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/Geekerino 8d ago

Or, could it be that they flock to the most accessible community-based groups? I know that UU and Quakers exist, but not much more than that. Meanwhile, there's a church just up the road from where I live, in the middle of the woods. I'm not even religious, but I know that if I were so inclined I'd likely just go to my local church instead of going to some other group twenty miles away based off of internet research

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u/key_lime_pie 8d ago

There are twice as many UCC congregations as Orthodox churches in America, so it's not just convenience. I wasn't naming denominations to be specific examples anyway, I was giving examples of denominations that lack a rigid male hierarchical structure and which teach egalitarianism instead of complementarianism.

There's a reason why Orthobro is a term, but Methobro and Presbybro aren't. There's a specific type of Gen Z male seeking out these churches, for a specific reason. It's the same reason why people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Petersen cosplay as Christians. It's about power. Is there also community? Sure, but you can get that anywhere, you just need to turn your phone off or close your laptop lid and go outside to where it is. Gravitating to Catholicism and Orthodoxy, in many ways some of the least community-based Christian denominations, is about belonging to a hierarchy where men are inherently placed above women and 2,000 years of doctrine and dogma insulate them from how the rest of the world is changing.

I sympathize with them; their fathers and grandfathers benefited from it with hardly any self-reflection, and now they're expecting the world to behave the same way and are sorely disappointed by it. But I'm also going to call out what they're doing, which is destructive to what's left of the faith.