RE: The Religious Void
January 7, 2021 at 11:04 am
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2021 at 11:17 am by The Grand Nudger.)
One of the biggest issues with this comparison is, ofc, that religious people do not necessarily see that there is any difference between the religious and the secular (or that there should be, for that matter). It's not an off on either or proposition. They have beliefs about the sacred that unite them into a moral community - full stop. More like a set of tools that they use more or less depending on their aims and how effective those tools have been at a given moment.
If christians had succeeded in creating a groundswell of consequential belief through evangelism, they'd never have needed to attempt to capture government. There was an attempt to do so, and religiosity in the in group went up - but outside of that the same period saw the rise of the nones and the attached perception of the religious that they were "losing their country".
-if we really wanted to do a deep dive, it's not at all difficult to see how the various strands of propaganda that we call trumpism came to service the communities that would form it's base. Why common cause was made between white supremacists, evangelical christians, and 1%ers. For the evangelicals part, they found themselves as kingmaker (a stunning reversal of perceived fortune) and without that normalizing and credible block a coalition of overt racists and rich people weren't going to win any us elections. There was plenty of free market scientific racist crossover between the groups already, obvs, having been primed in the obama years. The real tragedy (for the us and for christianity) is how utterly predictable and right on the surface all of this had been. It was impossible not to see it for any reason other than not wanting to.
Plenty of us still don't.
If christians had succeeded in creating a groundswell of consequential belief through evangelism, they'd never have needed to attempt to capture government. There was an attempt to do so, and religiosity in the in group went up - but outside of that the same period saw the rise of the nones and the attached perception of the religious that they were "losing their country".
-if we really wanted to do a deep dive, it's not at all difficult to see how the various strands of propaganda that we call trumpism came to service the communities that would form it's base. Why common cause was made between white supremacists, evangelical christians, and 1%ers. For the evangelicals part, they found themselves as kingmaker (a stunning reversal of perceived fortune) and without that normalizing and credible block a coalition of overt racists and rich people weren't going to win any us elections. There was plenty of free market scientific racist crossover between the groups already, obvs, having been primed in the obama years. The real tragedy (for the us and for christianity) is how utterly predictable and right on the surface all of this had been. It was impossible not to see it for any reason other than not wanting to.
Plenty of us still don't.
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