% of humanity.  It is known now that we're found in all skin colors, all ethnic groups, all nationalities--we're all over.  And they are facing the fact that we have actually been around for a very long time.

And it isn't a matter of one or two genes that cause it.  There are a bunch of genes involved.  Some families can go along for years, and then out of the blue, they get a baby who turns out to be autistic.  What seems to be odd about my family is that, as near as we can tell, we have been marrying other people on the spectrum for at least 3 generations, and possibly longer.  So in our family the genetics have gotten rather concentrated.  So far, eight of my ten grandchildren have been diagnosed--the other two fit the pattern, but haven't been identified for certain yet.  But with what we know now, we can see signs of it on both sides of the family--mine and my ex-wife's, and even on both sides of hers.  My son-in-law's family is beginning to figure out they are on the spectrum (yes, he is too).

And we do have variety.  We have musicians in the family (from my side--my sons are fifth-generation guitar players).  We have artists.  Of course we have one professional computer programmer, and a tech who repairs business equipment, both mechanical and electronic.  And we have all kinds of sensory issues!  My daughter has given up trying to fix meals that everybody will eat--if one or two don't like a particular meal, they can opt for leftovers!

So dealing with this has been a factor in our lives for some years.  There is a fair amount of information now, that was not available when I was growing up.  And there are strengths along with the deficits, it's just a matter of sorting out which is which.

But--even with all of this, I am still a Redneck.  My grandfather and at least two of my mother's brothers worked in the coal mines around Hazard, KY.  My grandfather died of injuries from a mine accident.  And my ancestry is half or more Scots-Irish:  the family names on my mother's side were Burns and Webb, both good Scottish names.  My father's name was Hawkins, which is English; but there are other names that married into his family that could well be Scots-Irish.  He grew up on the western edge of Appalachia in Ohio, near the town of New Richmond, where his forebears had settled in the 1790s.  My own guitar has been used for country music, bluegrass, old-time, and traditional folk--not much rock and no disco.  And for much of my working life, I was in construction--a few new houses, including one I built myself for my family, but mostly remodeling and home repairs.

If anyone is curious, a good source for the history of the Scots-Irish is a book by former Senator Jim Webb, "Born Fighting."  (No, not a relative as far as I can tell, or else extremely distant.)  And for a good short history of autism, its past, its recognition and progress, I recommend Steve Silberman's "Neurotribes."

My Own Political Journey, Part II

 I am going to start with a quote from Ronald Reagan early in his political career.  He said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me."  In many respects I feel the same way.

In Part One I described the political world at the local level that I grew up in during the '50s and '60s.  Back then, the Democrats were the party of the Working Man--the industrial unions were their power base.  

The Democrats were also strongly anti-Communist in those days.  The Cold War had its beginning under Harry Truman, who became President when Franklin Roosevelt died in office.   Even during World War II, though the US was allied with the USSR against Nazi Germany, Communism was beginning to be recognized as a threat; that was why Truman replaced Henry Wallace as Vice President--Wallace was considered too soft on Communism.  After the war Communists and their sympathizers were purged from government, from the entertainment industry, and from the labor unions.  The fall of China to the Communists and the Korean War that followed also fed this trend.

But the Vietnam War began the change.  While there had been some aid to South Vietnam under Republican President Eisenhower, it increased under Democrat Kennedy.  And it was massively increased under Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination.  Yet it was during Johnson's term that the Democrat Party embraced the anti-war movement.  Seeing he was losing the support of his own party, Johnson gave up the idea of running for a second term of his own.  He had served the last year of Kennedy's term, and beaten Republican Barry Goldwater in a landslide in 1964.  Under the 22nd Amendment, passed during Truman's term, he was allowed to run one more time because he had served less than two years of Kennedy's term.  But Johnson stepped aside, and his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, got the nomination at the party convention in Chicago.  But the convention was marred with mass demonstrations in the streets by anti-war activists.

Humphrey lost to Republican Richard Nixon, thanks in part to a third-party challenge by segregationist George Wallace that siphoned off Democrat votes in the Southern states.  I was not able to vote in that election; the voting age in the US was lowered from 21 to 18 by the 26th Amendment in 1971.  Four years later, Nixon defeated George McGovern in a landslide, only to be forced out of office by the Watergate scandal.

The American people watched as the Democrats, who had been strongly anti-Communist since WWII, were taken over by the anti-war activists and Communist sympathizers.  The Democrat-controlled Congress reduced financial aid to South Vietnam, and North Vietnam conquered the country in 1975--with many Dem pols (including a young Joe Biden) opposing letting Vietnamese refugees into the country.  The turnabout was noticed by many people.  The failures of the later Carter presidency added to the shift.

Despite being brought up as a Democrat, by 1980 I voted for Reagan.  While at times over the years I voted for individual Democrats, as the party shifted farther and farther to the left, I stayed put.  They left me, and it cost them my votes.

A lot has changed in the American scene in the last fifty years.  And one of the biggest changes is the reversal in the bases of the two parties.  These days, the top execs at the Fortune 500 companies are not Republicans; they vote Democrat.  Many of them are even supporting Democrat-inspired political correctness within their corporations.  The small business people (as in your town's local Chamber of Commerce) may still support the Republicans, but the national Chamber of Commerce is perfectly happy with the Democrats now.  

The industrial labor unions still exist, but their membership is a shadow of what it once was; the real power of the labor movement today lies in the government employee unions.  And in the old industrial unions, the leadership is out of touch with their members.  In 2020, the Pittsburgh local of the Pipefitters' Union endorsed Trump; the national union endorsed Biden--and then was shocked when one of his first actions was to cancel the Keystone pipeline, eliminating thousands of union jobs.  Do you really think the rank-and-file Pipefitters are happy with the union brass?  The union brass may have supported Biden, but many of the local grassroots union members voted for Trump.

These days the Democrat base is primarily the elites:  the government employees; the generals and admirals of the military; the Ivy League administrations and faculty, along with their imitators at the lesser universities; the college-educated well-to-do suburbanites, and others near the upper crust.  Their coalition also includes most (not all) of the LGBT crowd.  But they are losing ground with two grass-roots groups they have long taken for granted--blacks and Hispanics.  Historically, many blacks have been liberal on economics but conservative on social issues, and that is starting to affect their political choices.  Hispanics are not a monolithic group--there are differences among them because of the various countries they came from--but many of them are opposed to the socialist ideas that the Democrats are increasingly embracing.

The Democrat shift is obviously reflected in Barack Obama's 60th birthday party not long ago: a crowd of upper-crust celebrities, dancing and reveling without masks during what is supposed to be a serious health crisis, waited upon by masked servants, drawn from the lower class.

The real divide today is between what Angelo Codevilla in 2010 called the "Ruling Class"--the government officials (Democrats and many of the Republicans), the academic elites, the business moguls (both traditional and Silicon Valley), the national media brass (both news and entertainment) and their sycophants and wannabes--and the mass of the American people.  Not all of the people have figured it out.  But the changes are getting more obvious, and the number of people catching on seems to be rising.

I Am Not Surprised

Back in September of 2007 I wrote a blog post about how the churches in the area I had lived in had an appearance of strength, but not the reality.  The specific issue that caused me to notice that was the passage of a ballot initiative to allow riverboat gambling in the county.  Dearborn County, Indiana had a lot of churches--churches in the towns, a couple of megachurches in one area, and it seemed like every other crossroads had at least one rural church.  They all opposed the gambling; and yet it passed easily.

In the years since, this trend has continued.  Some big-name church leaders have been caught in sin, often but not always sexual misbehavior.  The "mainline" denominations have continued their decline:  some scholars have predicted that the Episcopal Church may disappear by 2040; they still have their buildings and a fair amount of money, but their decline in numbers continues, and the numbers of weddings and baptisms in their churches look even worse for the future.  The United Methodists have begun the process of breaking up into liberal and conservative groups.  But since the breakup was stalled by postponing their international conference because of the Covid pandemic, some congregations are pulling out early, even at the risk of losing their buildings.  And this is happening with both conservative and liberal congregations.

This decline is not limited to liberal churches, although they seem to be worse off than the conservatives.  The Southern Baptists are stagnating in numbers and beginning to show signs of disagreement among their leaders.  Other groups are not much better off.

And it isn't just the Protestants, either.  The Roman Catholics are still dealing with the fallout from the sex abuse scandals among their clergy.  Some years ago Rod Dreher, a writer I sometimes read, who was brought up a Methodist in Louisiana, moved to the Roman Catholic church after a personal awakening.  As the sex scandals came into the news, he moved to an Orthodox church.  But in the years since, several of the Orthodox groups became embroiled in financial scandals.  He has stayed with them.  But for myself, I don't see that one scandal is less bad than another.  All of them show a failure of the denominational brass to live up to their supposed standards.

But I think there is a distinction to be made, an important one.  The decline of church organizations does not necessarily indicate a decline in real faith.  It may only indicate a separation of the wheat and the chaff.  It has been noted for years that in most local congregations, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people.  The rest are just pew-sitters.  But there are signs that a substantial part of those 20% are no longer content with the traditional congregation model of church.

Back in 2015 Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope published the book "Church Refugees."  At the time the "Nones" identified by Pew Research, the "religiously unafilliated," were big in the news.  The assumption of many was that these were people who were no longer Christians.  But Packard and Hope started finding and talking to people, and found that many of them were still Christians, but were "done" with the traditional religious structures.  And many of them were not just the back-row, Easter-and-Christmas attenders, but were part of the 20%--a substantial part of them even pastors!  The authors estimated that nearly half of Pew's "Nones" were actually what they called "Dones"--Christians still, but trying to live their faith outside the traditional organizations.

I became part of that group years ago, well before that book came out.  Some of us weren't that enthralled with the "Done" label--some of us called ourselves "Free-Range Christians."  I did go back to a small church in the fall of 2018 because of a major disruption in my life that resulted in getting divorced.  I was helped by the men's group, and supported the church in gratitude.  But over time, they seem to be drifting into further decline, and I am back to "Free-Range" status again.

How will this turn out?  I do not know.  I do not claim to be a prophet.  But I do think that one possible outcome is that the Real Church, as defined by our Lord, will be revealed, with less drag from the institutional substitutes, and will remain when those are long gone.

My Own Political Journey Part I

 There are going to be a few posts coming up that concern politics in the US.  I am not going into the events of the past few weeks, and probably not that much into the events of the past few months.  But in another month, I will be 71 years old.  I have always observed politics--I have had a lifelong fascination with history, and politics is history in the making.  I am not that much of a partisan; I don't put bumper stickers on my cars, or go to rallies or contribute money to politicians. I have voted in elections since I was old enough--you still had to be 21 to vote when I started.  But for this particular post, I want to look back at what US politics were like when I was growing up.

I grew up in a UAW household.  My father worked for Ford, at a plant that made automatic transmissions.  My parents grew up during the Depression, and they thought President Roosevelt was wonderful.  My dad was the first of his family to finish high school.  He did not get the chance to go to college.  He was offered an opportunity after his graduation in 1936 to take a test for a scholarship, but it meant he would have to travel to the state capital to take the test, and his parents would not give him money for bus fare.  College was not the big deal then that it became after World War II.  By the '60s, many of my friends had fathers who had gone to college on the GI Bill after the war.  But when my father was called up for the draft, he flunked the physical (he was recovering from a bout of pneumonia at the time).  So he spent the war years working in a factory, making radios for the military.  And of course, he could not qualify for the GI Bill.

But in the '60s, the distance between the college-educated and the blue-collar worker was not that large.  Most of the college grads I knew back then were the first ones of their own families to attend college.  And white-collar and blue-collar people mostly lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same churches and sent their kids to the same schools.  And many of them still remembered growing up in small towns and rural areas where the only people who had gone to college were the doctor, the lawyer, and the preacher.

And the two parties were not as far apart as they are now.  They routinely worked together in Congress and state legislatures.  Major cities like New York swapped the mayor's job back and forth from Democrat to Republican, and states often did the same with governors.  They had worked together throughout the war years, and continued for quite a few years after.  There were a few extremists in each party, but the mainstream of each side got along fairly well.  It was a surprise to many when Barry Goldwater got the Republican nomination for president in 1964, and he was not that popular in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio where I lived.  I remember one of his few partisans in my high school repeating Goldwater's slogan "In your heart you know he's right!" and being answered with "In your guts you know he's nuts!"--by the son of the Republican mayor!

The truth is, most Republicans in the Midwest in the mid-'60s were what would later be called "Rockefeller Republicans" after Nelson Rockefeller.  They identified more with him and President Eisenhower than with Goldwater.  (Eisenhower himself had to decide which party he belonged with when he began thinking of running for president!)  And the Democrats of that day were still strong anti-Communists, and otherwise only slightly more liberal than most Republicans.

In those days, the Democrats were considered the party of the working man.  The industrial unions were a major part of their strength.  The Republicans were considered the party of business--both Big Business and small business (think US Chamber of Commerce--big--and local Chamber of Commerce--small).

That describes the political world that I grew up in.  There were major changes in the '60s and after that had large effects on that world, and on my own political thinking.  The next post will go into that.