Hell, man, there are still people voting for Republicans because they think they’ll lower the deficit.
I am a religious tourist. I enjoy going to religious services, and have been to a wide variety of them. I’ve been to that kind of Christian service. But i think that’s a minority or Christian Church services. Many more preach love and/or faith than preach hatred.
Then those aren’t right wing, and so aren’t the ones being talked about; hate is the essence of the Right. And wouldn’t be considered “Christian” by the people running the country or their supporters; people who call empathy a “sin” aren’t exactly big on warm and fuzzy sermons.
When you said:
That implied that all religion was. But I believe you clarified what you meant in later posts.
Years ago, one of our consderpatives, don’t remember the name, complained that he mistrusted all news media because they never listed the Who? What? Where? When? How? of a certain news topic. I replied he could internet search any topic and consult more than one news outlet for those particulars.
I showed him an example. I posted a current news topic (at the time), posted the source of two news sites, and how each one detailed the Who? What? Where? When? How? of that topic.
On another thread, he complained about the news media again, this time saying “only two sites show the Who? What? Where? When? How?” of a news item. Head, meet desk.
Obviously this individual isn’t really interested in knowing things; they’re doing a certain kind of conservative performance that involves discrediting all non-approved media. The actual thing they’re complaining about is that the cable news media oligopoly has a few outlets that don’t blast conservative propaganda 24x7. To them, that equals 24x7 liberal propaganda. The performance is to howl about “bias in the meeeeeedia” while pretending that Fox doesn’t exist, Newsmax doesn’t exist, Ben Shapiro doesn’t exist, even neutral outets like The Economist don’t exist.
Funny story, but a long time ago before I knew better, my dad was on one of his rants about “I just want a neutral source of news.” I didn’t realize what he meant was “I wish every news outlet except Fox would disappear.” I had a stack of issues of The Atlantic and The Economist (both of which are centrish, but right-tilted in different ways) and I handed him a few. Next time I saw him, I asked how he liked unbiased news, and he said he didn’t really understand it.
You have to understand that conservatives do not see journalism as a process of surfacing and grappling with bias. They believe there is an objective unbiased reality, and that objective and unbiased reporting would favor the conservative cause, and any outlet not satisfying that expectation is “bias”. I’ve even talked to kids on my street in households where Fox is blasting 16x7. Sometimes they talk about current events because it’s always in the background, just as entertainment and gossip. If I share any information that differs from the propaganda line, they just laugh “oh, that’s just bias”. Kids as young as 10. People just don’t understand how cooked we are.
Have they all left because they’re getting $3.50 an hour as Klu Klux ICE Agents…?
Yes, I know you clarified this, but your commentary on religion, conservatives, and religious conservatives has always been impressionistic and poorly grounded in fact. It’s useful because most people have a blind spot for your line of thinking, but that doesn’t say that your characterizations are accurate. Let’s go to Pew:
Here’s a chart by religious affiliation:
Evangelical Protestants, however high profile they are in politics, have always been less than 50% of the US Christian faith. Here’s a table based on the above chart:
| 2007 | 2014 | 2023-24 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evangelical Protestant | 26 | 25 | 23 |
| Catholic | 24 | 21 | 19 |
| Mainline Protestant | 18 | 15 | 11 |
| Historically Black Protestant | 7 | 6 | 5 |
| Morman | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Orthodox | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 78 | 70 | 61 |
| Evangelical Protestant share | 0.33 | 0.36 | 0.38 |
So we’re now talking about 38% of Christians at most who follow Der’s shtick and I trust @puzzlegal will tell us that most (not all) Evangelical churches emphasize the positive. Sure, the positive can have some fairly toxic undertones, but currently there’s a soft cap of 38% of all Christians.
Now many Evangelicals talk like their form of Christianity (sometimes largely heretical from an early Christian perspective - I’m thinking of the Rapture) is the one true faith. But that doesn’t change the shares.
Also, women have consistently been more religious than men in the US, though the gap is narrowing.
I’m honestly not sure how I would reshape Der’s presentation to make it fact-consistent. Put another way, it’s a challenge to reconcile political Christian conservatism (which I agree is a thing) with the Pew figures.
More from Pew: evidence of the power of prayer:
So the religious trend Republican, at least among whites. Among black people, not so much. Also:
Political ideology: The share of self-described political liberals who identify as Christians has fallen 25 percentage points since 2007, from 62% to 37%. Among self-described conservatives, the Christian share has declined 7 points, from 89% to 82%.
Yikes. Let’s look at partisanship by denomination:
I’m not sure how to summarize that, except for the well-known evangelical tendencies towards the GOP. There’s a lot of variation overall, though the religious certainly lean Republican.
It doesn’t really matter. They are both the ones with all the power, and the people who define the image of what American Christianity is. Other Christians are either ignored, or assumed to believe exactly the same even when they say otherwise. We saw that here during the debate over same sex marriage; the “religious position on the issue” was equated with the rightwing Evangelical Protestant one, and even when members of other religions said otherwise they were simply ignored and talked over.
It’s the Evangelical Protestant Right who own the “brand” of religion in the US. The opinions of other religious sects aren’t even acknowledged as existing, much less taken seriously.
Both the Catholics and the Mormons had essentially the same position on same sex marriage as the evangelical Christians. I think the Catholics really led the charge against abortion. “Evangelical” covers a lot of ground, and the evangelical churches don’t mind in lockstep on political issues. I would say that the three churches that have the most political power in the US are the southern Baptists, the Catholics, and the Mormons, because they are large and each speaks with a single voice. The individual mega-churches are strange, and tend to lean conservative, but there are a lot of them, and each has its own leadership with its own agenda. And no one mega-church is large enough to have significant political clout, except maybe locally.
Well yeah, which is why I’ve recently given you a pass with the inaccuracies: I often mumble Mutatis Mutandis and move on.
Nonetheless: Evangelical conservatives are a minority with American Christianity, and are but one interest group among many within the American conservative coalition. For many years, the Romneys of the country held the reins and passed business friendly legislation while tossing red meat to rabid dogs at election time. Trump flipped the table, governing on the basis of rabble-friendly cruelty, while keeping big conservo-biz happy with tax cuts and regulations that get little airplay on the news. Now the Leopards are turning on the donor class, though the latter haven’t quite grasped that.
Sure, but I find their members effective stances on mass deportation to be more interesting. This doesn’t reduce spending, doesn’t reduce crime, and isn’t about jobs. The cruelty is the point in a way very much at odds with traditional Christianity. Evangelical may cover a lot of ground, but the 70% support that it provides Republicans is very high demographically. (Mormans are at 73% which sort of screws up my story given the internationalism of that sect, but their low numbers make this a smaller puzzle.)
Remember: the GOP handed out 2 placards during their 2024 convention. One was MAGA related; the other said, “Mass Deportation Now!” It was their big promotional item.
When i was canvassing, the anti-immigrant people i spoke with weren’t religious. Are you saying that American churches have become anti-immigrant? Or that maga voters are?
Reportedly, there are congregations complaining that Jesus was too woke.
The Catholic church pushed back on Trump’s opposition to immigration. Catholics support for the Republican party is roughly in line with the rest of the country. Not so much from Evangelicals, with some exceptions. You can see it in this chart: white evangelical Protestants follow, “Hate thy neighbor: they don’t look like me”, reasoning, while white Catholics and mainline Christians are closer to 50%. The American average (in light grey) is below that though.
Judging from the chart, the true Samaritans are the religiously unaffiliated.
No, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this.
ETA: Atamasama: Well the contrast between religiously unaffiliated attitudes towards the stranger - a sympathetic character in ancient sources - and self-identified Christians is striking. We’re discussing 40 point gaps here relative to white evangelical Protestants.
“Cool story bro.”
I guess that’s the only legitimate response?
I didn’t leave, per se. I just came to my senses. Part of it was the influence that this place had on my thinking, leading up to the Iraq War I was so certain that we were doing the right thing, and I had people who were supposed to know what was going on telling me that it was the right thing to do. I fought awfully hard from that position, but each time someone said something that didn’t quite fit I found myself questioning my position. Sure enough, I had wasted a lot of time trying to defend the indefensible. And then I found myself agreeing more and more with Obama, and then everyone I used to know joined a cult led by a truly detestable person and they started to say and do detestable things.
I was once one of the leading conservatives here. Now I’m only slightly to the right of Lenin, though my thoughts now are still colored by what I used to be, which makes my opinions somewhat more nuanced on occasion.
So I didn’t leave. I evolved. Such things are possible, if you allow them to happen. But because of that, I felt that perhaps I didn’t fit in quite the way I used to, because now I was in the awkward spot of having to either defend myself from what I had said or denounce myself, something I’m not too proud to do but still not something I find terribly appealing.
So I still pop in here on occasion. I typically avoid politics for the reasons stated above, but that’s not to say that I don’t still express them. In some ways I’m as combative as I ever was, but in other ways I’ve very much mellowed with age.
You were one of the board conservatives who explained (actual conservative) positions in a reasonable way. And got me to rethink some of my positions.
The ones who clung onto the GOP/right-wing tribe no matter what as it swept ever rightward until it became a full-on cult are never going to be able to have a rational discussion about their positions because reason had nothing to do with them.
You don’t have to do either. If someone brings up the past, just say you don’t believe those things anymore. If they don’t drop it they’re an asshole.
There’s no need to attack your past self anymore than you need to erase your footsteps behind you.
I disagree with a lot of the things I used to think in the past but I don’t feel the need to dig up the past and yell at it. Just be who you are today.