Years ago I knew a devout Catholic woman that was very active in her church. It was a decent sized and youngish congregation so they could maintain a grammar school and youth programs. The way it worked, if I recall, is the regular parishioners got a discount on tuition while everyone else paid full retail for their kids. Jews often send their kids to Christian schools, for example, even though they obviously do not participate in the life of the Church so they paid retail.
At some point, the neighborhood started to change. The local Jewish population began to leave and was replaced with blacks. In the Baltimore area this is a common phenomenon. Jews in America have always been the most generous to blacks, preferring to hire them over whites and now immigrants. This is a custom that dates to a century ago, which is why it is ironic that famous blacks like Barak Obama and Al Sharpton hate Jews so much.
As is often the case when neighborhoods change, people worried about home values so there was a cascading effect. In Baltimore they used to call it “block busting.” Realtors would get one family on the block to sell to a black family and immediately everyone else on the block was in a selling mood. It was a good way for realtors to churn a stable neighborhood.
Anyway, as the neighborhood turned, the church started to get blacker too. The new members who would show up once a month or less, demanded access to all of the parish resources for regular members. Because modern Americans would rather see their church collapse than be thought anything other than enthusiastic for the swirl, a classic cycle ensued where costs went up and contributions declined.
All of the new “members” wanted their kids in the parish school at a discount, but they were not kicking in time and money to help support the church. The old members grew resentful of what was happening and started to leave the church. Of course, many simply sold their home and moved away. The result was predictable. The finances of the parish declined and services had to be cut. That drove away more paying members and, if memory serves, the school eventually closed.
People living around large cities in America are familiar with this pattern. Europeans will soon become familiar with it as they are overrun by Muslims. Moving away is not a solution as the troublesome population soon follows. For the same reason bank robbers rob banks troublesome minority populations seek out stable majority neighborhoods. It’s why diversity is a toxic poison in the West. It generates social instability.
The more mixed the Sunday morning pews are, the fewer people are likely to be in them.
That’s the primary finding of a new study from Baylor University published in the current Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Researchers studied the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, where racial diversity doubled from 1993 to 2012, and found that, at the same time, churches with the greatest diversity growth also had the steepest declines in attendance.
Kevin Dougherty, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor and lead author on the study, said the findings should not be taken as a stab at racial diversity in churches.
Rather, he said, it shows congregations that are not originally started — “planted,” in church parlance — as diverse will have a tough time becoming so after their planting.
“That change in the fundamental character of a congregation is an extremely daunting task,” Dougherty said. “Congregations intentionally planted as diverse from the beginning have the greatest potential to sustain that change while those that are trying to change their diversity will have a bumpy road ahead.”
It’s the fundamental defect of all egalitarian ideologies. The diversity advocates assume that all people are the same, when they are clearly not the same. Thousands of generations of evolution have hard wired humans to seek out those who are most like them. Trust is highest with our kin. Social structure like churches, and civic communities are built on trust. Throw a bunch of strangers from different tribes together and they are not going to build a community.
That does not mean people have live in isolation from one another. It’s just that stable, productive communities maintain their stability by working to limit diversity as much as possible. In the bad old days when covenants prevented home owners from selling to weirdos outside the group, the community remained stable. Those who moved away sought out places where their kind was welcome. Those who moved in did so knowing they would fit in with their neighbors.
One half of this still happens. The example I described at the start of this post is a good example. The people who fled the diversity moved to places that were pretty much like their old neighborhood. They were just far away from public transportation and had no apartments that could be conjured into ghettos by the miracle of Section 8 vouchers. The people moving into the old neighborhood did so because their tribe was moving there.
The fact is, for most people, diversity sucks.
Edit: The nice church lady I mentioned at the start eventually moved away. Her new church has many of the same people from her old church, who moved away for the same reasons. The new church is a growing concern while the old church has fallen into deep decline.
Trying to maintain stability becomes daunting when the “diverse” members of the parish council yammer on at meeting after meeting about everything wrong with the parish is because “some people are still fighting the Civil War.”
“The diversity advocates assume that all people are the same, when they are clearly not the same.”
You have this exactly backwards. It’s the diversity skeptics that treat all “blacks” the same, all Mexicans the same, etc. Diversity advocates treat people as different – that’s why they are called diversity advocates! Diversity means “different”, not “same”. While racism is a fundamentally collectivist idea…
Also there is nothing wrong at all with “voting with your feet”. It’s one of the primary tools of liberty lovers.
If you are seeking the cause of the degradation of cities like Detroit, you have to look no further than government. “Blacks” were doing just fine on their own until Lyndon Johnson decided they needed his “help”. The result was the destruction of the “black” family. Few populations could survive that kind of “help”.
This is a wonder of wrongness. The HBD crowd treats American blacks as a single group because they are a unique population with a similar heritage. That’s simply logical in most contexts. You need to understand the material better and stop reading your own biases into things.
Did you read this?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3590156/The-whites-East-End-BBC-documentary-reveals-cockneys-endangered-species-London-borough-70-000-immigrants-moved-in.html
Notice the teacher talking with pride about all these children that don’t speak English. What madness!
What’s the distinction between diversification, and gentrification?
Other than the demonstrable long term outcome of course.
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Most of my Jewish friends seem to be fairly cynical and dismissive about their parents’ antics during the civil-rights and urban diaspora days. Of all my friends, maybe one in twenty would ever acknowledge the casual link between the civil rights movement and the flight from the old neighborhoods.
I guess the trend for the grand children of the original white flighters is to move back to the old neighborhoods and gentrify them. I get that they are fed up with 40 mile commutes and the perceived sterility and alienation of the suburbs. But in the event of serious unrest, they would be trapped. Which takes us back to the underlying logic of the original white flight.
“In Baltimore they used to call it “block busting.” Realtors would get one family on the block to sell to a black family and immediately everyone else on the block was in a selling mood. It was a good way for realtors to churn a stable neighborhood.
Anyway, as the neighborhood turned, the church started to get blacker too. The new members who would show up once a month or less, demanded access to all of the parish resources for regular members”
Blacks never receive any push-back for their behavior. If blacks moved in and we held to neighborhood standards and the church made them join, attend, and contribute (and work), they’d have far less incentive to be a plague of locusts. Whites seem to cower in the presence of black aggression. If 1 in 10 whites stood up for themselves and at another 4 in 10 supported the 1 in 10 who stood up for themselves, blacks would have serious resistance to their behavior.
As it stands right now, 1 in 100 whites might stick up for themselves, and 50/100 whites condemn the 1 percent. Aren’t we getting the treatment we deserve?
The “further affirming fair housing” movement, essentially “Section 8”-ing the entire country, is simply blockbustering on a national scale. Between genderless bathrooms and FAFH, our national leadership is hellbent on breaking all of our cultural ties to our friends, communities, and any sense of what has always been called “normal”.
Closer to my home (my wife’s employer), the United Church of Christ, as reported in the WSJ yesterday, internally anticipates a drop of 80% in membership in the next 30 years. Yet the UCC steers itself headlong into loud support of all of this stuff that breaks down communities and congregations. Truly, Liberalism as it is practiced today is a death wish. But I guess they will rest easy, knowing that they lobbied for the “right” kind of world, never mind that it bears no relationship to the reality that we live in, or ever could live in. I guess that 80% drop in membership won’t be “unexpected”, in the Glenn Reynolds sense of the term. Which makes their rush to go there even less fathomable.
HUD is trying to conjure this little spell here in Westchester County. The thought being that if they can break the will of a county where the County Exec has flatly declared his willingness to go to jail over it, the rest will roll over.
Diversity is like the grim reaper, everything it touches withers away.
I’ve watched the process of several neighborhoods being busted. In time (and totality) nothing can compare with the exit speed of a busted Jewish neighborhood. Newark was Exodus 11.
It’s a thing that gets little discussion for obvious reasons. The nice church lady in my post had Jewish neighbors on both sides. Very nice people. Within a month both sold and in came a black single mother and a black family. Within a year or two, every Jewish family moved and they even closed down the synagogue and Hebrew school. That suggest some degree of organization, but her neighbors were atheists so they were never at temple.
My guess is Jews are better at seeing which way the wind is blowing.
“That suggest some degree of organization, but her neighbors were atheists so they were never at temple.”
“My guess is Jews are better at seeing which way the wind is blowing.”
Many in the Tribe like to think themselves as “atheis”t but they’re fully part of the Networked jewish community, your Church Lady was just another naive goy screwed by the Organized Jewry.
I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How was the Catholic lady ‘screwed’ by ‘Organized Jewry’? How is that fictional entity even involved in this anecdote? Why was it her Jewish neighbours’ responsibility to stay put in a deteriorating neighbourhood? Was it their job to shield her from the consequences of diversity? They did exactly what I would do if I saw that my surroundings were getting dangerous and ugly – get away. Too bad she didn’t do the same, but then Pope Shitty would have scolded her for not being open to the peripheries, or whatever the hell idiocy he’s barfing out today.
I’m getting so tired of having to careful step around the anti-Semitic dog turds being dropped by my supposed “allies” on the Right. Z-man only mentions the fact that Jews are less willing to take chances living in hostile neighbourhoods, and some fool takes it as the green light to let fly with some Jewish conspiracy crap. This used to be uncommon; now it’s the rare blog thread that doesn’t end up hijacked by it before the end.
I’ve seen various busted neighborhoods take anywhere from five to twenty years to turn ghetto. The Jewish neighborhood in Newark parted for the ghetto faster than the Red Sea parted for Moses. Is it anti-Semitic to say so? I find it especially relevant because in the case of Jews there is an inverse ratio between talking the talk and walking the walk. My guess is that this may annoy people who might not even be anti-Semitic, if such people exist of course.
No, it’s not anti-Semitic to say that Jews don’t hang around when blacks move into a neighbourhood. But if you say, “your Church Lady was just another naive goy screwed by the Organized Jewry” then that IS anti-Semitic. Do you want to throw in with Hades up above, or do you want to stick with the observation of fact that I didn’t argue with?
The arduous work of anti-anti-Semites, like anti-racists, must be exhausting.
“My guess is Jews are better at seeing which way the wind is blowing.”
A group will evolve that trait after a few thousand years of surviving captivities, expulsions, pogroms and holocausts.
Jews who left Europe for the New World would be more likely to move again. Most don’t have deep roots in American cities and are brought up with stories of escape and resettlement. Many South Africans who have relocated to Australia/USA in the past decade don’t celebrate Christmas if you know what I mean.
German churches are empty and our cathedrals are being turned into museums. And they have been for years. In fact people are buying smaller churches quite cheap and turn them into homes, clubs, restaurants or whatever. We didn’t need the Muslims to do this, we did it to ourselves.
“July 20, 2015 – More than 200,000 German Catholics formally left the Church last year. The total loss of members, according to the German Bishops’ Conference, was 217,716, to be exact. That’s even more than the year before, when more than 175,000 left. Unlike in other countries, German Catholics have an extra incentive to officially remove themselves from the Church, because the German government enforces a strict “Church tax” for all Catholics.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/german-catholic-and-protestant-churches-sell-off-church-buildings-a-883054.html
http://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/88356188?referrer=RESULT_LIST_LISTING
Church tax for Catholics? What about Lutherans?
The church tax is only for church members as a way to raise funds for services provided by their church (e.g. marriage, baptism, burial, Christening, etc.) You can still attend and not pay a tax you are just not entitled to the services mentioned above. When you register in your town, most people check the box for “none” for their religious preference so they don’t pay any tax.
There is no quicker, surer way to kill the Church, than to use government force as its collection plate. What a diabolically monstrous plan.
Yes, but what about the “devout Catholic woman?” She sort of got left hanging in the wind….
Once we got the light rail system plugged in here, north of Dallas, it started getting blacker almost immediately. When I lived in the St. Louis area previously, light rail plug-in there was voted down, 90-10, and you could hear the howl from the diversity queens in St. Louis thirty miles away. I’ll be out of here before long. What was once a really nice place to live is getting boogered up, quickly. Diversity is Death.
I’m trying to think of a leftwing piety that they actually live with themselves…. nope, coming up blank. The only time you’ll see a “Progressive” within a few parsecs of a “diverse” neighborhood is when it’s “gentrifying” (= the hipsters are driving real estate prices up in order to drive the diversity out). Me, I believe in not imposing on others what I’m not willing to tolerate myself. If I believed in the benefits of diversity, I’d live near the ‘hood — and send my kids to those schools. If I believed in global warming, I’d live in a wind-powered yurt as far from the ocean as I could get. If I believed in nationalized health care, I’d drop my insurance and get on the exchanges. Etc. Etc. Time was, such an attitude made me a “conservative.” These days it makes me a “fascist” and / or a “racist,” these being the two worst insults those birdbrains can think of. Guess I’ll have to find a way to live with that.