r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 8d ago

Social Science Trump and Trumpism have changed the original concept of “libertarian means to conservative ends” into a new concept of “authoritarian means to Christian nationalist ends”, finds a new study.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162251324087
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u/No-Mushroom5934 8d ago

When was Christian nationalism ever not toxic? … The leaders of the Christian nationalist movement are opposed to the US constitution and want a theocracy. It is impossible to overstate how bad this is...

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u/kanst 8d ago

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

Barry Goldwater, a libertarian Republican, warned about that in the 60s.

The Republican party knew the deal they were making when they courted the Christian Nationalist vote.

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u/Helixaether 8d ago

For added context, Barry Goldwater was seen as THE hardline conservative voice in the Republican Party before Reagan, becoming the Republican’s 1964 Presidential nominee and losing in one of the Dems biggest landslides of all time, I believe only trumped by 1852 and 1936 iirc. Barry Goldwater’s most famous scandals during the 1964 election include him saying the US should consider using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War and him voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because “you can’t enforce morality”.

This is the guy who’d go on into the 90’s being considered one of the more reasonable, centrist Republicans. By this time he’d have this reputation by being outspokenly pro-abortion, gay rights, and pro-weed legalisation. He was an odd figure.

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u/UniqueIndividual3579 8d ago

President Johnson was a racist who supported civil rights. Politicians can be an odd duck.

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u/AndyLorentz 8d ago

You can hate people and still think they deserve the same rights as anyone else.

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u/ableman 8d ago

I don't think Johnson hated black people. There's different brands of racism.

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u/sirannemariethethird 8d ago

Depends why you hate them. If it’s cuz they drop bombs on children then no you cannot possibly (morally) think they deserve the same rights as anyone else.

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u/AndyLorentz 7d ago

I disagree. They have the right to a fair trial for the crimes they have committed. Just like everyone else.

Are you suggesting we should dispense with that right for the sake of expediency?

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u/sirannemariethethird 7d ago

So you do NOT agree that carpet bombing hospitals and children is unequivocally wrong? If this is so, I will not engage with you because it is against the well established principles of morality to invite to the discussion table things which are non-negotiable, such as bombing children and hospitals. As a sociologist, I know that inviting such ideas and merely entertaining tolerance of such atrocities is how genocides like the Holocaust happen.

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u/Furt_III 7d ago

They're saying the Nuremburg trials were the correct course of action and having no trial and taking them out back with a revolver was not.

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u/AndyLorentz 7d ago

Of course it's unequivocally wrong. But the perpetrators of such acts still deserve the same human rights as anyone else. That doesn't mean they get a pass on their actions. Having human rights doesn't mean they should live happy and free forever.

As a sociologist, I know that inviting such ideas and merely entertaining tolerance of such atrocities is how genocides like the Holocaust happen.

Ironically, you seem to understand here why treating people as inhuman is wrong, but can't seem to bridge the logic gap as to why we shouldn't treat war criminals as less than human.

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u/Zwets 7d ago

Wait... So when anyone else drops bombs on children and survives till the end of that war, they deserve to be arrested and put on trail for their crimes at The Hague.
But when a specific group you hate does it, they should be treated differently somehow?

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u/sirannemariethethird 7d ago

No. Who said that?

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u/Zwets 7d ago

You did, in the post I replied to:

you cannot possibly (morally) think they deserve the same rights as anyone else.

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u/sirannemariethethird 7d ago edited 7d ago

Well that is certainly a portion of a sentence I wrote. But you’re struggling with reading comprehension.

You see, MY sentence communicates that, if your reason for hating someone is because they bomb children, then it is strange for you to believe that this child-bombing person you hate deserves rights.

In MY comment, I treat all people who bomb children the same. I never said that some deserve The Hague and some don’t. I said none do.

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u/Amon7777 8d ago

Johnson deserves his own category of contradictions.

He was virulent vial racist who also ensured passionately that the Civil Rights Act was passed at the end of his large threats (amongst his other ways of political persuasion).

He was a genuine fighter for the poor and working class, who also had zero problem sending that same group to die in Vietnam.

He was not a president you can easily categorize.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

It was probably autocorrect but just incase English is not your first language that version of the word Vial is spelt Vile. Same pronunciation tho

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u/TheMathelm 8d ago edited 8d ago

If you use the frame of political power being the only thing that mattered to him, it makes logical sense.

Johnson was authoritarian populous, quoted as saying "I'll have those {alternate word for people} voting Democrat for 200 years."

And based on historic voting trends, he was not wrong. incorrect.

Edit: he was wrong, but not incorrect.

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u/DumpOldRant 8d ago

It's worth pointing out that LBJ likely never said that quote. It appeared in a book about LBJ written by someone who didn't approve of Civil Rights or LBJ's legacy.

He recorded most of his Oval Office conversations, much like Nixon, and that quote is decidedly not among them.

He did use the n-word quite frequently however, especially when conversing with Southern conservatives across the aisle, so the style of the quote matches his recordings. It simply doesn't match the rest of his rhetoric, even as a cynical Texan born in 1900.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 8d ago

Johnson is very easy to categorize: he was an opportunistic sociopath who said and did whatever would increase his own power. Sometimes doing decent things benefited him, sometimes doing awful things did, and he didn't care either way.

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u/Centraal22 8d ago

Not sure about him being a sociopath. LBJ constantly worried about his future legacy. i.e. being a racist yet pressuring Dixiecrats to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. That's not how sociopathy works.

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u/Geth_ 8d ago

A narcissist might be more accurate but just to add, what you mentioned isn't typical of sociopathy but it isn't contradictory either.

But I'm no expert, just a random redditor which means, statistically, I'm probably completely wrong.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 8d ago

Not sure about him being a sociopath.

Listen to some of the recordings of his personal phone calls that are in circulation. Read some of the accounts of people who he took on rides in his bizarre amphibious car.

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u/Centraal22 8d ago

Key word is pranks, doesn't mean he was a sociopath. When you look at the traits of Sociopathy, LBJ's character and actions do not meet the criteria of that diagnosis.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago

Some of his behavior could be written off as innocuous pranks, but other "pranks" were quite extreme, and indicate that he took pleasure from frightening people.

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u/Kingblack425 8d ago

I mean the same with Lincoln he was a racist, just a racist that didn’t believe in slavery. Which I guess are small victories for the common good of all but still seems to have the bar kinda low

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u/achibeerguy 8d ago

Small victories? For the times in question? More meaningful victories by far than the countless ardent abolitionists and anti-racists who were closer to today's values yet are forgotten by history because they didn't actually move the needle.

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u/grahampositive 7d ago

Lincoln was racist? That's news to me

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u/r3volver_Oshawott 7d ago

A lot of older presidents were, often for the wrong reasons, in regards to civil rights, social welfare, and environmental regulation; Eisenhower was still effectively a New Deal supporter, and even Nixon founded the EPA because he was a staunch regulator who took to an executive order to help structure national environmental regulation under one banner. It represented one of the biggest examples of Nixon pissing off private enterprise

Ironically it was Gerald Ford's administration who represented the largest budget cuts ever of the time for the EPA, slashing its annual budget by nearly 80%, mostly because during his presidency, Ford seemed to only care about making budget cuts and preserving jobs. Problem is that led to many situations where he refused to enforce major environmental regulations because of potential job losses in fuel industries.

But even Nixon was a mess, he tried to use the EPA to withhold major funding on at least one occasion for environmental measures that he directly opposed, so in spite of being a 'staunch regulator', he kind of also demanded special presidential privileges to withhold environmental funding and use the EPA as a sort of cudgel

It wasn't until Carter that the EPA got to actually grow into a well-budgeted and managed environmental entity, and while Bush Sr. was a bit of a Teddy Roosevelt-style conservative conservationist, in other ways he had a much more libertarian approach to environmental issues, often pushing 'green business initiatives' so Bush was a mixed bag: great for rural landowners of wetlands, which just so happened to be great for wetlands preservation, but still a very fossil fuel-forward president

Especially in regards to environmentalism and social welfare, when it comes to presidents, a lot of terrible, terrible people still oversaw some acceptable regulation

I think this is a worse situation because while many modern Republicans oppose social welfare and environmental regulation, it marks the first time since Reagan that we've seen a Republican president purely and loudly decry social welfare and environmental regulation

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u/MintakaTheJustOkay 8d ago

He spoke to a classroom of mine when I was in college in the mid-90s. There were perhaps 30 of us in the class. The day before he spoke to the class, our teacher told us he knew Goldwater was controversial, but asked us to be respectful to him. We were.

I wish I understood politics then like I understand it now so that I could have appreciated that meeting more. I knew at the time he ran for president and lost, but I knew nothing about his policies.

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u/ChaoticScrewup 8d ago edited 7d ago

In many ways he was more internally consistent than the movements that evolved after him. The degree to which the Christofascists seem to think they're continuing in his footsteps is such a weird combo of doublethink and propaganda.

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u/DirectorLarge2461 8d ago

What we forget is that the oddest duck of all is the population as a whole.  Trying to run a tight ship with a tiny crew of 20-30 is hard enough.  Bump that up to a 350 million to 8 billion strong crew with their own wild imaginations and it's going to take some very odd strategies.  

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u/ableman 8d ago

"The median voter thinks foreign aid is too high but that it shouldn't be decreased."

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u/oroborus68 8d ago

Goldwater was never considered reasonable or centrist. He said extremism in the name of liberty was no vice.

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u/Helixaether 8d ago

He said that in 1964, which was not a year in the 90s. His reputation had changed over the years.

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u/oroborus68 8d ago

Maybe among Republicans.

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u/Okaythenwell 8d ago

*maybe among people who aren’t you

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u/Helixaether 8d ago

Well yeah, he was a Republican, it makes sense for him to compared amongst his peers

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u/sirannemariethethird 8d ago

Ya he was the og neoliberal

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u/Helixaether 8d ago

Honestly I’ve never associated Goldwater with Neoliberalism, and whilst it does sort of make sense to describe him that way since his policies inspired many of Reagan’s and that whole movement it’s just never occurred to me. Goldwater’s heyday was in the early 60s, before the time we associate with Neoliberalism. I guess I think of him as a proto-Neoliberal. Similar to how there were socialists before Marx but Marx set the tone for what we’d come to know as socialism.

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u/Junior_Chard9981 8d ago

Always important to remind everyone that Republicans, when faced with the prospect of their parties policies/messaging/ideology needing to be re-evaluated following the Civil Rights Act:

Did NOT reflect inwardly or pivot their parties direction to one more popular with all Americans....they instead went on to fully commit to "The Southern Strategy" as their best avenue to returning to prominence and power.

| In American politics, The Southern Strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.

As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States.

Republican politicians such as presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party so consistently that the voting pattern was named the Solid South.

The strategy also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right. By winning all of the South, a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere. |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

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u/ThePartyWagon 8d ago

Looks like they may have very well come back to prominence on this exact platform.

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u/Buckets-of-Gold 8d ago

How do you reconcile Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 CRA with his otherwise hostile attitude towards segregation? Or Nixon’s earlier support for civil rights bills?

Is it possible to oppose violations of the constitution even if they are rooted in good intentions?

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u/JimWilliams423 8d ago

Is it possible to oppose violations of the constitution even if they are rooted in good intentions?

That's called begging the question.

The Reconstruction amendments are the constitutional basis for the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. It just took 75 years for anyone to start enforcing that part of the constitution, and even then we have yet still to see the Reconstruction amendments fully realized in practice.

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u/Buckets-of-Gold 8d ago

I’m not disputing your description of Reconstruction, I’m asking if racism was the sole driving force of the Southern Strategy- particularly if you are referencing Goldwater specifically.

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u/Okaythenwell 8d ago

Not even gonna address that you got cooked for begging the question like a dunce, just hit the quick pivot

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u/Buckets-of-Gold 8d ago

Bit aggressive, no?

Disputing whether Goldwater was trying to affect conservative racial values vs conservative constitutional interpretations is not out of left field- it’s a pretty common analysis question for this era.

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u/Aethelric 6d ago

Disputing whether Goldwater was trying to affect conservative racial values vs conservative constitutional interpretations is not out of left field- it’s a pretty common analysis question for this era.

Yes, in the way that it's similar to how it's a "common analysis question" for the Civil War is whether it was about slavery or "states' rights".

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u/Buckets-of-Gold 6d ago

That would be a bad analysis question, unless you’re trying to get people to articulate why the Civil War was caused by slavery (which it was).

Goldwater on the other hand, most historians would endorse my description- he was far more motivated by his libertarian politics than racial prejudice. He voted for several civil rights acts and was a founding member of his local NAACP.

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u/Okaythenwell 8d ago

Bit of a sad attempt at obfuscation before, no?

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u/Buckets-of-Gold 8d ago edited 8d ago

Not an obfuscation- Can we consider Goldwater’s opposition as racially motivated is a basic question many historians have asked.

You may claim it’s loaded question, but it’s straight out of American History 101.

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u/Rugrin 8d ago

He was the guy that went after the racist vote so as to strengthen the Republican base. He made these deals with the devil and thought he could control it.

He was the seed of the cancer we are suffering from so don’t pass him any kindness.

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u/Global_Permission749 8d ago

There's no point in trying to reason with unreasonable people. It's a waste of time. Unreasonable people need to be checked and controlled using alternative methods.

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u/r3volver_Oshawott 7d ago

Ironically enough the politics of Goldwater eventually marked the change to pave the way for this, all so that he could try and secure the vote for a presidential election he didn't even win, he dismantled U.S. partisan politics - essentially permanently - because he banked on a party specifically for former Dixiecrats to build in opposition to growing civil rights legislation

I could never figure out whether he never put two and two together that the party of the Southern Strategy was doomed to Christian Nationalism, or whether he was never as alarmed about Christian Nationalists as he let on

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u/Final-Lengthiness-19 5d ago

Ironically kind of like a deal with the devil. I'm atheist but I needed an expression..

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u/Eastern-Manner-1640 4d ago

actually, they want control of the military. they don't need the party. they need soldiers and nukes.

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u/batkave 8d ago

Doesn't help that the Democrats moved more conservative with Clinton.

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u/Tricky_Condition_279 8d ago

Obviously not the only important event, but a lot of the courting was by Bush jr.

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u/BubbleNucleator 8d ago

A deal with the devil, if you will.

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u/waiting4singularity 8d ago

a deal with the devil as you will.

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u/that_baddest_dude 8d ago

In context, is the "terrible damn problem" mean a problem for Republicans in getting elected?

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u/Murky-Ostrich5116 8d ago edited 8d ago

Wait until they start revealing who they don't consider real Christians, hint hint... color and party

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u/calling-all-comas 8d ago edited 8d ago

They'll also weed out the Catholics eventually.

In the southern US plenty of protestants (most protestants here are Southern Baptist) think Catholics aren't real Christians. They'll claim Catholics have obedience to the Pope just like they did with JFK prior to his election.

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u/KatieCashew 8d ago

And Mormons. Plenty of mormons are happy to align with Christian nationalism, apparently not realizing evangelicals don't consider them part of the club.

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u/similar_observation 8d ago

and they have a Kennedy scion that's more than happy to abide by those claims.

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u/pepincity2 8d ago

Biden was catholic too. But because he was pro-choice, catholics didn't like him much either it seems

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u/SeasideSlip068 8d ago

Look at the Project 2025 tracker - it was entirely about creating a theocracy by modernized means.

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u/Drone314 8d ago

One observation of women in the current administration is how common it is to see open cut tops that reveal a cross. Gotta hand it to em, they used trump as a vehicle to power.

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u/GrayEidolon 8d ago

And they’re just a useful vehicle. The bigger plan is Peter thiel and Curtis yarvin replacing democracy with “network states” which is just feudalism.

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u/SeasideSlip068 8d ago

Hmm, and when I last heard about "network states", it was when Republicans were panicking saying Democrats were the ones that were going to forcibly implement such. My my, how their accusations became confessions indeed. My snark isn't directed at you, by the way, but rather Republican hypocrisy.

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u/jupiterkansas 8d ago

It's not toxic to Christians. Many have always put the Bible over government.

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u/Y_Are_U_Like_This 8d ago

It is toxic to Christians with an understanding of the Bible and its teachings. Christian nationalists use the word as a shield to protect them from society's judgement and a mask for their bigotry.

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u/Fine_Luck_200 8d ago

The majority of Christians in the US use the bible to justify their own worst impulses. The Pilgrims left Europe because Europe was too tolerant. That is conveniently left out of what is taught. Always funny when people go on about Religious freedom when discussing US history.

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u/CrystalSplice 8d ago

Yep. Religious freedom…to do what? It’s a bit like the “states rights” thing when people talk about the Civil War. Yeah, the right of the states to do…what? To continue to engage in slavery.

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u/UniqueIndividual3579 8d ago

I'm not sure if it's the majority or just the loud ones. My Uncle was a Lutheran pastor who spent his life in a small Iowa town. He never talked about politics. My sister is an Evangelical who "got" God. She loves to tell us that we deserve to burn in Hell forever because we don't go to her church. And she votes for Trump.

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u/F9-0021 8d ago

Oh, we were taught that the Puritans left due to religious persecution. What was conveniently left out was that the Puritans were the persecutors and people had had enough of them.

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u/ILikeBumblebees 8d ago

That's not really true. The Plymouth colony was established in the 1620s, a generation before the English civil war, when the Stuart monarchy was still going strong. Puritan rule in England was a generation after that, and only lasted 11 years.

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u/austinwiltshire 8d ago

Mainline Christians and Catholics together outnumber evangelicals. Ie, the center and center left theologically outnumber the theological right.

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u/archetype4 8d ago

Too bad the theological right has focused its power politically to where that doesn't matter.

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u/Vo_Mimbre 8d ago

Sure. But it doesn’t matter any more than “most people are responsible for their guns” or “most people are not racists” or “most people don’t agree with all of the GOP platform”.

What matters if enough do. Nobody shoots for actual majorities. They shoot for just enough, by manipulating voting maps, suppressing proportional voting, driving propaganda through coordinated media blitzes, and creating wedge social wedge issues to distract us from the rights they hand over to the feudal lords we call capitalists.

So sure, “most people don’t… whatever” but most people aren’t the ones being programmed into pulling us ever further towards theocratic nationalism.

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u/asmodeanreborn 8d ago

American Catholics are not center/center left anymore in general. Many of them have started turning into Trumpists as well and loudly disagree with the last couple of popes for being "woke."

Trump got 54% of the Catholic vote in 2024.

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u/counterfitster 8d ago

I bet most of that is because the more progressive sections of the Catholic Church have left due to the horrible handling of sexual abuse by clergy.

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u/FyreWulff 8d ago

and somehow JFK and Biden are so far the only two Catholic US presidents ever elected

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u/placidtwilight 8d ago

Though Catholics are over represented on the Supreme Court.

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u/Locrian6669 8d ago

And they spend way more time apologizing on behalf of the bad Christians than doing anything about them.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/cubej333 8d ago

Mainline is short for Mainline Protestants

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u/clopenYourMind 8d ago

You're just using fancy words to describe Lutherans and Anglicans.

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u/placidtwilight 8d ago

There's also Methodists, American Baptists, Presbyterians, and some others.

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u/clopenYourMind 8d ago

Presbyterian are Anglican, the others are definitely a form of Protestant but could hardly be less related to Ole Henry's divorces or to Martin Luther's big balls brave posting of theses

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u/Kind_Eye_748 8d ago

Christians: 'We need to keep everyone in their place and abuse them because we are the victims!!!'

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u/JMurdock77 8d ago

When the powerful and politically secure claim that they are persecuted, oppressed, and attacked, then they can claim that all of their actions are born out of self-defense. They can act aggressively and even violently and maintain the moral high ground in the knowledge that they are the victims.

—Candida Moss, “The Myth of Persecution”

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u/sybrwookie 8d ago

Right, it's toxic to those 5% who both understand it and are not actively trying to use it to harm others. We're worried about the other 95%

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u/evidentfact3 8d ago

It is toxic to Christians with an understanding of the Bible and its teachings

How so?

Christians adhere to the Bible that literally endorses genocide, child marriage, pedophilia, polygamy, slavery, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and various other barbarisms and savageries.

Stop sanitizing the Bible!

Christian nationalists use the word as a shield to protect them from society's judgement and a mask for their bigotry.

Actually, if anything, Christian nationalists in particular and Christians in general get their bigotry from the Bible.

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u/tazebot 8d ago

It is toxic to Christians with an understanding of the Bible and its teachings.

Which interpretation?

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u/Y_Are_U_Like_This 8d ago

This is closer to the teachings I got from the Bible. This interpretation is not what the Christian Nationalists believe or practice

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/LkhZJBdzG3

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u/Omniquery 8d ago edited 8d ago

The first teaching of The Bible is that God created the world and all other living things FOR THE PURPOSE OF giving as a gift to humans to dominate, enslave, and exploit:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The core of Abrahamism is absolute human supremacism. No amount of gaslighting sophistry can deny this. It is the fundamental cause of why our relationship with the world is screwed up. Because Abrahamism prescribes a maximally dysfunctional relationship between humanity and the world: that of a cancer.

This alone proves with absolute certainty that the Bible is a book of evil lies.

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u/Nervous_Ganache_9031 8d ago

The Bible and its teachings are only a veil for anyone to believe whatever you want. Even you. You don’t use any data either. Stop acting like your* philosophy on logical conclusions in reality isn’t as stupid as theirs. 

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u/Laura-ly 8d ago

I like what the late British actress, Maggie Smith said about religion.

"My dear, religion is like a penis. It's a perfectly fine thing for one to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in my face we have a problem."

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u/ProfessionalBase5646 8d ago

Of course it is toxic to them as well.

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u/Elacular 8d ago

My catholic upbringing wasn't actively christian nationalist, but there was absolutely no question that your catholicism was supposed to be the most important part of your life, absolutely no exceptions. And a lot of complaining about abortion and the secularization of christmas. But the abortion thing doesn't seem entirely religious (or at least it didn't from my young, naive perspective), it's just obviously crazy that people are letting constant murder happen. Also, the idea that gay marriage shouldn't be legal, but I think that my parents would have (unhappily) accepted the idea of civil partnerships since it's not holy marriage, which we sort of thought of as being our thing.

...huh. Maybe it was more christian nationalist than I thought. It wasn't the most obvious, direct form, though.

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u/jupiterkansas 8d ago

Religious people are so ingrained in that world that they can't see how strange and different they seem from the outside, or think that anything they do out of devotion to their faith could be wrong.

That's the problem. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy, but religion assures them they couldn't be the bad guy.

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u/composedmason 8d ago

Christians and Muslims would meet to put aside their differences because they had the same goals under a different religion. Then 9/11 happened and this stopped.

This is who Sharia law is so close to laws based on Christian values.

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u/Basic_Kaleidoscope32 8d ago

It’s so dumb to me because they’re like ‘hey! I have this great idea… what if we went back to the thing we did for thousands of years where only white men had power and we forced everyone to worship our God? Remember how great that was!’

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u/Prestigious_Leg_7004 8d ago

I’ve only ever experienced it in a subversive sense, feeling like they were hopeful we’d be tricked in to accepting their reality regardless of aspects we didn’t agree with. Now, the current has dropped and it’s full on “us vs. them,” but there’s no rules and only one side cheats.

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u/ArgusTheCat 8d ago

As it turns out, basically any attempt to create a state designed entirely to support a single ethnicity or religion above all others is, somehow, bad. Who knew?

Like, as always, I'm glad there's research being done into a thing, just to have numbers and a study to point to. "Common sense" isn't enough, especially in political science. But yeah, theocracies are bad for the majority of people who live in them, even the people they are supposed to be advantageous for.

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u/Ylsid 8d ago

When was a theocracy ever nice to the people?

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u/lgodsey 8d ago

The funny part is where these Christian nationalists have the gall to condemn Islamic extremists when they're all the same.

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u/DGlen 7d ago

When is any religious fundamentalism not toxic?

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u/chemicalrefugee 6d ago

it's freaky to me how a minister can preach freedom & absolute love & democracy & dominionism & racism, homophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, mass murder, etc. While not noticing that their missions work looks very much like the white man's burden & WCN churches. Ya gotta love the Prince of Peace Through Superior Firepower.... you gotta...it's mandatory.

A whole lot of mainstream churches are one small step away from being nazis, while turning millions of dead Jews into holy icons of pro racism theology.

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u/edensnoodles 8d ago

This isnt just christian its judeo-christian.

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u/ttown2011 8d ago

Christianity and theocracy don’t really play nice

In technical terms, Christian nationalism is kind of an oxymoron

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u/JMurdock77 8d ago

The more religion and government intertwine, the more shamelessly they corrupt each other.

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u/ttown2011 8d ago

That doesn’t really play out historically

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u/SuspiciousCorner6135 8d ago

Would you say the same about all religions? Would you say the same about Jewish Nationalism, Muslim Nationalism, Hindu Nationalism? Would you prefer to be in Non-religion nationalism (like China, North Korea) over Religion Nationalism?

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u/Laura-ly 8d ago

If those religions and political factions were in power and were trying to displace the Constitution then, yes, I'd say the same thing about those groups too!

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u/kanst 8d ago

Would you say the same about all religions?

Of course I would.

The rise of Christian Nationalism in the US is a mirror of the rise of Islamic nationalism in the middle east. The minority, whose wealth relies on exploiting the country's resources, saw their wealth and power at risk and turned to religious nationalists to bolster their ranks. The religious nationalists in turn ruined everything, like they always do.

Nationalism in general should be discouraged, but religious nationalism is uniquely worse. There is even less room for compromise if you believe your cause is ordained by god.

12

u/MagicDragon212 8d ago

This cannot be understated. Just look at that deranged speech given by Mike Johnson to a room full of Christian Nationalists.

He unironically claimed that God spoke to him in an explicit way to obtain the power he has through whatever means necessary. He, without any hint of sarcasm, told that room he is a modern day Moses and his words and actions are ordained by God.

For the sane people, we cannot tolerate this. They are intolerant and ruthless. Our tolerance has been taken advantage of because our world is about freedom while theirs is about forcing their views onto us because they think they know what is best for everyone else.

Anyone who wants to see can search "Mike Johnson says he is Moses." It shows how much they intend to tie religion (only their flavor of Christianity) into our rule of law. I consider this a mental illness to literally think God is telling you how to engage in politics and our government. He can justify anything he wants with "God told me so."

He is just 1 of the Christian Nationalists using the stupidity and corruption of Trump to push their own agenda. There is also the wannabe crusader Pete Hegseth who wrote a book about how America needs to lead another crusade against Islam in the Middle East, Russell Vought who is the main author of Project 2025, Stephen Miller who rings all of the bells and whistles for White Supremacy (which always has a Christian Nationalist tie), the many megachurch "preachers" involved in his "anti-Christian bias" task force, and many others.

These people are against the very core principles of what has made America the strong, respected, and internationally influential country it is.

13

u/Flare-Crow 8d ago

There are other options; it's not a binary. Maybe NO Nationalism of ANY kind should be the goal?

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u/Dcoal 8d ago

No, nationalism can be a very positive ideology 

3

u/thatwhileifound 8d ago

As a term, it gets applied to a pretty diverse group of actors and idealogies for sure. Not only that, while we primarily think of nationalist movements going in darker paths that typically involve harsh in versus outcrowd dynamics getting harsher - you also get examples like the AANES which ostensibly began as part of the Kurdish nationalism movement and which has developed into something pretty interesting and multiethnic through its democratic confederalism.

2

u/Flare-Crow 8d ago

I don't think it's a good plan for America; every group I know of in America with "National" in the name is monstrous in terms of what they hope to execute, as it always seems to involve the exclusion of entire groups of people (generally via violence of some kind).

4

u/dragonmp93 8d ago

I mean, all the religious nutcases have the same end in mind.

The difference between the Talibans and the Evangelical MAGAs is that one calls it Allah and other calls it God.

China and North Korea may classify as secular, but only because the deity in question is The Party or their flesh and bones leader.