The New York Times has an article that makes clear the relative value of religion to Black and white folks. Speaking in my professional role of Chaos Lord and New Wave Titan, it really sounds like two different deities are involved. And one of them is Mammon.
I got this far
In Times of Stress, Can Religion Serve as Insurance?
By VIRGINIA POSTREL
FROM layoffs to bad health to killer hurricanes, economic well-being is subject to all sorts of nasty shocks. To protect themselves, people accumulate savings and buy insurance.
But these formal strategies are not the only ways to guard against sudden hard times. Social networks - families and friends - also provide critical safety nets.
Economists are increasingly interested in the role of such networks in economic life. They want to understand "the way that an individual's social connections somehow translate into an economically valuable tool," Rajeev Dehejia, a Columbia University economist currently visiting at Harvard, said in an interview.
...before deciding I must read as much of the working paper (a 54 page pdf) as I can (under)stand. I find its title, INSURING CONSUMPTION AND HAPPINESS
THROUGH RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS, amazing and the abstract cuts right to the chase.
This paper examines whether involvement with religious organizations insures an individual’s stream of consumption and of happiness. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), we examine whether households who contribute to a religious organization are able to insure their consumption stream against income shocks and find strong insurance effects for whites. Using the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), we examine whether individuals who attend religious services are able to insure their stream of happiness against income shocks and find strong happiness insurance effects for blacks but smaller effects for whites. Overall, our results are consistent with the view that religion provides an alternative form of insurance for both whites and blacks though the mechanism by which religious organizations provide insurance to each of these groups appears to be different.
I admit, this post is something of a spasm. I am not clear at this point how one would meaningfullt measure some of the stuff they're talking about...I suspect the real-world applicability of their definition of happiness matches that of Fryer's definition of "acting white"...but bottom line: poor white folks' churches help them get past being broke and poor Black folks' churches help them feel better about being broke.
