This is an interesting excerpt from Dan Gilgoff's new book on the rise of James Dobson. I've made this point before, but so many of us experience James Dobson in his political incarnation that we forget that his prominence and power comes precisely because millions of Americans don't. The megachurches, with their remarkably innovative techniques for constructing social capital and a feeling of connectedness, have been fairly explicit responses to greater geographic dispersal, weakened family ties, and increased insecurity, and so forth. Many of us who don't experience the megachurches as anything but occasionally malign actors on the national stage are quite poor, I fear, at understanding why they are important and why their influence is proving durable. Which is odd, given that the very foundations of the liberal critique of contemporary society -- increased economic risk, civic deterioration, etc -- are exactly what the churches help address.
