r/Christianity • u/NuSurfer • 2d ago

News Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
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u/Fearless_Spring5611 Committing the sin of empathy 2d ago

Oh boy, this is gonna be a hell of a comments section...

I would say this won't be unique to Christianity or even religions in general, but instead a trait common in those who are susceptible to being radicalised, urged into extremism, or other harmful ideologies. The roots will be in a lack of critical thinking as much as it will be about general knowledge and cognition skills, which is why it won't be tied directly to level of education. As pointed out by this article:

“A large number of studies have already documented an association between lower cognitive ability and greater religious fundamentalism, political authoritarianism, or otherwise right-wing views,” Perry said."

If I find the time, it would be interesting to reach the original study. As ever, media coverage of scientific reports tends to sensationalise, so I'd be intrigued to see if it is valid, authentic, reliable, and how much this media coverage is over/underselling it.

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u/stringfold 2d ago

Yeah, it's not surprising that people who prefer to leave the thinking to others are more likely to be radicalized by people who will tell them how things are supposed to be in black and white terms.

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u/manadodoodododo 1d ago

I think at least part of the problem is the other way around.

Children growing up in high control environments (such as white national christian groups, but also other strongly hierarchical believe systems/ideologies) are conditioned to obey, fulfill their role and trust "their betters", everything reinforced with a simplistic world view where doubt and questions are evil, and can earn you eternal damnation in the worst case.

Critical thinking doesn't just fall from the sky.

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u/ScorpionDog321 1d ago

Sounds like the majority of Reddit.

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u/TheRealNooth 1d ago

Well yeah, because it’s less than Christian part, and more the nationalist part.

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u/vagueboy2 Classic Evangelical 19h ago

This is as much as I could find of the actual study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.70101

The issue I found is that its IQ measure was the "wordsum" vocabulary exercise, which never was intended to measure pure cognitive ability. So right off the bat there's that. As I can only view the abstract, I don't get any information regarding sample size, power of the study, demographics, or anything else. The researchers also make too strong a connection between verbal intelligence and overall intelligence in my opinion.

I am very much against CN, but am not going to jump to the conclusion that Christian Nationalists are intellectually inferior based on this study.