Workers in interwar Europe were likely more “deviant” than “media people” in 1990s America

In my previous post, I noted that it is likely that the threat posed by an activist working class to the Catholic Church was likely a very important driving factor behind stigmata stories in the southwestern quarter of Europe during the interwar period. This is true even if my original imagination — that the stigmata stories were designed to directly convert the workers — is unlikely to be true because the Church viewed converting the working classes as a fundamentally hopeless cause. The fact that the Church made few efforts other than by political power to do so suggests that no belief existed within the Catholic hierarchy that European workers could be converted from their fundamental anti-religion stance.

Indeed, the evidence I can gather reminds me of Peter Kreeft’s article ‘A Defense of Culture Wars’, which I read as a young man in the late 1990s as part of his book Ecumenical Jihad to a mixture of utter ridicule and some agreement. Kreeft used a poll by the supposedly secular Wirthlin Agency — of whom I have not heard from any other source so I can doubt how secular it might have actually been — to illustrate differences in belief between the general population and “media people” (whom Kreeft defined as those involved in any of journalism, public education, or entertainment):

Issue	Support by general population		Support by “media people”
Cheating sexually upon spouse is wrong	>90		50
Regular attendance at religious services	50		9
Abortion should have minimally some restrictions	72	(Wirthlin)	3
	80	(other sources)

The impression one obtains from church and other political histories, however, I have always envisioned as implying that the industrial working class of Europe between about 1860 and 1945 was even more “deviant” from the opinions and practices of the remainder of society. Pat Buchanan in his The Death of the West doubted this — indeed suggesting the working classes even in Europe were socially conservative — but he is unsupported by other sources. During periods of weak class struggle European workers accepted passively  the system as it was, but when the gains mass class struggle could potentially produce were revealed, European workers always constituted the vanguard of social change.

Almost certainly, the proportion of industrial workers in Europe over this period who attended religious services was extremely small, probably 5 percent or less. Contrariwise, amongst the ruling and middle classes, and the rural population, church attendance was typically very widespread (with some exceptions, for example the latifundia regions of interior Spain). From what I can gather, the proportion of all Europeans between 1860 and 1945 attending religious services was reasonably similar to 1990s America. This would mean Europe’s industrial working classes stood much further apart from the rest of society. Although abortion was not legalised outside the USSR and Scandinavia until the 1960s or 1970s, it is probable that the great majority of Europe‘s industrial workers had long supported eliminating restrictions upon it (and upon homosexual relations) since before the Bolshevik revolution.

Moreover, if we extended the survey beyond sexual issues to economic ones, the views of media people in 1990s America would become less “deviant”, whereas those of workers in Europe between 1860 and 1945 would undoubtedly remain equally or more so. Additionally, because media people lack power to transform society — they have zero control either as bosses or producers over fundamental mechanisms of production — their deviant views and practices are extremely unlikely to transform society. Contrariwise, after World War Two the Boom Generation of Europeans (born after the war) confirmed in its social beliefs and practices to that which European workers had established within their own cultures as early as 1860, but was radically different to the remaining sectors of European society in this period.