Similar to Japan and Christianity, most of the people who practice Eastern religions in the GSS are high IQ white people.

Stark and Bainbridge noted that people who join cults are typically educated, upperclass, and urban.

yeah. jews are way overrepresented in NRMs.

also, re: japan. for wvs wave 5 the N for xtians = 30. tiny, but they are WAY more educated than the typical japanese. OTOH, the japanese who don't give a religious denomination (the majority) are more educated than the large minority who say they're buddhist (these are more likely to be women and older).

Japanese example makes me wonder if fair number of Christians in Japan aren't even Japanese. Their immigration is restricted to only the very elite. So, the few foreigners that they allow in would have very high educational status and likely be high percentage western. And of course a fairly high percentage of westerners are at least nominal Christians.

sg,

1) there's been a rather influential minority of native japanese xtians since the meiji restoration (apparently many women in the imperial family were christian or christian-sympathizers). these xtians are atypical in asia insofar as "mainline protestantism" is actually dominant last i checked, as opposed to evangelical protestantism which is more the norm in china or korea. japan is the only non-western country where unitarian christianity had some impact to my knowledge (perhaps india is another).

2) actually, i assume that many of the 'foreigners' would be japanese brazilians who came back. the majority of japanese brazilians are roman catholic.

There's very little plausibility for the idea of the masses' phenotype being a lagging indicator of the elites'. Simples case: fashion in baby names. Lieberson in A Matter of Taste shows that there's not really anything to the idea.

When a new name becomes fashionable, it strikes high and low classes at more or less the same time. I think it's slightly earlier in the elites, but not by much -- probably just because they're more in touch with what's hot and what's not, so they can jump on the bandwagon earlier.

Same is true for clothing. Lower classes today don't dress like the upper classes of yesterday, in general. (They do dress more colorfully, though, like elites used to.) Keep price the same -- you still don't see working-class people wearing some variant on a white shirt, dark jacket, and dark pants. Blue-jeans and a black t-shirt is more like it.

And there were other elite belief systems akin to religion -- Marxism, for one. As far as we can tell, that never caught on big-time among the working classes of industrialized countries. Unions, sure. But I mean the larger belief system of how history works, what important forces there are, etc. -- just like how religions explain the history of the world, our place in the universe, etc. Working people never bought into that aspect of Marxism.

I think a better model is that the masses don't change as much as the elites do over time. True for homicide -- elite violence fell much more sharply than lower-class violence over the past 500 years.

So, it looks like the lower classes now are copying the violent behavior of yesterday's nobility. But in reality, the same secular trend is striking at both groups' level of violence, just more strongly among elites. Maybe elites have easier access to information, people to discuss things with, etc., so that the influence these things have on changing behavior long-term affect the elites more strongly.

And there were other elite belief systems akin to religion -- Marxism, for one. As far as we can tell, that never caught on big-time among the working classes of industrialized countries. Unions, sure. But I mean the larger belief system of how history works, what important forces there are, etc. -- just like how religions explain the history of the world, our place in the universe, etc. Working people never bought into that aspect of Marxism.


well, the majority never really "get" ideology, so i don't see that that's relevant to what i'm saying. but there is data that secularism in the united states is "normalizing" demographically. that doesn't mean that the average non-believer is reading george h. smith or michael martin.

i don't know if the point about marxism is totally correct either, eurocommunism was a working-class phenomenon from what i recall, while even non-communist left parties like the SPD and labour were influenced by marxism. i also don't think marxism was every as common among the elite as something like secularism was. the broadening of the franchise resulted in the expansion of socialist parties and the collapse of liberal parties all over europe (with conservatives staying where they were).

When a new name becomes fashionable, it strikes high and low classes at more or less the same time. I think it's slightly earlier in the elites, but not by much -- probably just because they're more in touch with what's hot and what's not, so they can jump on the bandwagon earlier.

this is a persuasive point. so i wonder if there's a possible disjunction between material and ideas embedded in institutions.

"eurocommunism was a working-class phenomenon from what i recall"

I imagine that you want to say with "eurocommunismo" is "West European communism", and not exactly the ideology that it was known as "eurocommunismo" (who was, basically, Gorbachov-15-years-before). There is some overlapp between the 2 concepts, but they are not the same: Portuguese and Greek CP never were "eurocommunists", but hard-line traditional communists, and they were and are parties with strong support in the working-class; also the French and Italian CP were strong working-class parties even before his conversion to eurocommunism (in reality, specially in the french case, can be argued that the adoption of eurocommunism was the begining of the transformation of the CP from working-class parties to parties of "progressive intelectuals")

tx miguel. i was actually talking about france & italy (or that's what i hand in mind), though you're right, sloppy use of the term.