Opinion | Money Is Up. Patriotism and Religion Are Down.
Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, the founder and president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race, told me that social media is focusing attention on longstanding gaps in wealth, making people more sensitive to issues of money. “Everybody’s life looks fabulous through the social media filters,” she said.
The simultaneous descent of religion and ascent of money as values in the Journal survey could leave the impression that religion and capitalism have nothing to do with each another. In fact, religion came before capitalism and has shaped our thinking about it, Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist, wrote in a 2021 book, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.”
I exchanged emails about The Journal’s survey with Deirdre McCloskey, a scholar at the Cato Institute and emerita professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has written books on bourgeois virtues, bourgeois dignity and bourgeois equality. The seven bourgeois virtues, in her telling, are prudence, temperance, justice, courage, love, faith and hope. (Not greed.) She argued in an email that former President Donald Trump is at least somewhat responsible for the decline in Americans’ attachment to what she called the American idea. “If, as Trump did, you can persuade people to look with pessimism on the American Idea, it will fade,” she wrote.
The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who wrote “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” say there’s a rift between the third of the adult population who have a bachelor’s degree or more and the two-thirds who don’t and are faring worse. “Their lives are coming apart,” Deaton told me on Tuesday.
The rift appears in some but not all of the questions in the Journal survey, according to data Zitner gave me. People with and without bachelor’s degrees have roughly similar views on patriotism, having children and community involvement. At the same time, people without bachelor’s degrees are seven percentage points more likely to call religion a very important value and eight percentage points more likely to say the same about money.
