The awkward marriage of conservative religionists and Trump

[_aussieguy55]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tru ... mg00000009


Things are getting worse. Looks like Pence might be next President who argues evolution is a theory and gays can be cured.

[_beastie]

There's a lot of strawmen running around in flames on this thread, but I don't have time to try and put out all the fires, so I'll just try to summarize.

I was making one specific point about one specific subset of Trump voters. I was not generalizing about all Trump voters, nor was I stating that the one specific point I was speculating about represented the sum and total of why that subset voted for Trump. I know people are complex. I know we all feel justified and righteous in our thinking. But I also know that when people eager to accept an argument in particular, there are often background reasons for why they were so ripe for that argument.

As some posters on this thread tried to highlight for others, I'm talking specifically about why white conservative religionists - mainly white evangelicals - are such enthusiastic supporters of Trump. I know many people voted for him with while holding their noses, and I know some voted for him solely to get a conservative supreme court judge(s). I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the (largely) EV's who really are in bed with this guy. They've married him, so to speak, and it seems very awkward given his history.

Of course, EA is likely right in that much of their moral outrage at liberal candidates was a game. And that would explain those who held their noses to vote for him. But it doesn't explain the enthusiasm.

I believe that EVs who hold very conservative religious views have, indeed, felt scorned and even mocked by larger society, in particular, by intellectuals and the media.

Does anyone disagree with that point?

I can't imagine why anyone would disagree with that point, but feel free to expound if you do.

I think that this background issue perhaps made them ripe for the picking in terms of "don't trust intellectuals and don't trust the media" argument that Trump is particularly good at conveying.

I'm not saying this is the only reason they voted for Trump. I'm saying it may be a reason they were particularly susceptible to that argument.

Of course cable 24/7 news and the internet has created a general skepticism of media, anyway. But this is more than skepticism. It is outright eagerness to feel justified in disregarding just about anything the media has to say. And that is dangerous.

[_honorentheos]

beastie -

Your OP does raise an interesting question as to why evangelicals are so much more likely to continue to support Trump after everything else that's happened.

It seems it's interesting to a lot of people, and there are a few attempts to understand it out such as the thinkprogress article I linked to earlier. And for me there aren't valid reasons to try and assign motives to the demographic beyond the idea that what Trump had been doing honestly appeals to them for the reasons brought up in the thread. Namely -

Based on actual reporting and evidence, it still seems more likely that religious white evangelicals who are apparently Trump's base point to his following through on nominating a Supreme Court justice they believe to be conservative/pro-life. They see Islam as being at war with Christianity and Trump dropping bombs on Syria and ISIS seems to get their dicks hard. Again, according to the reporting. They see what Trump's done with his executive orders regarding travel bans and immigration and like it. They like his Religious Freedom EO. They seem to see Obamacare as forcing Christians to subsidize medical procedures and practices they believe are morally abhorent such as abortions. And they are reported as seeing him as one of the first Presidents who didn't just give lip service to evangelicals but is actually following through on his campaign promises.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear it discussed this morning on NPR as well following his Liberty University speech:

http://www.npr.org/2017/05/15/528419743 ... plishments

Some quotes that pertain:

JERRY FALWELL JR: He appointed more men and women of faith to his Cabinet than any president in recent memory. He bombed those in the Middle East who were persecuting and killing Christians.

MCCAMMON: Speaking with NPR after the commencement, Falwell discussed why conservative Christians voted for Trump in larger numbers than they had for Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain.

FALWELL JR: They said all the right things, but they never followed through. And I think evangelicals were tired of being burned. And they - instead of voting for another professional politician, they wanted somebody who was more authentic.

MCCAMMON: Falwell endorsed Trump early, back in January 2016, when many other evangelicals were still expressing concern about Trump's history of multiple marriages, past support for abortion rights and famously sharp tongue. Falwell says the focus should be on the issues not a particular politician's character.

FALWELL JR: Because (laughter) the ones that you think are so perfect and sinless, it's just you don't know about it. They're all just as bad. We all are, and that's the bottom line (laughter).

MCCAMMON: So far, he says Trump is following through on his promises to conservative voters as much as it's within his power to do so. Falwell expresses frustration with moderate Republicans, who he blames for standing in the way of repealing the Affordable Care Act.

FALWELL JR: I think he's going to keep pushing until he - you know, keep every single promise unless he's just completely prevented from doing so by his own party.

MCCAMMON: Falwell wields influence over a considerable number of evangelical students and their families. More than 18,000 people received degrees from Liberty this weekend alone. Among the crowd was John Johnson (ph), a software developer from Florida, who came to watch his daughter graduate. He says he hopes Trump can deliver on promises to cut health care costs, though he's not sure about some of the current proposals working their way through Congress.

JOHN JOHNSON: It's hard to really say. I think it's a little early. I've heard some things that I don't like. In fact, I've probably heard more that I don't like than I do. But I recognize it's early, and I hope they get it together.

MCCAMMON: Johnson voted for Trump and says, overall, he's pleased with his performance so far, though he has a few concerns about the abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey last week.

JOHNSON: That's not ideal, but, hey, I'm not going to sweat the details. I'm looking at the big picture. So I'm willing to take a little bit of, you know, less than ideal as long as we get the big picture.

MCCAMMON: Regardless of a big controversy in Washington, Johnson and other Trump supporters here say they're feeling optimistic that the big picture will eventually come into focus.

This still leaves me unsatisfied with the suggestion in the OP. I would be open to seeing some form of support for it but I'm not inclined to accept it based on speculation. In particular when it runs so close to the types of biases progressives thrive on (I suspect royalty checks from the movie Idiocracy are at an all-time high since November) that bypass actually thinking about the issue and evaluating evidence for or against it. It demands skepticism.

[_honorentheos]

I would add this: If it turns out Israel is the ally who has been undercut by Trump oversharing with Russia, we may find out what it takes to shake his support from evangelicals. I have a hard time believing that evangelical voters would see a Trump betrayal of Israel as a forgivable offense. If it is an Arab country, who knows.

[Guest]

I believe that EVs who hold very conservative religious views have, indeed, felt scorned and even mocked by larger society, in particular, by intellectuals and the media.

Does anyone disagree with that point?

I can't imagine why anyone would disagree with that point, but feel free to expound if you do.

I think that this background issue perhaps made them ripe for the picking in terms of "don't trust intellectuals and don't trust the media" argument that Trump is particularly good at conveying.

I definitely agree with that point. In fact, I could find nothing in your OP that did not make a great deal of sense to me.

I think that it too often happens when people hold irrational beliefs, the stupider the belief, and the more obvious it becomes just how irrational it is, the more they double or triple down on defending it rather than face or admit just how stupid it was for them to have persisted in believing it. This is especially true with religious, faith based convictions, I think.

[_Gunnar]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-russia-meeting-classified-information_us_591a1b39e4b07d5f6ba55159?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009


Things are getting worse. Looks like Pence might be next President who argues evolution is a theory and gays can be cured.

Of course, evolution really is a theory, according to the way scientists use the word. This does not diminish its value or credibility in the slightest. This has been explained often enough by so many that surely even Pence must have heard that by now. He doesn't care about that. All he cares about is that it disputes and invalidates certain misconceptions that Mike Pence refuses to seriously question. He neither understands nor wants to understand what evolution is really about or how it really works.

[_Some Schmo]

I believe that EVs who hold very conservative religious views have, indeed, felt scorned and even mocked by larger society, in particular, by intellectuals and the media.

Does anyone disagree with that point?

I can't imagine why anyone would disagree with that point, but feel free to expound if you do.

I think that this background issue perhaps made them ripe for the picking in terms of "don't trust intellectuals and don't trust the media" argument that Trump is particularly good at conveying.

I'm not saying this is the only reason they voted for Trump. I'm saying it may be a reason they were particularly susceptible to that argument.

Of course cable 24/7 news and the internet has created a general skepticism of media, anyway. But this is more than skepticism. It is outright eagerness to feel justified in disregarding just about anything the media has to say. And that is dangerous.

That's an interesting argument, beastie. There's no doubt that the right has been fostering anti-intellectualism for some time now.

I guess I'm just not convinced that the demo that feels indignant about those they consider "elites" is the same demo that fits your specific description. In other words, I don't think it's the EVs who were voting Drumpf out of a backlash to the establishment. I think the number of people who did that is relatively small. Most of Drumpf's supporters are hard right anyway.

[_beastie]

I do understand that EVs are pleased that Trump is attempting to make changes that align with their objectives. And of course they're going to vote hard right. But being pleased with a president’s attempts to enact some of your goals is different than being wildly enthusiastic about said president. They really love this guy. Why?

I speculate that some sort of emotional connection has taken place. But that’s what is odd. He’s not really a part of their tribe. He doesn’t share their values and appears to have only superficial interest or even understanding of religion. I would not be asking this question if we were discussing EVs’ adoration of Pence, for example.

So what is the emotional connection that has taken place? Some of it may be the outright xenophobia or implied bigotry, but surveys also show some EV discomfort with that. So what is it?

That’s what led me to think about the possibility that the emotional connection has taken place in one specific arena – almost loathing of experts and media. Here’s an article that discusses something similar.

http://religiondispatches.org/the-relig ... ive-facts/

As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administration run on the principle of “alternative facts,” it’s worth taking some time to ponder what seems to be contemporary conservative credulity. We should certainly be reminded of the term “truthiness” that Stephen Colbert invented in October 2005 to capture some of the pronouncements of the George with. Bush administration. As he explained then, truthiness was the truth that “comes from the gut,” not from actual facts—“the truth we want to exist,” that feels right.

Truthiness is certainly an ancestor of fake news and alternative facts. And the way fake news tends to get better reception among conservatives than liberals, even by a two-to-one margin, has also been recognized. (When one fake news creator was interviewed, he explained, “We’ve tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments, and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.”) What is it about Republicans that seems to make them more credulous to fake news than Democrats?

The answer to this question might have to do with the religious roots of today’s Republican Party in the Christian Right. Beginning with the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye, and continuing through church organizations such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, conservative Christians have helped reshape the Republican Party and its policies. Its “family values” positions on abortion, the sexual revolution, gender roles, pornography, and homosexuality have been heavily influenced by its conservative Christian theology.

Voters have continued to “sort” themselves over the last few decades, as political liberals became less religious and political conservatives more religious. Sociologists call this the “God gap” in partisan religiosity. Conservative white evangelicals have formed a hugely important and highly motivated core group of the Republican electorate for several cycles. In 2016, Donald Trump garnered 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, higher than Mitt Romney, John McCain, and even the born-again George with. Bush.

But it wasn’t Christianity, or religious faith itself in general, that helped make Republican voters more likely to be duped by fake news than their Democratic compatriots. (There were, and continue to be, lots of progressive or liberal people of faith.) Instead, susceptibility to fake news has its particular historical origin in Christian fundamentalism’s rejection of expert elites.

To see this connection, it bears recalling what it meant to be a Christian “fundamentalist” in the early 20th century. Christian fundamentalism was characterized in particular by its rejection of two theologically disturbing bodies of knowledge that emerged from the 19th century: the theory of evolution, and the historical-critical method of Bible scholarship. While mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches have had considerable success in coming to terms with these expert knowledge consensuses, Christian fundamentalism is defined primarily by its rejection of them.

Evolution, we remember, was perceived as a threat to the biblical account of creation in the Book of Genesis (at least, if read literally). It dethroned humans as the culmination of God’s specific acts of creation during six days approximately 6,000 years ago. It replaced this story with a less grand one of natural selection and random mutation across eons. And evolution also undermined the theologically important explanation for human and animal suffering, as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, believing that humans have always existed in their present form, while another 25 percent believe evolution was guided by God.)

The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. There were multiple authors and editors of scripture, scholars began to demonstrate, sometimes with incompatible stories and contradictory theologies. The New Testament’s gospels, this scholarship showed, were not composed shortly after Jesus’ death by his eyewitness disciples like Matthew and John. Rather, they were written accounts based on oral traditions and other now-lost writings, composed decades after Jesus’s death—with all the attendant problems of memory and record-keeping that entails.

Fundamentalist Christians rejected these accounts. But more importantly, fundamentalists critiqued the methods, assumptions, and institutions of the expert elites. Fundamentalists questioned the biologists’ and Bible scholars’ suspension of the question of God’s supernatural intervention. They rejected the secular university as a site of neutral science and objective scholarship. And they didn’t just question the ideas and conclusions of the secular world and its institutions of knowledge. In a form of resistance, they adapted modern institutions and technologies to create bodies of counter-expertise.

Christian fundamentalist Bible colleges and universities, publishers and bookstores, newspapers and magazines, radio and then television shows, museums and campus ministries, together formed a set of institutions that resisted elite, secular expert knowledge. Recognizing the power of expertise’s infrastructure, Christian fundamentalists created this counter-infrastructure to cultivate and curate its alternative forms of knowledge. This alternative knowledge—the forerunner of today’s alternative facts— took the form of creationism and an alternative Bible scholarship demonstrating the Bible’s inerrancy and traditional authorship.

This alternative educational and media ecosystem of knowledge was galvanized and mobilized when the Christian Right emerged in the late 1970s to influence the Republican Party. There were two long-term consequences for our fake news world. First, theologically and politically conservative Christians learned to distrust the proclamations of the supposedly neutral media establishment, just as they had grown to suspect the methods and conclusions of elite experts like scientists or historians. And second, they learned to seek the truth from alternative sources—whether a church sermon, Christian media (newspapers, books, radio or television shows), or a classroom in a Christian college.

The consequence is that theologically fundamentalist Christians have for years explained to themselves that what seems to be worldly wisdom and conclusions are really the results of conspiracies, biases, and misplaced human pride in academic, scientific, and journalist communities. This cognitive training to reject expert knowledge and to seek alternative, more amenable explanations has helped disarm the capacity for critical thinking and analysis.

In the following years, the areas of rejected expert knowledge has grown to include climate change, the efficacy of abstinence-only sex education, and even the supposed link between vaccinations and autism. One could make the argument that even issues that don’t appear to have any religious resonance at all—such as the efficacy of supply-side economic policies, or the idea that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction and ties to Al Qaeda—are likewise successful partly because of this conservative cognitive training in the rejection of mainstream media and the cultivation of other sources of information, like Fox News at first, but also now websites like Breitbart, 4chan, Infowars, and others.

The goal of “fake news” and “alternative facts” goes beyond providing different data. Their purpose is actually to destroy the notion that there could be impartial news and objective facts. Maria Bustillos calls this endgame “dismediation,” “a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels.”

It will rightly be noted that part of this phenomenon is only our shared human condition: our propensity to believe in the comforting things we want to be true rather than accept the tough things we don’t want to be true. And this is correct: we all are vulnerable to these ordinary processes of mental sifting and harmonization. We all suffer from confirmation bias, making it easy for us to uncritically accept ideas we already like, and to resist actual evidence counter to what we already believe.

While this is certainly true, it doesn’t explain the asymmetry of the situation in terms of fake news reception, or that asymmetry’s origin in Christian fundamentalism. It is conservative voters who are measurably more credulous to fake news sites. The origin story of that credulity in fundamentalism holds a similar imbalance.

The truth is that millions of non-fundamentalist Christians believe in evolution and the historical-critical method of Bible scholarship, and there are lots of practicing Christian scholars pursuing research in both those fields! But there are essentially no non-Christians who do “creation science” or believe in the literal Genesis account of creation, and there are essentially no non-Christian scholars who believe the Bible is inerrant and that the authors of the four Gospels (who never identify themselves) are the actual people Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

This is a highly controversial question because it begins to name that which must not be recognized in polite company: the asymmetrical polarization and extremism in America’s current political climate. That asymmetry was famously expressed by the bipartisan team of Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012), where they explained,

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, the Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.

It’s past time for us to consider the possibility that the God gap in partisan religiosity is linked to the asymmetry of whether and how voters consume fake news. Akin to William F. Buckley standing athwart history and yelling stop, the sister conservatism of Christian fundamentalism has stood athwart modern knowledge and yelled NO. In cultivating alternative sources and alternative ideas, Christian fundamentalists laid the ground for the fake news to come.

While this is not quite the same topic, I think it is relevant. I bolded the parts I found particularly relevant to this discussion.

EV have felt dismissed and scorned by secular news and experts. This is one of Trump's main (and most dangerous) shticks. Is this commonality enough to explain the emotional connection so many EVs have to this flagrant adulterer, liar, and braggart?

[_beastie]

That's an interesting argument, beastie. There's no doubt that the right has been fostering anti-intellectualism for some time now.

I guess I'm just not convinced that the demo that feels indignant about those they consider "elites" is the same demo that fits your specific description. In other words, I don't think it's the EVs who were voting Drumpf out of a backlash to the establishment. I think the number of people who did that is relatively small. Most of Drumpf's supporters are hard right anyway.

I'm not trying to explain why they voted for him. I'm trying to explain why they love him.

[_Some Schmo]

I'm not trying to explain why they voted for him. I'm trying to explain why they love him.

Up to this point, that's been a mystery, but I think it might be starting to wane. A couple (religious) conservative friends of mine expressed more disappointment in him today than I've ever heard from them. Anecdotal, true, but an interesting sea change from my perspective. Is it the weight of the drip drip drip of constant scandal, or was giving away classified information to the Russians the kicker on this particular day? Who knows. I don't pretend to understand their (or anyone else's) attachment to the guy in the first place. I considered him a fake the few snippets I saw him on the Apprentice years ago.

If I had to guess, it's not Drumpf himself, it's the idea of Trump they're attached to. It's the fantasy they've created for themselves about the guy that they're in love with, not the real guy. How could they love the real guy? It's like when you meet someone new and fall madly in love... right up till you get to know them. Until you know them, you've been romancing a fiction. They don't want to get to know Drumpf; they want to keep on loving Trump.

But I think the infatuation is starting to wear off a little for some of his less intractable supporters, perhaps, and the reality is setting in. At least, that's what I'm telling myself to get me through today.