Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 597

Erdogan’s Great Losing Gamble

These are unusual times in Turkey. This is not just because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a new round of voting after the June 7 general election, in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002 or because of the renewed violence with the Kurds. These are also unusual times because there is a great deal of confusion in Ankara: Who actually runs the country, the Prime Minister or the President?

If we were to judge by appearances—namely Erdogan’s forceful personality—then we would conclude that it is the President who is fully in charge, whereas Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu seems to be just a functionary executing the former’s orders. The Turkish Constitution makes the President an impartial, yet powerful, above-party leader. Executive power resides with the Prime Minister. However, because of a modification to the constitution, Erdogan in 2014 became the first President ever to be elected directly by the people instead of by Parliament. Erdogan has repeatedly said that this change is tantamount to a regime change in Turkey, because a popularly elected President is de facto imbued with greater powers.

Still, the informal control he exercises—through his influence over the AKP stalwarts, allied or fully controlled media organs, and his control over the bureaucracy through years of careful appointments of loyalists—is not enough for Erdogan. He wants to amend the constitution yet again to replace the parliamentary system with a presidential one—probably one that resembles France’s.

In the run up to the June 7 elections, Erdogan threw all caution to the wind and campaigned for his former party, the AKP. At one point he even pleaded with the public to give him—or rather his party—400 seats in parliament so that he could change the system. His power grab elicited a backlash as some people rallied around the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party, HDP, enabling it to cross the 10 percent national threshold needed to elect members to the parliament. HDP obtained 13 percent and eighty seats, most of which were at the AKP’s expense and were necessary for Erdogan to carry out his agenda.

For Erdogan, the setbacks of the June elections were not the end. He has availed himself of every tactic at hand to ensure that Davutoglu would not succeed in forming a coalition government with an opposition party, because such an outcome could open the door to corruption investigations targeting his family and close associates, as well as put a hold on his hopes to construct a presidential system. Erdogan made it clear that he preferred either an AKP-run minority government or new elections.

New elections are what he got. However, if the AKP fails to win a majority in the coming vote in November, then Erdogan’s hold on the AKP and Turkish politics will begin to erode—and erode quickly. This represents an impressive gamble for someone who doesn’t believe in gambling.

Undoubtedly, Erdogan will take to the campaign trail just as he did before the June elections, especially given Davutoglu’s charismatically challenged public persona. Erdogan will argue that the post-election chaos that Turkey experienced (mind you, chaos to which he contributed) could be avoided if his AKP were returned to power. Also, he will argue that the flare-up in violence between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish security forces, after a hiatus of more than two years, was the fault of the Kurdish HDP in an effort to reduce that party’s appeal and perhaps push it below the 10 percent threshold.

In other words, Turkey is gearing up for two months of intense, no-holds-barred electioneering, in which anything could happen. Security forces have already arrested HDP officials at will in the countryside. Some Kurdish towns have been under siege with their inhabitants unable to leave their homes to avail themselves even of needed are essentials. There is a real danger that, between the violence and the illegal campaign tactics, this election will be stripped of its legitimacy in the eyes of many, potentially leading to a prolonged period of uncertainty. Erodgan faces a lose-lose situation. If the November 1 elections do not produce results that are significantly different from the June 7 polls, Erodgan and the AKP will be humiliated. If on the other hand, he succeeds in eliminating the pro-Kurdish HDP by pushing it below the ten percent threshold, then it is quite likely that Kurds, especially the young, will react to disenfranchisement through civil and active disobedience in major cities such as Istanbul, Adana, and Mersin that is bound to turn violent. For a country that relies on tourism and foreign direct investment, nothing could be worse.

This is unfortunate. In their early days Erdogan and his party made great strides. The Turkish columnist Metin Munir summed up the public’s frustration best when he wrote, “Erdogan helped get rid of the military. Who will help now to get rid of him?”

Turkey’s tumult does not come at a propitious moment for Washington, which has just managed to get Ankara to open its air bases for use in a future intensive bombing campaign against ISIS. To make matters more complicated for the Obama Administration, the Americans’ most effective ally on the ground in Syria against ISIS is the Syrian Kurdish group, PYD, which is a close affiliate of the PKK. The combination of the PYD fighters and the U.S. Air Force has proven to be an effective tactic for liberating chunks of territory from ISIS. The next phase of the campaign consists of further weakening ISIS to provide an opportunity for Iraqi forces to recover lost territory there.

Nothing is easy in the Middle East.

The Iran Deal Should Kill the “Jewish Lobby” Myth

President Obama secured what might be the biggest foreign policy victory of his six years in office yesterday as forty Senate Democrats and two left-leaning Independents banded together to filibuster a Republican-backed bill to kill the nuclear deal with Iran. Afterward, the President and his supporters waxed triumphant, while those who opposed the deal vowed to continue to raise the issue—although it seems unlikely they’ll get a different result on the filibuster, and certain that they cannot override the President’s veto. The deal will stand.

And because the deal stands, one hoary old myth should fall: that of the “Israel Lobby”, and its supposed secret, malign control over the U.S. government. The Israeli state and major U.S. pro-Israel organizations were foursquare against the deal. Yet, not only did they not defeat it, but they couldn’t even get a bill of rejection to the President’s desk.

But even as late as yesterday, we saw evidence that an insidious form of the old myth seems to be becoming more acceptable in mainstream, center-left sources. Look for instance at the graphic the New York Times ran before yesterday’s vote—now infamous on Twitter as the “Jew Tracker”:

The lawmakers against the Iran nuclear deal http://t.co/WsvuvPoczO pic.twitter.com/7TJaUzqW0Z

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 10, 2015

(h/t @Yair_Rosenberg at Tablet, formerly of TAI and an absolute must-follow on Twitter.)Though one doubts that the misguided NYT staffers and editors who threw this chart up had any bad intentions (update: following criticism, the Times removed this portion of the graphic), the implications of the “Jew Tracker” are obvious, and repulsive. Does a Democrat oppose the deal? Well then—is he Jewish? Are his constituents Jewish? That must be why. Yet, a recent AJC poll showed that as many American Jews support the deal as oppose it. According to a recent Pew poll, only 21 percent of the public at large supports it; the rate of Jewish support for the Iran deal, in other words, is more than double the rate of gentile support.To those who know their history, this isn’t surprising: American Jews have long had much more shaded and nuanced views about the Jewish state than most non-Jews understand. Before World War Two, the American Jewish leadership was largely anti-Zionist, and the Reform Jewish tradition, the strongest religious force historically among American Jews, has never been completely comfortable with Zionist ideals. From 1945 to 1967, American Jews—whether Zionist or not—tended to rally strongly behind Israel out of concern for persecuted Jews in Europe and the Arab world. After the Six Day War, when Israel no longer was a threatened underdog populated by desperate refugees, many American Jews began to grow more critical. The rise to power of the nationalist and religious right in Israel drove another wedge between Jerusalem and the American Diaspora. Neither Bibi Netanyahu nor the settler movement have majority backing among American Jews, and the American politicians most supportive of the Likud agenda (like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Cotton) don’t get a lot of love from most American Jews.

But the myth of the omnipotent Jewish lobby is not rational, and belief in it hinges on feelings more than facts. It rests on anti-Semitic tropes that many people swallow without ever examining: that “the Jews” are a united bloc relentlessly pursuing a single agenda, that “Jewish power” through its control of the media and its vast wealth determines the outcome of political battles on issues of importance to the Jews, that democratic processes are helpless when “the Jews” weigh in.

All over the world, people blame George W. Bush’s policies (perceived as more pro-Israel than they were, but no matter) on “the Jews”, though more Jewish votes and Jewish money went to his opponents. And all over the world resistance to Barack Obama’s perceived “even-handed” policies is blamed on “the Jews”, though he got more Jewish votes and Jewish money than his opponents—and continues to enjoy high levels of Jewish support. 

To the extent that they have a political ethos, the ethos (even among very wealthy people) is liberal, but American Jews aren’t a monolithic voting bloc. There are some high-profile wealthy Jewish political activists who donate heavily to conservative, pro-Likud politicians; there are more wealthy Jewish donors who contribute heavily to liberal, anti-Likud politicians like President Obama. But Jewish donors and activists, like other Americans, act as individuals supporting their individual beliefs.

To believe otherwise isn’t “sort of anti-Semitic”; this is exactly how anti-Semitism distorts peoples’ perceptions of reality. 

Brazil Sings a Familiar Kind of Blues

This week S&P downgraded Brazil’s credit rating to junk status, the latest in a series of bad economic news for the country. A recent piece at Bloomberg profiles one of the country’s many economic problems dragging Brazil down: its generous civil service benefits, which distort the labor market. More:

In July, the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais announced 32 job openings at its labor court. It received 134,270 applications.

There is nothing exceptional about Minas Gerais or its labor court. But with unemployment soaring and Brazil heading for its worst slump since the Great Depression — Standard and Poor’s just downgraded its credit rating to junk — landing a civil-service job is like winning the lottery. It comes with an outsized paycheck, lifetime tenure and perks that can include a chauffeur and free flights.“The public sector offers stability: You pass the test and you have a job for the rest of your life,” said Guilherme Alves, 21, who was studying numbing legalese in Brasilia at one of the hundreds of schools around the country dedicated to passing a state employment exam. “It’s awesome.”

As Bloomberg explains, there are two major consequences of this system for the country’s economic health. On the one hand, most private employers cannot compete with such generous benefits, particularly during an economic downturn. On the other, Brazil itself can’t afford to pay government employees this much forever, particularly when it has such poor credit.

Behind this story is some key historical background. Brazil is a racially polarized society and for many decades dark-skinned people and children from poor and rural backgrounds were largely frozen out of competition for government jobs—as well as most good jobs in the highly protected and regulated formal economy. Like many other Latin American countries, Brazil skimped on public education in elementary and secondary schools, and splurged on universities. What this meant was that middle class families who could send their kids to private schools were almost certain to see their kids get into the university system (and state university education was heavily subsidized) and from there, they faced little competition for civil service and cushy private sector jobs.Government jobs were and are highly coveted, with high salaries, great fringe benefits, and some of the most generous pensions in the world. Similarly, many formal sector jobs enjoy European levels of job protection and benefits. But for years, the great majority of Brazilians worked in the informal sector. They were poorly educated and they had few job protections and miserable wages. For many, hunger and destitution were a constant presence.That system—a kind of Third World imitation of the blue model social systems of Europe and North America—is breaking down now. This is partly for the same reasons that Europeans and Americans are having to adjust, and also partly because Brazil’s poor people are unwilling to be treated so unfairly anymore. Slowly, the government is moving away from supporting privileged (and largely white) enclaves, and moving toward a more open society where more resources are going to those most in need.The fightback is fierce. Civil servants (and the politicians who share in the benefits of the system) don’t want to lose their privilege, and the middle class fears a decline in university quality as well as tougher competition for places, and it’s doing what it can to hold on to its power. When the economy was growing and the world hailed Brazil as one of the BRIC superstars, these conflicts were easier to manage. But now the economy is in recession, and everybody is feeling the pain.If getting the economics right weren’t hard enough, that is, Brazil also faces a tough uphill slog to develop the kind of political consensus that can help it make fundamental and often painful reforms. Part of the challenge is that the technocrats who are among the prime beneficiaries of the old system are, inevitably, playing a major role in any reform process. This is not unlike what we see in the United States, where the upper middle class of professionals and managers is fighting to preserve its power and standing even as the economic foundations of the old system are shaken. Our civil service, very much like Brazil’s, would rather fight change than accelerate it. Similarly, our universities don’t want to lose their privileged places and our political/media establishment is much more interested in trying to defend the old system than to push reform.But in both the U.S. and Brazil, reform is exactly what’s needed.

Australia Weathering the Chinese Storm

Not long ago, Australian officials were on the defensive about the state of their economy. Just last week, Paul Krugman was in Sydney warning that the Aussies should be preparing for a possible recession, saying “It doesn’t look that nasty so far but there are pretty severe headwinds facing Australia.” Yet new employment data suggests that Australia is defying gloomy predictions for the moment. Bloomberg has the details:

Australian employers added jobs in August, indicating record-low interest rates, a falling currency and weak wage growth is encouraging hiring.

Employment rose by 17,400 from July; economists forecast a 5,000 increase
The jobless rate dropped to 6.2 percent; matching economists’ estimates
Full-time jobs rose 11,500; part-time employment increased 5,900
Participation rate, a measure of the labor force in proportion to the population, fell to 65 percent from 65.1 percent; matching predictions

It is, of course, dangerous to read too much into one month’s employment figures. But 17,400 new jobs beats the 5,000 estimate more than handily. And David Scutt at Business Insider Australia points out that tourism is up and a survey of the services sector last month indicated expansion faster than anything seen since March 2008.

Although we hesitate to agree with all of Scutt’s sunny analysis, the weakened Australian dollar seems to be helping the country weather China’s economic storm for the time being. Readers may recall that Canberra and Beijing inked a landmark free trade agreement last November. The latest news is that embattled Prime Minister Tony Abbott is still struggling to push it through parliament amidst strong union opposition. Deal or no, Australia has made a big bet on China in recent years. We’ll be watching closely to see if its economic improvements continue despite Beijing’s troubles.

Swapping Crude with Mexico a Rare Win/Win

When the Commerce Department approved crude oil swaps with Mexico last month, the decision seemed to make a great deal of economic sense. America’s Gulf Coast refineries were built with heavier, more sulfurous “sour” crude in mind, but the oil being fracked from U.S. shale formations is by and large of a lighter, “sweeter” variety containing less sulfur. Mexico, in contrast, has three major refineries (constituting 42 percent of its refining capacity) that were built with light crude in mind, though much of the oil it produces is of the heavier sour variety. It’s therefore not hard to see why a swap isn’t just a boon to the “operational efficiency” of both countries’ refineries—it’s a downright neighborly thing to do. But as the EIA reports, the crude swaps don’t just make economic sense, they’re also good for the environment:

The partial substitution of Eagle Ford crude for Mexican crudes…in Mexican refineries would free up sulfur removal capacity in the Mexican refining system. This would, in turn, allow that capacity to be used to produce more lower-sulfur gasoline than is currently possible. Any increased supply of lower-sulfur gasoline to Mexico’s motor gasoline market, which consumed 761,000 b/d in 2013, would result in reduced sulfur emissions and other environmental benefits.

This is one of those rare policy moves that makes sense from whatever angle you examine it. It also represents the chipping away of America’s ban on crude oil exports—a policy that dates back to the 1970s when the U.S. was wrangling with Arab oil embargoes and scarcity at home. Today, the political debate about our oil has changed significantly, now focusing on what to do with a domestic abundance. That ban is looking more archaic by the day as the shale boom continues to propel the U.S. up the global ranks of top oil producers. As oil guru Daniel Yergin put it, “[i]t’s pretty clear, directionally, where things are headed. This ban becomes more and more awkward and ill-fitting. It doesn’t fit reality.”

In that context, these crude swaps represent a baby step towards ending that export ban; it’s a policy move small and sensible enough to avoid the political debate over the wider issue, but could build momentum for the more substantive strategy of repealing the ban altogether. The argument for that decision isn’t as clear-cut as the one for the crude swaps with Mexico, however. Arthur Herman makes the case that we’d be better off chipping away at the export ban in a slow, measured manner by making bilateral trade agreements with our allies as a way to retain the strategic advantage that our crude gives us in the global market.Expect to be seeing more of this issue in the coming months—a bill to repeal the export ban just moved out of committee in the House of Representatives yesterday.

Big Japanese IPO Signals Blue Demise

Japan is putting a crown jewel of its once-robust blue model system on the auction block. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Tokyo Stock Exchange said Japan Post Holdings and units Japan Post Bank Co. and Japan Post Insurance Co. are all scheduled to list Nov. 4. Japan Post Holdings aims to raise about ¥1.4 trillion from the simultaneous listings, based on the indicative prices.

That would be the biggest IPO since telecommunications provider NTT Docomo Inc.went public in 1998, raising ¥2.1 trillion, and the largest sale of a government-owned company since Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. raised ¥2.4 billion in 1987.

This immense titan of everything blue—jobs for life, state-directed savings and investment, subsidized postal service, crony contracts with favored suppliers—has been a drain on the country’s economy for years. Privatizing it should have happened decades ago; it is a white elephant that today’s Japan cannot afford to feed.

However, the smart money wants nothing to do with what looks like an overvalued, badly managed, and politically constrained sink hole. For privatization to work, the government would have to give the new management permission to do unspeakable things, like putting profit ahead of politics. So the Japanese government is going to try to trick unsophisticated investors into buying 90 percent of the shares. The problem is that millions of new share owners will be furious unless their investments do well.The stake that owners will now have in the company’s performance means that one can see this either as a bungled privatization or as a clever plan to create strong public support for the much deeper changes that will need to be make for the new company to work. As with so many of Abe’s moves, only time will tell whether this is genius or delusion. But it is inescapably clear that Japan, which rode the blue model to unprecedented affluence and success, understands that the old system doesn’t work any more and that things have to change.

Turkish Govt. to Charge Kurdish Party Chief

Turkish prosecutors may be aiming to take the head of the Kurdish party out of the race ahead of upcoming elections. The Financial Times reports:

DHA, Turkey’s main secular news agency, reported late on Wednesday that the state prosecutor in Diyarbakir, the regional capital of Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish populated south-east, had opened an investigation into Mr Demirtas on charges ranging from humiliating the Turkish people to insulting the president and producing propaganda for a terrorist organisation.

The prosecutor has applied to the Turkish justice ministry for Mr Demirtas’s parliamentary immunity to be lifted, the report said.

Why oh why might the powers-that-be have an interest in seeing this happen? Oh, there it is:

Following the failure of talks to form a coalition government Mr Erdogan announced last month that Turkey would go to the polls again on November 1, a move intended to allow the AKP to win back its majority.

The action against Mr Demirtas raises the prospect of other senior HDP figures facing prosecution in an attempt to reduce the party’s appeal ahead of the November polls — or even of the closure of the HDP.

As we warned in August, the period before the new elections gives ample room for President Erdogan to attempt to reduce the opposition through other means. That seems to be one of the reasons the AKP opted to hold them, instead of entering a coalition. And it’s noteworthy that this news came on the back of riots and arson attacks on the HDP. There’s still about a month and a half left until the new polls, and it will be interesting—although likely unpleasant—to see how hard Erdogan will lean on the levers of both state and extrajudicial power in that interval.

Biofuel Boondoggle Threatens “Severe Economic Harm”

There are so many things wrong with America’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that it can be difficult to decide where to begin the list of grievances. Our biofuel mandates raise global food prices and starve the world’s poor, and in the process they can’t even accomplish the green goals they’re purportedly made to achieve. But a new National Economic Research Associates (NERA) report, commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), outlines two other fatal flaws. First, according to the report, the targets being discussed for 2015 and 2016 will be impossible to reach:

The current level of gasoline demand, the blend wall limiting the share of ethanol that can be blended into the gasoline pool, and the lack of non-ethanol biofuels limit the market potential for total renewable biofuels. Similarly the current market potential for higher ethanol content gasoline like E85 and E15 is too small to have an immediate impact on the amount of ethanol that the gasoline market can absorb.

This facet of the biofuel boondoggle is particularly galling, as regulators have proven so consistently incapable of setting reachable targets. The so-called “blend wall”—the percentage of ethanol capable of being safely blended into our country’s gasoline—necessarily caps demand for biofuels, putting refiners in the difficult position of being squeezed between federal mandates and market forces. Worse, the EPA has a history of missing deadlines for setting these unrealistic targets by wide margins, imposing a cloud of uncertainty over the industry. Targets for the next two years are due to be finalized by the end of November, but we won’t be holding our breath for an on-time submission.

The NERA study doesn’t stop at the logistical issues with the RFS, though. It warns of “severe economic harm” if targets are finalized at too-high levels, explaining that “the market becomes disrupted because there are an insufficient number of RINs to allow compliance.” RINs, or Renewable Identification Numbers, are credits refiners can purchase to comply with mandates when they can’t physically blend the volumes of ethanol the government requires. The RIN market has proven volatile in the past, and has attracted the interest of so-called “non-obligated parties” (read: canny Wall Street investors) looking to make a quick buck. In the end, the costs of compliance are passed from refiners along to consumers in the form of higher gasoline and diesel prices. NERA points out that the economic effects of these price spikes aren’t only felt at the pump, but also across the wider economy:

Since the transportation sector is interconnected with other sectors in a way that the transportation services are consumed by other sectors, the fuel cost increase creates the spillover effects that ripple through the economy. Higher diesel fuel costs increase the cost to move raw materials and finished goods around the country, thus eventually making everything that directly or indirectly depends on transportation services more costly.

The costs of our biofuel boondoggle are large, varied, and growing. They dwarf any potential benefits, and raise an obvious question that grows more urgent with every passing year: Why in the world haven’t we ended this nightmare yet?

Cuomo Moves to Destroy Upstate New York Economy

Despite growing evidence of the potentially devastating consequences of big minimum wage hikes, Democrats are forging ahead, with Empire State Governor Andrew Cuomo becoming the latest to hop on the bandwagon. The Wall Street Journal reports that Cuomo is proposing a $15 minimum statewide, a move that would destroy what’s left of New York’s upstate economy. More:

The push by Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, comes after he moved earlier this year to boost the minimum wage for fast-food workers in the state. The state’s minimum hourly wage across all industries is now $8.75 and is set to increase to $9 at year’s end.

Several U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, have passed measures to raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour, though they won’t reach that level for years. Lawmakers in Oregon and California also are contemplating setting their statewide hourly level as high as $15. The highest current statewide hourly wage is $9.47, in Washington state.

A $15 minimum wage is tough enough in New York City, where many low-skill workers are unemployable at that level, but at least the Big Apple has pockets of vitality like the hotel industry where $15 an hour jobs would survive. Cities like Rochester and Buffalo—to say nothing of rural areas—don’t have that kind of cushion. Manufacturing jobs in New York State (Albany has a burgeoning semiconductor industry that Cuomo purports to support) are likely to be hit especially hard because these industries are highly mobile.

Meanwhile, smart investors should probably dump New York bonds and buy stock in robotic companies and tech firms. With the state economy facing this headwind, and state expenses likely to rise if Albany has to bear these higher labor costs across its huge and poorly funded networks of medical programs, New York state and local bonds will become less attractive unless interest rates rise to offset the risks. But, on the other hand, putting this floor under wages guarantees that firms who employ low-skilled workers will look to automate those jobs as quickly as possible.The message to business from a $15 minimum wage is clear: Sell New York bonds, stop hiring poor people, and see what you can do to move your company to a more welcoming location. This message will be heard and acted on. When the effects start to be felt, New York Democrats will complain about the sudden run of bad luck, and campaign for tax increases to pay for the state’s growing welfare and unemployment costs.

Church Picnics and the Communion of Saints

In its issue of September 2015, Christianity Today, the banner periodical of Evangelical Protestantism, carried a story by Morgan Lee with the title “My Small Group Looks like Me.” It deals with an experiment by several mega-churches to combine maximal inclusiveness in major Sunday worship services with smaller groups meeting during the week to allow members of various ethnic groups to be by themselves and worship in their own languages. Groups mentioned consist of Latinos, Filipinos, South Asians, and Indonesians. Apparently this practice is spreading; the story mentions as examples New Life Fellowship in New York and Christ Fellowship Church in Miami. There is no intention to give up the large multi-ethnic Sunday services, because it is felt that they are important as witnessing to Christian unity. Also, the children of immigrant families like the large services; they enjoy the many programs for children and they have no problems with English (their parents often come along, even if they do have a language problem—they can have the opportunity later in the week to meet with other adults who “look like me”).

There is a sociological and a theological assumption behind the quest for inclusiveness. The sociological assumption is that the reason for the empirically verifiable effect that on Sunday morning there is “the most segregated hour of the week” (the phrase was first used by Martin Luther King) is white racial or ethnic prejudice. The theological assumption is that this is a sin. The sociological assumption is probably valid in many cases. The theological assumption calls for closer examination.The sociological assumption omits what is certainly an important factor in the shortfalls of the inclusive ideal: Class. This may or may not overlap with race or ethnicity. Class of course correlates with level of education. It is difficult for individuals with doctoral degrees to be at ease socially with high-school dropouts (even if they are all dark-skinned and speak Spanish). Interaction between rich and poor, especially in a society with a strong egalitarian ethos, is prone to evoke feelings of guilt in the former and of envy in the latter. What comes in here very strongly is a distinctively American Protestant notion of “fellowship” equated with relaxed sociability: This is empirically difficult among people with very different levels of class—even if (perhaps especially if) they are told in sermons that they ought to try, and feel guilty if they don’t. By contrast, imagine a Catholic cathedral in, say, colonial Mexico. The ladies of the aristocracy might well attend Mass in reserved seats, while poorer women sit several rows farther back (the men of both classes may not attend at all—hay que ser hombre/”one has to be a man”). Everyone is focused on what happens at the altar. The two classes need not interact with each other at all. Things have become more complicated in the U.S.: The Protestant notion of congregational sociability has infected everyone else—Catholics, Jews, Buddhists. If you will, church picnics have become an interfaith institution. Conservative Catholics have called this process “Protestantization.”If you put together religious pluralism (many faiths and moralities co-existing in the same society) with religious freedom, you enable something that looks very much like the American denomination—that is, a voluntary association in competition with other such associations. In America every religion becomes a denomination—even Judaism, perhaps the least likely to develop this kind of religious institution. For most of its history Judaism was simply the faith of the Jewish people; an individual did not choose this faith, but was involuntarily born into it. In America there are now at least 5 Jewish denominations—Modern Orthodox, Haredi Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist—and more if you count in the different Hasidic schools, each of which acts as a kind of denomination. Is the following joke really about “Protestantization”? – An American Jew is stranded alone on an island. He somehow manages to use driftwood to build two synagogues—one in which he prays, the other in which he wouldn’t be caught dead.The theological assumption is that when the Apostles’ Creed speaks about the “communion of saints”, what is meant is ordinary sociability in the here and now. That is questionable. The Church, described as the communion of saints, is the “mystical body of Christ”, including both the living and the dead—a supernatural rather than an empirical entity. It is not incidental that the term “communion” in the Creed is the same word that also refers to the Eucharist. I would not be misunderstood here: I am not suggesting a theological orthodoxy, which insists that Christians today must be rigidly bound by what the early Church taught and practiced. But if one understands that it is unrealistic to force people who have nothing in common in this world to enjoy relaxed sociability, it is useful to have a theological rationale for not feeling guilty about this. It is one thing to ex-communicate someone from the sacrament of the altar for some egregious moral failure (such as racism), it is quite another thing to ask an individual to stop attending meetings of the ladies’ altar guild because of her atrocious taste in flowers.