The one thing Trump has delivered on that fits with Evangelical Christians’ stated values is appointing anti-abortion judges, but even that hasn’t yet had a tangible impact on the number of Americans getting abortions. And it seems like they could have got much the same result with ANY Republican candidate.
Evangelicals’ devotion to Trump goes beyond a pragmatic alliance of political convenience. These people really do seem to treat him like a messiah figure.
Spot on. He’s delivering enough to enough groups they have an incentive to keep him around. The rabid support you see isn’t so much support for him, as trying to convince themselves they haven’t made a bargain with the devil. Devil? No no no.
Funny thing is, many of his supporters know he is a shitshow and will admit parts of it. And that’s how you deal with them. Sympathize with them. Sympathize with how Trump is tarnishing the reputation of conservatives with how he treats women, insults everyone, etc. Sympathize with how Trump leading to younger generations turning against everything they are striving for. How this short term gain is leading to losing it all in the long run.
Don’t fight their positions. Feed their doubts.
It won’t flip them to support a different candidate. But it seems to throw a wet blanket on their support of Trump.
God, Inc. downsizes just like every other giant multinational corporation. Instead of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, God has chosen Donald Trump to be His harbinger of doom.
I have had experience with these people, and they are horrifying. During the 2016 election, I knew people who voted for Trump because they thought he was the guy who, if he reached the White House, would be the most likely to start a nuclear war. That’s right, they voted for Trump because they WANT him to get this country nuked.
They have this sick fixation on “end times”. They believe in the “Rapture”. They think a nuclear war will mean that they will get saved and lifted bodily into Heaven while everyone else either burns or is shredded or dies of radiation sickness. They want this country to get nuked because they think they can use the thermal updrafts from the firestorms to soar up to meet God.
These people are NOT Christians. The Bible that talks about Christ teaches that people should be good and kind to other people. It teaches that we should love other people. These Rapture nuts are a cult that doesn’t worship Jesus, they worship death. They don’t want to be kind to other people, they want to use the bones of other people to build themselves a private stairway to Heaven.
But they ignore that. It doesn’t fit their pathology.
Good moment to mention the one book I recommend more than any other: The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer, available free at https://www.theauthoritarians.org/. Altemeyer is a sociologist who uses data to evaluate the way authoritarian followers think.
It’s true that most of them aren’t going to change their minds when given a logical fact-based argument—indeed, it usually makes them cling more tightly to their provably false beliefs. But not all of them are incorrigible. There is empirical data on a few ways we can prevent people from becoming authoritarian followers, and subvert the people who already are.
The only reason I believe there is a divine will at all - is that the real message that Jesus was attributed to have said, was so fundamentally against everything religion had stood for previously, and against human nature - that I believe there is a message of hope.
It could have been aliens for all I know also. Frankly the fact that we can still get it so wrong after thousands of years just shows how revolutionary that message of love and acceptance really is.
I read an online parody of Left Behind in which Satan comes to Earth as the President and instantly wins the religious right’s support for his Satanic agenda. I’m hoping that someone on BoingBoing will remember it.
These people have been deliberately broken so they’re incapable of rational thought. Raise a child brainwashing them with these beliefs and it’s incredibly hard for them to break free, ever. Teach them after they’re old enough to make their own choices and most of them would laugh in your face. Religion is child abuse, full stop.
there’s many ways to do that even in cases the website does not provide an audio version.
in case you’re interested: google “text-to-speech”, most systems can do that for selected text out of the box, and there’s a lot of apps and web services that take an url and provide an audio download or directly read the content of the page out to you.
I use Voice Dream Reader, which does what it should. It’s overly expensive, and the voices are not that impressive. But it does allow to set the pause after each sentence, which makes listening a much more relaxing experience.
yeah. was reading it a few days ago and commenting about it in the “trumpian-events”-thread…still scares the fuck outta me…I mean…look at this!
Perhaps, but they might have gotten all these judges with someone else, but they have gotten them with Trump. All the groundwork these people have done at the state levels is paying off, and we are literally one RBG heart attack away from having a Court that will invalidate Roe. These folks see the progress they’ve made (the term “progress” being used ironically by me, please understand) and they know what they’re on the brink of.
I’d posit that it’s a chicken/egg situation. In any event, trying to apply rational if/then/because causality to a group and leader who are so willing to aggressively embrace cognitive dissonance is a fool’s errand to some extent, so I don’t mean our disagreement about some aspects of their nonsense to obscure the fact that I agree with your larger point.
Rational thought is one thing, but they’re devoid of empathy.
Old news to organized religion: “Give us a child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life”. The jesuits knew that 500 years ago.
George W. Bush delivered on his promise to install conservative judges too, but I don’t recall this kind of cult-like devotion from his supporters. Compared to Trump his approval ratings were all over the place during his time in office.
Trump is something different and uniquely dangerous.
He’s more their hired hater. Taking the hate and bigotry out of the hollers and out into the World. He’s fighting their ‘good fight’ and he is delivering. Even Jesus couldn’t do that.
Jobs, health care, infrastructure, foreign policy, climate change et al mean nothing in comparison.
The child still has a pretty normal reaction to being touched by the orange creep.
But the lady may very well be beyond any help.
Religion poisons everything. And these Trumpangelicals are poison personified.
This is another variation of what we’ve seen before, the American Taliban, the people who were jumping for joy when hostilities between Israel and Lebanon reappeared in the mid-2000’s because they thought it signaled the apocalypse. They want the world to burn because they think they will get a magical heavenly reward while all their former friends and family will suffer for eternity; they’re willing to wager the fate of billions on the blind hope that they alone have found the One True Path.
All religion is superstition.
Now that is a hilarious tattoo
I’d call that an overly broad generalization. Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister and Martin Luther King Jr.’s doctorate wasn’t in physiology.
These Trump cultists aren’t good-hearted souls who were poisoned by religion. They are fanatics and extremists who use religion to justify their hatred and actions.
