A 1950's Religion and Status Quiz

I don't know if I'll have Internet this weekend for our weekend to Cambria, Big Sur, and Hearst Castle, so if you don't hear from me until Sunday evening, that's why. In the meantime, here's a fun game that we played in the classroom on Tuesday. As a group of adults traveling from all over the country, I'm sure that we all have different political and religious beliefs. This isn't something that it's normally acceptable to discuss, but the American Studies professor who was leading the session had a backwards way of getting us to talk with each other about these potentially volatile topics. We were split into small groups and asked to rank the 6 Christian and 3 Jewish sects in order of socioeconomic status in the 1950s. This was one of cultural historian Packer Vance's studies. (I think his readings will have me covered for the next few months. You all know that I'm a closet sociologist.) Our group didn't come up with the correct answers, although my own guesses only had a few switches, but this quiz got us talking about our backgrounds and our religious beliefs in a way that would have been impossible without the prompt. Here are the sects.

-Baptist -Conservative Jew
-Catholic -Orthodox Jew
-Congregationalist -Reform Jew
-Episcopalian
-Lutheran
-Methodist
-Pentecostal
-Presbyterian
-Unitarian

Karen, you asked about the popular culture of the 1940's. We briefly discussed how Steinbeck buffered the "4 pound books" of the 1930's and 1950's with the "1 pound books" of the 1940's, but the professor who worked with us talked exclusively about the 1950's. I'll try to find some of my more interesting notes to post.