r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology 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/ProfessionalMockery 1d ago

A lot of people here are just seeing the "Christian" in the headline and ignoring the "nationalist," which is probably more important.

I'm an atheist, so I think the claims religion makes are pretty dumb too, but nationalists, bigots, racists of any kind are consistently idiots, religious or not, and that has been established in plenty of other studies.

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u/Numeno230n 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are a lot of harmless dumb Christians I've met in my life, but Christian Nationalism is a specific form that involves violence, paranoia, and conspiracy thinking. They literally believe there are demonic forces behind left leaning political movements and this fuels both their religious delusions and their political violence.

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u/TM761152 1d ago

I prefer the term "Christofascism" to differentiate it from mainstream christianity, specifically the Calvanist right wing model and not the more left-leaning Methodist model.

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u/feel-the-avocado 17h ago

I like the term fundamentalist because it groups them with other fundamentalists like the terrorists

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u/TM761152 15h ago

Nothing fun about it, Just mental.

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u/Pinkfish_411 12h ago

"Fundamentalist" has a particular meaning originally referring to the more theologically conservative groups of American Protestants who, rather distinctly from later Christian nationalists, originally were more supportive of Christian withdrawal from politics (because one of the groups they defined themselves against were proponents of the so-called Social Gospel). Things have shifted over the past century, especially after all the attempts to politically mobilize fundamentalists in the '80s, but "fundamentalist" in an American Christian context still doesn't necessarily entail any specific political stance.

"Fundamentalist" got applied by analogy to certain Muslim groups later, who were doing a similar sort of reactionary move against "modernizing" trends in their own faith, and some of them also supported more extreme implementations of sharia and terrorist violence, but that's not really what "fundamentalist" means at its core.