Is Church attendance all that odd these days?

I'm not sure that I should write this post, let alone publish it. I don't want to appear holier than thou, and on this subject one can slip easily into that mode. Neither do I wish to put down any of many friends, many of whom will know who they are if they read it. Further, though I don't think that I hide my religious beliefs I'm not comfortable waving them from the rafters either. They Holy Father is right: our actions should speak for our religion. Yet I find that I am bugged to write it anyway and let the chips fall where they will, and hope that readers understand my point.

I spend last weekend at a curling tournament. Before I left, I did a web search for Catholic Churches in the area where it took place. It's an easy thing to do in this internet age. I found four within an easy drive from the hotel where I stayed and wrote down all their Mass times; not knowing when my team would be playing until the tournament played out, I knew I would need options. As it were, we had to play at 9AM Sunday, and a Church just down the road had a Mass at 7:30. So that's where I went. I didn't even make it a point to tell anyone what I was doing. But when asked where I was going I answered honestly, because I'm not hiding the fact either.

The response ran the gamut from respect to humor. The humor I get: Marty goes to Church? It was friendly enough and I accept it on that level. Yet much of it was an odd amalgam of incredulity, embarrassment, and even excuse mongering, though I don't believe I had intentionally laid a guilt trip on anybody. But it was at times somehow admiring (So you went to Church, eh? Good for you) laced with pity (I could almost hear the unsaid question: why did you waste your time with that?) to shy excuse making (though I never asked anyone for the reasons they did not go). I suppose what got me most was the number of people, at least a dozen on Sunday and even a few more during my Monday night curling league who somehow got wind of my churchgoing, who, it seemed, almost felt they had to come to me and say something about it.

I know that Church attendance and belief in God is down. But I never thought that it was all that unusual these days. The only time I felt similarly to last weekend was back in 1989 when my daughter was born. She is our third child. My wife and I felt on display at the hospital. We actually heard the nurses whispering: See them? They're here having their third child. Together. And they've been married the whole time!

To the point, I find myself dismayed by it all. It just sounds very sad. Yet I don't see what I did to provoke it except to do what I always do: go to Church on Sunday. I simply don't know what to make of it.

The Truth about the Minimum Wage

A recent study based on the Basic Economic Security Tables for Michigan has concluded that people can't live on minimum wage.

Shocked? You shouldn't be. Yet what is so often forgotten is that no one generally has to live on it. The overwhelming majority of minimum wage earners are exactly those who don't need to live off of it. They are teenagers and others on the first step of the employment ladder, or the second wage earner in a traditional household. In short, they are, generally speaking, those just getting their feet wet economically. They're getting job experience; what ought they expect when just starting out?

But that is not the real intent behind the study. One of the people it focused on was a 23 year old unmarried mother of two, trying to support herself and her kids working two jobs which paid between $9.50 and $13 bucks an hour. Another is a single mother of three who makes $7.54 an hour as a telemarketer. Single mothers... is anyone willing to stand up and point out that these are not traditional families?

How did they become single mothers? It doesn't matter, because we will be told that that's none of our business as a society. Yet when these single moms want sympathy, and a liberal organizations such as Wider Opportunities for Women and the Michigan League for Human Services, who created the report using public data, want attention to their views on how the government ought to run the economy, then their lot in life is supposed to be our concern.

To call that effrontery is to understate the point. Yet simple common sense says that if these single moms had waited to have kids until they were in a more stable and traditional home environment, or at least until they had gained the skills themselves to qualify for better jobs, then their current wages wouldn't be such an issue.

This is not to disparage all single moms. Some are in that position through no fault of their own, to be sure. But as to the ones who are in such circumstances as the direct result of free will actions of their own, it is fair to wonder exactly how much society ought to change for their benefit. Simple Christian charity indeed calls on us to help...but more for the sake of the children involved. They are the innocents. Their mothers are all too often merely insisting that they be allowed to act any way they want, then demanding society help hold the bag.

It is a point which should not be lost on the larger society when considering wealth and poverty issues.