Going down the list, we see that Ashkenazi Jews are wealthy. No surprise here.
The Times also wants to believe that Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) has been disproved by the Pew center’s data:
Overall, Protestants, who together are the country’s largest religious group, are poorer than average and poorer than Catholics. That stands in contrast to the long history, made famous by Max Weber, of Protestant nations generally being richer than Catholic nations.
Again, no. The mainline Protestant denominations that once composed the WASP elite, and are still overwhelmingly Northern European in makeup, are wealthier than Catholics. Episcopalians are just below Jews (and Hindus). The Protestant denominations that fall below the poverty line are the Baptists and Pentecostals, which attract rural Whites and Blacks; the latter, no doubt, has a great effect in bringing down the average.
Moreover, as the Pew Center’s 2010 report showed, as Hispanics remain in America, they generally lose their Catholic faith and become either more secular or evangelical. This coincides with the much-noted tendency of generations of Hispanics to become more socially dysfunctional as they spend more time in America (“downward assimilation”). This trend certainly puts downward pressure on the less WASPy Protestant denominations.
Overall, it’s difficult to get a read on the socioeconomic status of White Catholics, since somewhere on the order of a quarter to a third of Catholics in America are Hispanic.
