I don’t know about you, but I’m getting weary of hearing about the “Kitchen Table and Board Room Table” or “Wall Street and Main Street.” How quickly a clever turn of phrase becomes a threadbare cliche.
The middle class got a lot of air time during the recent Canadian federal election, and continues to generate conversation in the current U.S. presidential campaign. But what is the “middle class” and who belongs to it?
In April, 2008, the Pew Research Center released a 169 page study of the American middle class, and though it analyzes the U.S. middle class, I suspect that it will be of some interest to those living outside the USA.
Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Times is a serious look at how the American middle class thinks and lives. The document’s two main divisions: “A Self Portrait” and “A Statistical Report” will provide hours of valuable reading for journalists, public policy practioners, market analysts, and, hopefully, Christian leaders who want to understand how so many of their congregants live.
Careful readers may discover clues as to why America is drowning in the financial meltdown currently spreading across the globe. I suspect that the current woes hitting the middle class have their source equally as much in both the evangelical Christian middle class and its secular middle class peers.
