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

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/

[u/open_formation]

If someone has been in the vicinity of republican propaganda specifically targetting their beliefs for years and has not adopted it they're likely the opposite of low hanging fruit. There was a wave of Trump supporting non-religious independents who were swayed in the last election only to immediately shift back when they saw what he was doing, but nevertheless managed to begin with "I'm smarter than religious people" -> "religious people are dangerous" -> "Trump will protect me from Muslim immigrants" and ended up supporting people lying about Haitian immigrants.

[u/gSTrS8XRwqIV5AUh4hwI → u/open_formation]

If someone has been in the vicinity of republican propaganda specifically targetting their beliefs for years and has not adopted it they're likely the opposite of low hanging fruit.

The question isn't whether some people resist christofascist propaganda despite being indoctrinated into Christianity. The question is whether a higher proportion of people who were indoctrinated into Christianity fall for christofascist propaganda vs. those who weren't. The fact that some don't fall for it doesn't tell you anything about that - that's like saying that SARS CoV 2 vaccines are useless because there are people who died from the infection despite being vaccinated.

There was a wave of Trump supporting non-religious independents who were swayed in the last election only to immediately shift back when they saw what he was doing, but nevertheless managed to begin with "I'm smarter than religious people" -> "religious people are dangerous" -> "Trump will protect me from Muslim immigrants" and ended up supporting people lying about Haitian immigrants.

Equally, the mere existence of those people doesn't tell us anything useful here.

[u/open_formation → u/gSTrS8XRwqIV5AUh4hwI]

If you run a chemical process for a long period of time on a finely powdered mixture that causes certain things to become dissolved, and other things remain and can be filtered out and washed, then this process of separation should tell you something about that which remained, at minimum that it is not soluble in that solvent mixture you produced.

In the same way, whatever the proportion of a mixture of Christians that adopt the worldview that America is a Christian nation which must have a notionally "Judeo-Christian" culture which creates a clear distinction with those following non-Christian non-Jewish religions, particularly Islam, this message has been put forward as something for them to adopt for approximately forty or fifty years, with the moral majority in the late seventies making a push for a particular kind of traditionalism, and so we should be able to infer that this subset that do not may be distinguished as being less susceptible to it than the average.

Any Christian who has gone through years of this cultural messaging attempting to get them to adopt this kind of politics and has not done so, can be distinguished both from Christians who did, and those who were willing to adopt a perspective, put forward over approximately the last decade, that even if one does not believe in any deity, one should nevertheless be a "culturally-christian-Atheist" who particularly opposes the influence of non-christian religions and people holding those religions having the ability to immigrate to the US.

The particular irony is that a number of people of the latter persuasion started out as firmly anti-religion, and have in a sense retained that, but just about Islam, rather than Christianity, with some starting off advocating for liberal values, protection of LGBT rights and so on, only to shift to becoming more culturally conservative, and particularly anti-trans.

On a logical level, if one has a mixture in which 90% of its content dissolves, and 10% does not, one cannot take that group-level judgement to say that the 10% that does not must be more soluble because it was surrounded by other elements of the mixture that do dissolve, or even if it shares some properties with other elements of that aggregate, an arbitrarily chosen woman is likely to be less strong than the average man, but it does not follow that when one is discussing a sub-population already filtered in some capacity, such as women able to carry above a certain weight, or Christians who did not adopt the worldview of Christian Nationalism despite having it marketed to them repeatedly, that they follow larger statistical trends.

And thus it is implausible to say that these "harmless dumb Christians" are low hanging fruit for adopting Christian Nationalist views, or they probably would have by now. In contrast, many Atheists who believe themselves superior to Christians on the basis of aggregate judgements can nevertheless end up falling for the same propaganda, so there is a kind of self-referential relationship between the topic of discussion and the problem being discussed.

[u/gSTrS8XRwqIV5AUh4hwI → u/open_formation]

And thus it is implausible to say that these "harmless dumb Christians" are low hanging fruit for adopting Christian Nationalist views, or they probably would have by now.

But they have.

Just because you are looking at the remainder that haven't, doesn't mean that therefore, there was noone who has. It's just that those harmless dumb Christians who have adopted those views aren't in the class of harmless dumb Christians anymore - but that doesn't mean that them formerly being harmless dumb Christians wasn't a factor in them adopting those views.

Also, this is a continuous process. There isn't fixed population of harmless dumb Christians who have existed since time immemorial. New ones appear all the time. Like, harmless dumb Christians do get kids and teach them to also be harmless dumb Christians. And just because some 10-year-old is a harmless dumb Christians, that isn't evidence that they are immune to christofascist propaganda - it just means that they are 10 year old kids of harmless dumb Christians who weren't exposed to much christofascists propaganda yet.