The Affluentialist

On Religion & Wealth

In a recent blog post, I addressed the issue of wealth and race. In this post, I thought I’d take on a slightly lesser charged issue: wealth and religion.

Forgive me for so blatantly putting my head under the guillotine—I mean no harm. I’m just trying to follow the trail of affluence in our modern society. Also, a little bit of data makes me brave, perhaps a bit dangerous.

To wit: While surfing Pew Research’s Web site for data about race and money, I stumbled upon this report: “World Publics Welcome Global Trade—But Not Immigration.” The report considers how the populations of various nations view economic globalization.

As I skimmed the summary, I was stopped by this paragraph:

“The survey finds a strong relationship between a country's religiosity and its economic status. In poorer nations, religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations. This relationship generally is consistent across regions and countries, although there are some exceptions, including most notably the United States, which is a much more religious country than its level of prosperity would indicate.”

The notion that the U.S. rates highly in both wealth and religion dovetails with a social trend that I’ve been extremely curious about for some time now: the rising tide of “megachurches.” According to a recent article in The New Yorker, “Come One, Come All: Building a Megachurch in New England,” a church becomes a megachurch when its congregation reaches 2,000 parishioners.

The megachurch trend has grown exponentially for over 25 years across the country. There are more than 1,250 of them right now. Among the most famous are Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, and Joel Osteen’s Lakewood in Houston, Texas. Lakewood’s church is housed in the former Houston Rockets stadium and can hold 47,000 attendees. (Lakewood is so big it’s now considered a “gigachurch”).

Besides just being large, megachurches tend to practice a more reformed style of Christianity. Derisively labeled, “have it your way” religion, after the famous Burger King jingle, critics tag megachurches with pandering to their flock by preaching a style of worship they call “Christianity-lite” and a “me-centered,” rather than a “God-centered” gospel. Most harshly, they describe the teachings as presenting a “domesticated God—a God without wrath who demands no sacrifices from his children.”

On the other hand, public policy experts who note the deteriorating base of regular churchgoers call the megachurch “one of the most successful community-building institutions of modern times.”

Within this megachurch movement is a popular style of preaching that’s sometimes called “prosperity theology.” Based largely on the bible verse “But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth, that he may confirm his covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day” (Deuteronomy 8:18), it sums up thus: God wants Christians to be “abundant” in every way, including financially. Thus, this more modern form of the religion is not too different from other self-empowerment messages on how to reach for a spiritual or internal force to achieve material wealth.

As I am Jewish and never attended church, none of my observations on megachurches is any way based on my own experience. I think this partly helps me to see the popularity of megachurches in relatively simple and unfettered terms. Basically, Americans understand a good deal when they see one. Megachurches point the way to greater prosperity through behavior modification. This is no easy feat and one worth considering.

In our research for The Middle-Class Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How They Are Changing America, we note that soon 10% of America’s homes will have net worths in excess of $1 million. That’s a huge number of households, more than 10 million. But it still leaves 90% of the population on the outside looking in. While the number of seven-figure households is experiencing double-digit growth, the up-and-comers, those with $500,000 to $1 million are growing at a rate of 23% annually. Holy moly.

Prosperity is hot and megachurches want to talk about it. They hold out a helping hand to their congregation on all sorts of matters, from avoiding bankruptcy to repairing marriages to conquering alcoholism. If left unchecked, each of those—consumer debt, divorce, and addictive behavior—are wealth-killers. If megachurches can help people build positive self-esteem along with a positive net worth, hallelujah!

Now I’m no theologian, but I don’t see any harm in helping people modify their behavior for the better. In fact, I find it an incredibly life-affirming act. All the great spiritual leaders, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Buddha, spoke of changing perspectives and living life according to new rules. Since I don’t know the New Testament from New Coke, I can’t comment on all that religious experts say is wrong with the megachurch approach, but I think it’s apparent to see what’s right with it.

Spiritual houses of all kinds play a community-building role in addition to their function as houses of worship. Critics argue that the megachurch leans too much toward that community role and too far from the religious doctrine. Perhaps that’s true. But, as the Pew report points out, America is among the richest and most religious of nations. It’s no surprise, then, that in these times of widespread affluence, prosperity can act as a siren call to the flock. That’s not just logical, it’s also good marketing.

REUTERS: More U.S. millionaires are middle-class

According to Reuters' Belinda Goldsmith...

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Sitting on a million but still middle-class? New research has found that more and more Americans worth at least $1 million want luxury goods such as yachts but otherwise lead family-focused, work-oriented lives.

Private wealth specialists Lewis Schiff and Russ Alan Prince found the number of Americans with $1 million to $10 million had risen to 8.4 million households -- or 7.6 percent of U.S. households -- and was growing at 15 percent a year.

Click here for the full story...

Thoughts on Race, Class & Wealth

The Pew Research Center recently released controversial poll results about the African American community. In it, they report that “we see a widening gulf between the values of the middle class and poor blacks.” They go on to state that 37% of blacks believe “blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.”

This was enough to get Henry Louis Gates, who heads Harvard’s African American Studies program, to put out a widely published opinion letter entitled “Forty acres and a gap in wealth.” He decries the survey findings as a loss for the black community and a threat to their shared history as embodied by civil rights giants such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. He quotes the following statistic from the report: “by a ratio of 2 to 1, blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade.” He suggests that this trend is potentially dangerous to the cohesion of the African American community.

My own research into the nature of wealth and money suggests a more nuanced view of Pew’s results. People can share pride in their aspirations while increasing success can lead to an estrangement between themselves and those they’ve left behind.

Hot off the research for my upcoming book, The Middle-Class Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How They Are Transforming America, I recognized this duality in the Pew results but I found myself surprised by Gates perception that a robust and growing middle-class in the black community poses any kind of a threat.

When I point out to people that The Middle-Class Millionaire compares middle-class households to households of self-made middle-class people who’ve gone on to accumulate substantial wealth (net worths between $1 million to $10 million), one of the first questions I’m asked is “how do you define ‘middle-class’?” 

While writing the book, I spent a great deal of time looking for a commonly accepted definition of “middle-class”—a formula, a litmus test, a clear expression of boundaries—but was unable to find one that captured the essence of middle-class values. (For the study, we used an income-based definition: middle-class households had an income that fell between $50,000 and $80,000). During my research, however, I continually came across data and opinions about the emerging black middle-class dating from the 1970s. It seemed to me that the black community has been exploring this question of “what is the middle-class?” for a very long time. But more than that, the texts consistently place this aspiration in high regard and describe it as proof of success and assimilation in America.

For the purposes of The Middle-Class Millionaire, I finally settled on a quote from George Bernard Shaw to define middle-class values. He said, “I have to live for others and not for myself; that’s middle-class morality.” This statement naturally calls for some further explanation. Shaw’s expression of the sacrificing instinct of middle-class morality certainly has its own iterations among both the working classes and the very high net worth. However, it has a distinctly important meaning to the middle-class, the most openly aspirational of all the classes.

When we asked our two middle-class samples, the middle-class and the Middle-Class Millionaire, what are some “very or extremely important values,” they both agree that “being a good parent,” (about 90%) and “providing your children with the best possible education (about 86%) rank at the top.  This suggests that, even though Middle-Class Millionaires have assets several times greater than the rest of the middle-class, they still share common middle-class beliefs about home and family life. By contrast, our research shows that with extreme wealth come new priorities. Survey respondents with a net worth greater than $25 million gave these same values a ranking of 67% and 60.5% respectively. We did not survey any lower-income groups.

Gates himself is a big fan of many of the hallmarks of prosperity, particularly home and land ownership. In fact, he’s currently working on a study of the family trees of 20 successful and prominent African-Americans, from astronauts to Oprah, and he points out that 75% of them came from families who owned land before 1920, before land- or home-ownership was common among blacks. This research suggests that the seeds of accomplishment within these families were planted long ago.

One of the common misperceptions among the middle-class people we interviewed for the book was that somehow hardship and setbacks didn’t affect our Middle-Class Millionaire population as intensely as it affected the middle-class—that somehow self-made people were innately more able to shake off adversity than others. In our survey and our individual interviews, this didn’t bear out. Stories of crushing failures were common among both groups. The difference was the response.

When we asked our middle-class sample and our Middle-Class Millionaire sample if they had made “major career or business decisions that had a very bad outcome” they both reported “yes” at relatively equal rates, both around 90%. But when we asked them what they did after bad career or business decisions, the Middle-Class Millionaire’s most common response was, “I tried again in the same field,” (72.9% versus 14.3% for the middle-class sample) while the middle-class sample’s most common response was I “gave up and focused on other projects” (51.5% of the time as compared to 2.2% for the Middle-Class Millionaire survey sample).

While our Middle-Class Millionaire sample told us tales of the despair and rejection they experienced, they also said that, when faced with failure, they simply didn’t allow themselves to consider the idea of giving up. These and other attributes set them apart from the middle-class cohort even if their shared aspirations to lead a middle-class life and sacrifice for their families suggest common ground. The Middle-Class Millionaire possesses the values of the middle-class community while at the same time are set apart from that community by their behavior and attitudes.

In the black community, both the desire and the opportunity to enter into the middle-class appear strong—recent census data on the New York City borough of Queens revealed that its black population had surpassed whites in median income. Never has wealth been in the hands of so many Americans, nor has the belief that wealth is attainable ever been as widely held, as it is today.

As evidenced by the Pew poll results, the experience of those who are pulling themselves into higher economic status tends to bring people together, not separate them. When asked “in the last 10 years have the values held by black people and the values held by white people become more similar or more different?” A majority of blacks (54%) and whites (72%) said “more similar.”

Gates, who is focused on how to bolster the civil rights movement that dates back to the Reverend King and others, writes, “The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted.”  There’s no reason why a civil rights movement can’t emerge from within the stratified environment the Pew poll describes. While aspiration, unfortunately, is not equally distributed among any population, the pull towards a middle-class lifestyle remains a quintessential American goal. Public intellectuals like Gates have many great examples to choose from when looking for ways to turn the success of the few into policy for the many.