Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Upon meeting Madonna Massey at Starbucks in Lake Charles, Hochschild immediately notes “how many people seem happy to see her.” They complement Madonna’s clothes and her singing; her friendliness “seems to cast a circle of warmth around her.” After first meeting Madonna at a Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana meeting, Hochschild explains, she followed up to meet for coffee.

Hochschild has “explored industry and the state” as key institutions in the “social terrain” of Louisiana, but she still has to look at the church and the press. She wonders whether people feel the same way about the church as Mike Schaff does about his community, where the government seems to be unnecessarily interfering. “Nearly everyone” Hochschild meets attends church more or less regularly, and they take pride in their children “being churched.” Churches are a “pillar of social life” in Lake Charles, which has twice as many churches per capita as Hochschild’s hometown of Berkeley. People pray before meals and meetings, recall the churches of their childhoods fondly, and even credit God with their successes in business.

Hochschild visits the Masseys’ Living Way Pentecostal Church, where Madonna’s husband, Glenn, is the pastor. She sits next to Madonna in the front row as the 700 congregants trickle inside. Glenn gives a sermon, closing his eyes and raising his arms before speaking in tongues, and then the congregants bring their anxieties to his assistant pastors, who bless and weep for them. The parishioners lay their hands on one another, “forming a momentary still life of human connection,” before Pastor Glenn calls “everyone who needs to forgive or be forgiven” to the front. More than half the worshippers come to the front and “there is sighing, sometimes weeping, pats, and release.” The service ends; the congregants mingle and head home.

The Masseys’ church “focuses on human healing,” a role Hochschild suggests that “psychotherapy and meditation, as well as family and friendship” fill in other cultures. Other churches focus on different programming, from charity nearby to missionary work in the Global South. These churches “meet needs beyond the spiritual,” providing recreation facilities, sports leagues, summer camps, and addiction counseling. This is all funded by the parishioners themselves, who give 10% of their income to their churches. While Louisianans “pay taxes,” Hochschild notes, “they give at church.” Thinking about similar government-funded programs in San Francisco, Hochschild explains that she usually sees public services “filling the same cultural space” that church programs fill in Lake Charles. She notes that the services Silicon Valley companies provide for their workers are a different kind of private alternative to these public services.

Madonna Massey moved to Lake Charles recently, so she has not heard about many of the environmental catastrophes that people like the Arenos and Mike Schaff are facing. Massey tells Hochschild that she is “so for capitalism and free enterprise” but hates regulations that decide “the size of my Coke bottle or type of lightbulb.” Yet she trusts “our system” to ensure her water and air are clean. She sees a forced choice between the American Dream and environmental protections, the same “either-or scenario” in which Hochschild’s other friends also feel trapped.

Massey grew up in “the poorest town in America” but “has since prospered beyond her wildest dreams,” releasing albums of her music and living a comfortable, affluent life. She credits the church with her success, and many others in her congregation feel the same way. But Hochschild notes that “there were rich churches and poor churches,” as well as white churches and black churches, in Lake Charles. The white churches tend to be the rich ones, and the black churches the poor ones, which leads Hochschild to worry that, if church could truly take government’s place, “the churched world [would] remain a highly unequal one.” But Madonna thinks that “with God’s help, […] everyone can rise as she has.”

Hochschild learns that Louisiana’s “religious community appreciates the outdoors” but notes that she cannot find information about pollution on the website of any major Lake Charles church. She explains how the National Association of Evangelicals and Christian Coalition have contributed to the rise of the “religious right” and recalls a PBS interview series where those organizations’ leaders referred Bill Moyers to Dr. Calvin Beisner, their media spokesperson. Dr. Beisner argues that extractive practices like coal mining and oil drilling are sanctioned by the Book of Genesis, and Hochschild notices that oil and mining companies fund Beisner’s Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. She also identifies smaller environmentalist factions within the growing Evangelical movement, although they seemed absent in Lake Charles.

The churches Hochschild visited emphasized “a person’s moral strength to endure” above “the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength.” Like therapy, she suggests, church offers the emotional safety and support people need to endure hardship. Madonna Massey believes that the Second Coming is imminent and will bring believers like her to Heaven. This makes her ambivalent about environmental concerns because “the earth may just not be here.” While she confesses that she is “not well educated,” Massey asserts that “mine is a true belief.” And 41% of Americans share that belief, expecting the rapture by 2050.

Internet depictions of the rapture, Hochschild realizes, show a minority of “svelte, well-dressed adults” rising up to Heaven. She suggests such depictions might be responding to “shared and understandable anxieties about an earthly economy.” This makes sense, since American men with high-school educations have seen a 40% drop in income since 1970. Older white men who have experienced this decline over the last half-century have declining lifespans, so Hochschild understands why “life may well feel like ‘end times.’” But she also sees that church encourages Louisianans to “turn concern away from social problems,” government help, and the Great Paradox.

Over tea, Madonna Massey shows Hochschild the conservative pundits, politicians, church leaders, and news sources she follows on Twitter. Fox News, Hochschild explains, is “an extra pillar of political culture all its own” among Louisiana conservatives. Nearly all the people she interviews prefer Fox, considering it a source of moral guidance. One woman even says that “Fox is like family to me.” Fox “stokes fear” about issues “with little direct bearing on politics.” Mike Schaff told Hochschild that “a lot of liberal commentators look down on people like me” and wondered why those commentators can call Southerners “rednecks” even though Southerners realize that they “can’t say the ‘N’ word” because it’s “demeaning.”

Yet Hochschild notes that “none of the people I talked to” echoed the “extreme language” of Fox, which used words like “tyranny, apparat, terrorist, and strangler” to decry liberal policies. One Louisiana woman watches other news channels but sees them as opinion; she says she can distinguish opinion from fact “by their tone of voice.” For instance, she feels scolded when CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour interviews a sick or starving child, as though Amanpour is “imposing liberal feeling rules” on her, telling her to “feel sorry for, or responsible for, the fate of the child.” Hochschild notes that “the social terrain” of southern Louisiana encourages people to refocus away from the needs of people like the sick child; she suggests that she has begun “backing into” the woman’s deep story.

After Lee Sherman exposed PPG’s illegal dumping, he joined the environmental activist organization RESTORE. In 1997, he helped sick Condea Vista cleanup workers successfully sue the company, but soon thereafter “a schoolteacher and his wife” joined their group and began to sabotage their efforts. When Lee Sherman’s wife found the teacher suspiciously using her computer, she confronted him, the group fought, and it fell apart forever. Ten years later, it was revealed that Condea Vista paid spies $250,000 “to infiltrate RESTORE.” Condea Vista’s supply-chain manager, Peter Markey, admitted in a deposition that “it was a surveillance operation” approved by the company’s president. Mother Jones magazine—a progressive publication that none of Hochschild’s interviewees had ever encountered—broke the story in 2008, but Louisiana newspapers barely mentioned it, and nobody Hochschild interviewed could remember the story.

Hochschild reflects on a general trend she has discovered in Louisiana environmental politics: everyone suffers from pollution, but nobody publicly acknowledges it. She declares that Louisianans are “victims without a language of victimhood” and believes that she is “working slowly backward toward an answer to the Great Paradox”: admitting that they have a pollution problem would force Louisianans to address it. Institutions are not doing so, and Louisianans balk at the idea of government regulation, even though they realize that the federal government is the only entity that could fix pollution.

Hochschild returns to the idea of structural amnesia, suggesting that Louisianans focus on problems like people who “cheat the government” in order to forget the more severe environmental problems they face. To understand how an occasional case of welfare fraud makes Louisianans hate the whole federal government, Hochschild argues that she has to delve into people’s deep stories.