Completely agree. I think the author's tone in this article, in a nutshell, exemplifies what was a huge driving force of so many evangelical's in the US now being firmly in the MAGA camp, even though that seems paradoxical to many of us.
For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly". And look, I'm an atheist who has felt acute harms from religion in some very specific ways, so I get it - a lot of times I believe that religion is backwards and silly. But Trump and MAGA came along and essentially said "you're not backwards and silly, you're the righteous ones, the ones who are condemning you are backwards and silly". And yes, Trump has been married 3 times, had an affair with a porn star while his wife was pregnant, values displays of material wealth above all else, etc. etc., so I struggle mightily many times to understand how a community that preached "family values" so stridently for my entire youth supports him now so unconditionally. But, IMO, it's because Trump really constantly drove home this message of "you should be proud, and the only people who should be ashamed are 'the other side'".
I know that may feel like a tangent, but I've seen the general dismissive tone of this article repeated so many times (e.g. in much reporting about the Chick-fil-a family) that it now feels easy to recognize.
> For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly"
Most of the criticism that I have heard and read is not about evangelicals being "backwards and silly" but is about their hypocrisy for claiming the mantle of Jesus Christ and then saying and doing things that are antithetical to his beliefs.
I'll cop to treating them as a mix of "backward and silly" and "malevolent violent threat to the continued existence of people I love". There are a lot of reasons to disdain American Christianity, and my personal experience with the exercise of that religion makes it extremely hard to treat its practicioners with anything other than distrust and contempt.
The problem is that in the 70's when conservative/libertarian economics and the religious right had a shotgun marriage which spawned Reagan and most of the "government is the enemy" schtick, usually the former group actually was driving the agenda, using a carrot of "we'll get rid of abortion" to lead the latter.
The problem is that this almighty dollar worship is far more corrosive and destructive to society and ethics of everyone involved, and ends up eroding any sort of moral high ground that the cojoined group has.
Along with the almighty dollar worship was the super patriot worship, which some say was started by W Bush to support his war effort. Both are, from a christian view point, hypocritical. The current administration is full steam ahead on the former and busy killing the second with the tool of embarrassment.
> For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly".
A lot of them DO come off as backwards and silly. Christianity boils down to two commandments. TWO! Love God and love your neighbor. Who is your neighbor? EVERYONE! And you can't do one of those commandments without the other. And if you're calling yourself Christian, those are not OPTIONS - you can't choose not to do those. And yet, here we are...
"Silly" and "backwards" aren't the terms I'd use, though. What bothers me about a lot of it is that it is mean, even cruel, and utterly inconsistent with the character of Jesus given in the gospels.
I don't know why people are down voting you, your observations are something I've sadly noticed happening for a long time now.
The perception of Christianity among people who don't identify with any religion or people who fall into more "liberal" circles has absolutely been tainted by sects/members of Christianity that do not at all represent the teachings in the Bible. There is justifiable resentment towards these groups that spills over into unjustifiable resentment towards Christians as a whole.
I can't count the number of times I've heard, living in California, either said directly to me by someone who didn't know I was Christian, overheard in a conversation, or discussed at some event completely out of pocket claims or insults towards Christianity that most people would find absolutely inappropriate to say about other groups.
It doesn't bother me because I understand where those people saying it are coming from. But it absolutely leads to the phenomenon of otherwise moderate or formerly left leaning Christians moving towards the group that doesn't wear their not so thinly veiled hate openly on their sleeves for something deeply personal and important in their lives. You are the company you keep and shifting over like this brings you more in line mentally overtime with the kind of people you don't want to emulate.
Rational or not rational, it just doesn't feel good as a human being to receive hate and disdain for something you consider an irreplaceable part of your life and worldview.
This doesn't apply solely to Christians and is really something the left has been doing for a long time and why it's been "losing" the propaganda war to the right and seeing so many people who formerly wouldn't want to associate with the kind of rhetoric found there today at least passively accepting it. Rhetoric of the left seems to far more often embrace (at least on a smaller scale between people) snark, putdowns, wholesale "intolerance" ie making individuals feel some combination of bad/guilty/stupid/backwards for "ignorant" views instead of engaging with them openly. The right uses an approach of playing the "reasonable" man that is open to discussion, support, of all views and then slowly getting people to get on board with the more radical ones.
> But it absolutely leads to the phenomenon of otherwise moderate or formerly left leaning Christians moving towards the group that doesn't wear their not so thinly veiled hate openly on their sleeves for something deeply personal and important in their lives. You are the company you keep and shifting over like this brings you more in line mentally overtime with the kind of people you don't want to emulate.
If you're talking about Christians moving to right wing political groups because people were insulting them, then they're proving their detractors' points and actually encouraging this phenomenon.
If the goal is to truly change societal worldview and not just rack up "winning" dunks on an acceptable target that doesn't matter.
Human beings don't tend to enjoy being insulted and ostracized. Telling someone to "put up with our abuse or you're one of the bad guys" is going to make you seem unhinged and unreasonable to anyone you are trying to win over. Saying "well, we bullied them into the arms of the opposition, so they've proved our point and we can retroactively justify all the hate we gave and will continue to give them" isn't a very strong argument to bring them over to your side either. People deal with perceived threats by banding together with others they feel have their back. The left gave up an appreciable chunk of the American voting base which is fine if they really don't want to pander to them, but complaining that a voting group is acting in their perceived best interests when their two options are between a group that's verbally and culturally hostile towards them and makes no indication that they aren't going to do anything but get MORE hostile towards them (just look at some of the vitriol posted in this thread) and a group that embraces them with open arms and puts on a reasonable facade is silly. What else do people really expect?
No, but these ever-and-always-victimized-and-misunderstood MAGA chuds certainly are, especially when they try to wrap themselves in the cloak of "all Christians" for protection. D for effort.
I really don't think we can lay the responsibility for this at the feet of "the left."
I don't doubt there are those who have had uncomfortable, rude encounters with anti-religious people, but I do doubt how frequently this occurs. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and we openly prayed before meals at restaurants and never had a single issue. I attended a public school and had plenty of friends who were remarkably tolerant of when I got a bit weird about religion (including calling a friend's family "heathens" for not following the right type of Christianity). Yes, there was one classmate in high school who was outspoken, a bit angry and sometimes rude about her "leftist" beliefs but she was one classmate among many! And yet every week in Church I heard about how the world was against us, we were so persecuted and hated, silly comments like "oh you'd get in trouble if you brought a bible in your backpack to your public school" which wasn't true at all.
In my experience it's an identity built on being "different", on believing that others want to tear you down because of your beliefs. And a narrative that pushes this identity, by amplifying anything that could come across as disrespectful or dismissive, setting it up for someone to come in and say "you should be proud of yourself." And when this includes stupid things like Starbucks changing their cups to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, I really don't think "be nicer" is going to help.
Some beliefs deserve to be looked down upon and disrespected because they are backwards. I wouldn't call them "silly" because they're very serious.
I don't believe in treating religious fundamentalists with compassion and empathy anymore. That's how we got the nutjobs in power, by not deriding them enough in public and private. There can be no tolerance of hate, and the people you are talking about are motivated by hate of others.
Look, in many ways I agree with you, but I guarantee that mindset is essentially doomed to failure if you want to win elections in the US where 68% of Americans identify themselves as Christian in some way.
The problem is not so much wanting to coddle up to the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. It's that a lot of people who used to have what would be considered "standard", middle-of-the-road religious views have been told, again in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that they're stupid. Whether you believe this to be true is not the point. Calling a large portion of the country stupid is a great way to push them into the arms of an extremist.
This thinking is a memetic poison created by the exact people that need to be shamed out of the public discourse. I used to agree with it, but seeing how it's been coopted by the bigots, I reject the premise entirely.
No one is calling Christians stupid. The nutjobs that want to tear down our secular society and replace it with a white Evangelical ethnostate are telling Christians that their political rivals are calling them stupid. They're the suckers for the conmen, and at this point, it's not worth attempting to rationalize debate.
They literally vote for the most insulting person available, again and again. If anything, Trumps winning twice and conservatives in general getting votes is that being polite and nice is completely failing strategy. Democrats and centrists were nice and respectful for years while conservative were increasingly insulting ... and increasingly oversensitive creating outrages over nothing.
This demand for one sided niceness that amounts to submissivity was is is contraproductive.
The meat of the article are actual bad acts. You are just using the tone to distract from the actual accusations.
>Democrats and centrists were nice and respectful for years
This is only really true on the political level, not the cultural/social level. Politicians on the left have been significantly more respectful than their counterparts for a long time now. But the same can't really be said for the sentiments of their voter base or the media/education curated towards them. For a large amount of people what they see and experience in their day to day lives does more to color their beliefs than what a politician says that they have no relation to and might see a few sound bites of here and there running up to an election.
The left has to learn that telling a prospective voter repeatedly that they are the enemy won't make anyone want to support them unless they're already believers. It'll just push them towards the side that's offering to call them an ally.
I think the biggest problem is that Christianity is a font of power for fascism in America. If we want to change that, people need to start protesting churches the same way they are Tesla. But for some reason, churches seem exempt from political responsibility in the minds of the average non-fascist American.
See my other comment, but it's true that more people are cautious about saying things about it. That's because the religion has so retarded the progress of societies it has infected that they are more likely to threaten violence against those who speak reason.
I don't really blame people for speaking more cautiously about it, but that's because of how much savagery the mind-virus demands of its followers.
Some beliefs deserve to be looked down upon and disrespected because they are backwards. I wouldn't call them "silly" because they're very serious.
I don't believe in treating religious fundamentalists with compassion and empathy anymore. That's how we got the peace trucks, by not deriding them enough in public and private. There can be no tolerance of hate, and the people you are talking about are motivated by hate of others.
I find it interesting that the Episocopal Chirch in the United States has both old conservative members and young liberal members, and they all seem to get along as far as I can tell (many of them also believe in Theistic Evolution and don't shun science like others seem to think). I think it's a flavor of conservatism that is more libertarian. The Episcopal Church also has openly-gay priests and women priests, all of which whom can marry.
The two conservative and rich Episocopal churches (annual budgets of over $1MM) that I know of are still Episcopal according to their websites. The people at those churches were very nice and not uptight ("hoity-toity") when I visited.
I did read the Wikipedia entry on "Anglican Realignment" though, thank you for that information.
> even though that seems paradoxical to many of us
I think the only people in denial about it were those who view evangelical values as something other than the standing in the schoolhouse door values they demonstrated for centuries.
This seems like a common pattern: someone writes about sociopathic excesses of MAGA, but without sufficient empathy and respect, and the writer becomes responsible for the sociopathic excesses.
The article could definitely be more professional and mature. But something seems wrong with blaming people who are horrified by bad behavior for the bad behavior.
Would you ever excused leftist, feminist or atheist from massive hypocrisy or fraud with "conservatives are talking with disdain about them, therefore they have no moral agency"? And being from conservative environment, things that were being said about left, feminists, democrats were widely insulting for years.
Plus, you mean, any criticism or anyone pointing out hypocrisy or frauds or lies? As in, we all need to pretend these people never do wrong, because otherwise they might turn berserk? The same people who scorn and mock frequently and regularly need to be treated with niceties they never awarded to own opponent? They are at MAGA camp, because their values are compatible with MAGA, because they don't mind any of what Trump does.
If a compliment is all that it takes for you to reject your claimed morals, you never had them. And to credit of democrats, but Musk and Trump tried to get power through that camp first. They tried to take progressive cloak to get power and again, to credit of progressives, their hypocrisy was noted. That Christian right embraced those people does not imply they are victims, they are perpetrators.
> For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left"
Imagine saying this on the thread of an article that is literally about people using their faith to justify artifact smuggling and other crimes. The disrespect was entirely brought on by their insanely shitty and sociopathic behavior. Their faith isn't what is causing them to be disrespected. It's their behavior.
For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly". And look, I'm an atheist who has felt acute harms from religion in some very specific ways, so I get it - a lot of times I believe that religion is backwards and silly. But Trump and MAGA came along and essentially said "you're not backwards and silly, you're the righteous ones, the ones who are condemning you are backwards and silly". And yes, Trump has been married 3 times, had an affair with a porn star while his wife was pregnant, values displays of material wealth above all else, etc. etc., so I struggle mightily many times to understand how a community that preached "family values" so stridently for my entire youth supports him now so unconditionally. But, IMO, it's because Trump really constantly drove home this message of "you should be proud, and the only people who should be ashamed are 'the other side'".
I know that may feel like a tangent, but I've seen the general dismissive tone of this article repeated so many times (e.g. in much reporting about the Chick-fil-a family) that it now feels easy to recognize.