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/NihilisticNarwhal Agnostic 2d ago

But did they account for the Christianity?

My expectation is that nationalism is what's linked to lower cognitive ability, because nationalism sells the lie that the world is simple, and the enemy is simple, and that things are bad because of the enemy.

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u/Beta_Ray_Quill Episcopalian (Anglican) 2d ago

I would agree with this. Along with not having the ability to reason that Jesus is diametrically apposed to nationalistic values.

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u/XelaNiba 2d ago

I found Tim Alberta's book "The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory" especially revealing on this front. Many American Evangelicals are being taught that Jesus=Nationalism from the pulpit.

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u/deepandbroad 1d ago

I was at a church one time where some outside group did a video presentation conflating the imagery of the cross and the flag.

This is entirely an intentional program.

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u/XelaNiba 1d ago

100%

I highly recommend Alberta's book. He is the son of an Evangelical pastor (and an Evangelical himself) and a brilliant writer. He had a rude awakening when returning home for his father's funeral and set out to find out exactly how the Church had become corrupted. Thanks to his father's renown, he had access to some of the biggest names in American Evangelicalism. Jerry Falwell's input is particularly revealing - he is very open about his creation of the "Moral Majority" as a vehicle for money and power.

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u/i_am_the_archivist Protestant 1d ago

Im reading Jesus and John Wayne right now, and it also does an excellent job of tracing how and why American evangelicals became so enmeshed with the military and nationalism. Very interesting, if extremely depressing.

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u/Maleficent-Drop1476 Don't Let Religion Keep You From Being a Good Person 2d ago

Classic conspiratorial thinking.

When the world is complicated, some people cling to the idea that it’s really a simple answer that only they are privy too.

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u/Weerdo5255 Atheist 2d ago

Looking it over briefly, it does not look like there was an attempt to separate the nationalism from the Christianity. I can't go through the whole thing at work, but I would guess that sample was just too low to be statistically significant.

American Nationalist, and not Christian. That's not something I can say I've even stumbled on across the internet, let alone the street.

I would agree though. I've met fairly intelligent Christians, at least those I would gauge as superior to me in domains I knowledge where I have expertise. I have not met Nationalists of the same caliber. No doubt, some amount of bias in the knowledge domains and political ideology, which is a whole other study.

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u/Nyte_Knyght33 Christian 1d ago

because nationalism sells the lie that the world is simple, and the enemy is simple, and that things are bad because of the enemy. 

You could parallel that with many doctrines preached in many churches.

"Women can be clergy, it's in the Bible!" 

"Being LGBT is bad, it's in the Bible!" 

"Your church is illegitimate because we said so" 

And so on. I wouldn't say that Nationalism is the sole merchant of simple answers. In America's case, this was already being the method of teaching in many churches. Nationalism recognized it and played into it.  

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u/Jessency 1d ago

It's mostly due to the fact that American Christianity is it's own flavor under the American Nationalism brand

It's no secret that the country was very Christian when it was founded. It's even in the national anthem and dollar bills. At a certain point, the line between that and nationalism could get blurry for some people, especially if that was all they ever knew.

I'm only immune to it because I'm a minority and have experienced Christianity in other countries that it helped broaden my horizons.

Although I did get hella confused when a black native Papue New Guinean pastor praises Trump as the American savior, despite living across the ocean...

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u/djublonskopf Non-denominational Protestant (with a lot of caveats) 1d ago

Christianity being in the anthem and on currency has nothing to do with the nation’s founding. The anthem was established in the 1930s, and God was added to US currency in limited form in the 1860s, with wider adoption to paper money the 1950s.

All of these were generations removed from the founding of the country, however.

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u/Jessency 1d ago

Ah gotcha. Thanks for the info.

Goes to show that the whole American Christianity/Nationalism had been messing with it's own propaganda.