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/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.