I grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and my grandfathers were coal-miners and stone masons (bricklayers). During all of my formative years, I was proud of the fact that (1) I was born in the KEYSTONE STATE (actually, a Commonwealth!), because a keystone is what holds the other stones in place in the formation of a building archway:

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and (2) that my family’s blue-collar workers were “the backbone of America”–at least that is what we were always told, though it is skews the true history of America. Nevertheless, the identity of the people I grew up with, in the area I grew up, is that we were KEYSTONES and BACKBONES. In short, though we might not always be noticed, we were in fact necessary.

Then things began to change. Pennsylvania was no longer the second most populous state (behind New York)…it has now fallen to fifth (behind California, Texas, Florida, and New York). And coal mining and brick-laying and even steel-working are no longer held out as the core of a national economy that is now far more service-based and information-based. We are neither Keystone nor Backbone so much in Western Pennsylvania, and no one is any longer telling my people that they are necessary.

So along comes 2016, and the white people of my home area voted–overwhelmingly so, outside of Pittsburgh itself (which has moved fully into the information, service, and banking arenas)–for Donald Trump because he managed to embody their frustration and told them that they mattered (once again).

Face it: People want to Matter.

Let me be clear–I don’t believe that people mattering is a zero-sum game. And I don’t believe that the white people of Western Pennsylvania matter more than anyone else on the face of the earth. But I do have a heart for what it feels like to go from being a KEYSTONE and a BACKBONE to … nothin’ special at best, and an enemy of progress at worst.

One of the tenets of the academic study of religion is the recognition that people want to belong to something bigger than they are as individuals, but in which they individually play a crucial role…that each adherent matters.

Today’s saint, Vigilius, was a bishop who knew and worked with a lot of other important religious people. So far so good. But then a bunch of those others started getting killed by unbelievers (you know–infidels, heathens, Arians, whomever) and suddenly: What is a bishop compared to a martyr/saint? Vigilius felt as though his life didn’t mean anything special any longer. Butler describes Vigilius’ emotional state with the oxymoron, “holy envy.”

In the end, he got his wish–Vigilius was “murdered by a shower of stones” cast by “a troop of infidel peasants.” Ta-da–he got to matter, but at the expense of his earthly existence.

Maybe we need to pay attention to the phenomenon of what happens to people who start out feeling vital and important and then feel as though they are no longer anything “special”–surely there must be an alternative to either being stoned by a troop of peasants or voting for someone so incredibly dangerous!