Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Constructing Social Problems: The Second Act?

Constructing Social Problems: The Second Act?

Last updated on: June 13, 2024 at 5:57 am by Philip Jenkins

0 Comments

Constructing Social Problems: The Second Act? 2024-06-13T05:57:20-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I have been writing about the sequence of books I had published in an earlier phase of my career on the construction of social problems and panics. The constructionist approach I used still seems to me to be very valuable. So might I ever go back to writing and research in that sizable area? What follows is is an intellectual exercise rather than an actual game plan, but I hope that addressing that question might be of some interest.

Mainly in the 1990s, I published a lot of books on the theme of social problems, which included studies of cults, drugs, threats to children, serial murder, and other issues. In each case, I argued that the issue in question undeniably had a core of objective reality, but that the particular way we understood it – and how we frame possible solutions – depended on cultural work by a number of groups, activists and agencies. Among other things, you absolutely had to understand the workings of media and popular culture, including fictional depictions on film and television. Having largely said what I wanted to say about most of these things (not all), I then moved on to other things in terms of research and publication.

So would I go back? One obvious point is that this is all a long time ago, a very different cultural and political world. Having said this, I have closely followed the sizable social problems literature as it has developed through the years, and especially in fields like child abuse and concerns over cults or new religions. I would love to update my old Mystics and Messiahs work on the history of American fringe religions, and the successive fears and panics they have inspired through the years.

Meanwhile, I have always stayed very close to the literature on clergy sexual abuse, and the continuing debates that topic has inspired. The prospect of writing a history of the whole clergy abuse phenomenon in recent American history is tempting, if daunting in terms of its sheer scope and complexity.

Drug Crises Then and Now

Also, we assuredly do not lack for new problems to analyze and take apart today in the US, not least in the drug area. Nobody doubts that fentanyl, say, is a massive social issue that claims many lives, but there is still lots to be done about the rhetoric surrounding the crisis – about how it has been constructed. The same applies to the opioid crisis, and here too, the racial aspects are crucial. Whenever America has had a drug crisis or problem, whether genuine or inflated, racial politics have virtually always been evident. We can scarcely write the history of American race relations and racial stereotypes over the past 150 years – of the whole history of Whiteness – without drawing centrally on such drug-related themes. In some instances, stigmatized racial groups were accused of using drugs to infiltrate and conquer White society – think of the Chinese and East Asian association with successive panics over opium and heroin.

Most commonly, Black-White stereotypes were to the fore. Drugs were generally portrayed as singularly damaging and dangerous because of their effect in enhancing negative characteristics that were attributed to Blacks, especially in terms of violence. Also, drugs threatened to spread those supposedly Black characteristics – violence, sexual excess, irresponsibility, primitivism – to vulnerable White populations. Sexual subtexts have often been in play, in suggesting sexual threats to young White women. Throughout, the implied danger is that drugs will cause White users to forsake or betray their proper racial status and qualities.

Sometimes, the racial context of such rhetoric has been overt and unconcealed, but in more recent times, it was somewhat coded, for example in the contrast between the “inner city” and the suburbs. The law enforcement bureaucrats and politicians who used such rhetoric may or may not have believed it themselves, but they knew it was likely to be highly convincing to a general audience. Much of the literature on social problem construction grew out of studies of successive drug panics, from the cocaine scare around 1914 to marijuana in the 1930s, heroin in the 1960s, and then on through crack, PCP, methamphetamine, and “club drugs” like Ecstasy, and in each case, racial and ethnic themes were central.

All of which brings us to the modern-day crises over opioids and fentanyl. I know there is a substantial literature on racial disparities in understandings of these issues, but I think a great deal remains to be said.

More broadly, the whole current affair cries out to be analyzed as a constructed social problem. The issue is not whether a very damaging social threat exists, as of course it does, but rather how people acknowledge and define it as a problem or a crisis. The same questions apply to anything that we perceive as a major social problem. Simply put, what sort of problem is it? How do we contextualize it? Any answer to that question determines solutions. In the case of opioids, we can agree with condemnations of corporate abuse and irresponsibility, but are there other framings, with the implied solutions? Is it a racial crisis, a crisis of Whiteness, of masculinity, of class, of economic and geographic inequalities?

At every stage, the core question is: how do we know what we think we know? What groups or agencies or activists have assumed the authority to undertake such interpretation, and how have they achieved that credibility? Are there signs of rivalry among these various players in how they frame the problem? How do these activists and agencies use language and rhetoric to understand it, to “make it mean”? Which messages resonate most successfully with media? When can we legitimately speak of a drug “epidemic” with all the biomedical implications of that term? When should we apply the loaded (and misleadingly precise-sounding) term “addict” to users?

How do those groups and agencies use statistics? To ask that question is absolutely not to challenge the undeniable fact that tens of thousands are dying each year from overdoses, but what debates and controversies exist concerning definitions, and just how we count such things? I’m sorry if I sound paranoid here, but in bygone years statistics for drug deaths and overdoses were notoriously subject to manipulation and outright deceit, and coroners’ reports in such cases were among the finest works of American creative fiction. That was certainly true with the methamphetamine issue as recently as the 1990s. “So the man’s system contained major amounts of heroin, cocaine, PCP, methamphetamine, marijuana, and alcohol, so this is another death that was clearly a direct consequence of methamphetamine abuse.” No, I am not making up that kind of example.

Let me make clear that I have no reason to suspect that the abuse of statistics is anything like as bad today, but reasonable people can always disagree on how they interpret such numbers.

Satanic Continuities

I have posted at Anxious Bench quite a few times on other social problem themes, including on cult and child abuse issues. Indeed, it is hard to understand QAnon except as a kind of giant vacuum cleaner sucking up the remains of the panics of the late twentieth century, including the ritual child abuse. Before that, QAnon certainly looks to older American nightmares over anti-Semitism and more particularly to anti-Catholic mythologies. From a scholarly point of view, QAnon is the gift that keeps on giving. Just do the research!

That QAnon example points to one major change that any kind of constructionist work would have to take account of, namely how much of the work of construction has moved online, which was certainly not true a quarter century ago. That certainly requires whole new skill-sets, but on the other hand I was one of the early people studying deviant Internet subcultures back in the 1990s, so this is not entirely new to me. Again, I have posted on related themes at this site.

This kind of déjà vu struck me forcefully a few years ago when a book I published a long while back suddenly returned to life. In 1992, I wrote a book called Intimate Enemies about the panics then sweeping Britain about alleged Satanic cults, also about child abuse and serial murder more generally. In 2015, the country had a vast national panic about the exact same things, when a squalid liar reported to police that as a child, he had been a victim of a supposed cult led by very powerful politicians, including the former Prime Minister Edward Heath. And of course the police believed every ridiculous and self-contradictory word, and went into full Stasi mode.

I wrote about this whole Westminster Pedophile affair at the time, stressing how precisely the whole affair was just repeating the lunacies of the early 1990s, but I was very surprised to hear that my old Intimate Enemies book was suddenly a hot item for journalists, and copies were being passed around like contraband. This whole story did underline that in studying social problems and panics, to quote Faulkner, the past is never dead: it’s not even past. Or alternatively, as they used to say about London buses, don’t worry if you miss one, there’ll be another coming along in ten minutes.

By the way, even the police now acknowledge that the whole Westminster affair was a baseless shambles from start to finish, and in 2019 the liar who was responsible for the whole farrago was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. But this is no time to gloat (hah!)

So will I go back to that former academic life, to Jenkins 1.0? Maybe – but my Lord, I have a lot of other things on my agenda first.

social constructionism

Previous Post

June 12, 2024

Saluting the Translators

Next Post

June 14, 2024 Going Home: Looking to the Past to Move Forward

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

I came to Jesus at night to ask about being born again. Who was this Pharisee and member of the Jewish ruling council?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Gamaliel Joseph of Arimathea Nicodemus Caiaphas