Everything else being equal, the more religious the individual in the U.S. today, the higher the probability that the individual identifies with or leans toward the Republican party. I called this the “R and R rule” in my 2012 book on religion, found the phenomenon alive and well in my 2014 review of Gallup data, and now, nine years later, Gallup’s data confirm that this religiosity gap is more evident than ever.
Americans’ political identity is a powerful correlate of a wide range of Americans’ attitudes and behaviors, including, in particular, a wide range of attitudes about hot-button political and social issues. And we know that political identity is related to views of the national economy, views of the nation’s institutions, happiness, perceptions of the nation’s most important problems, and a variety of other measures. It is thus not surprising that political identity would also be related to religion.
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This is interesting:
Republican first, religious second. That explains why the supposed religious right can be as cruel and hateful as it is while still calling themselves religious. The Bible fits into their political ideology rather the other way around. So, they can reject a type of compassion as satanic rather than be unconditionally compassionate.
Living in the American South this is pretty plain to see, however in the American Northeast Catholics are starting to do the same, which hasn’t been the norm until recently and even the Pope has noticed.
My thoughts on it are that Right wing corruption affects everything it touches, the religious leaders wanted to batter down the wall separating church and state, and now many of them are losing their congregants to congregations that are lining up behind their new Orange Joseph Smith, because politics and religion are now intersecting within the Right wing. The MAGA Qult isn’t going away anytime soon, the Global Right Wing conspiracy is implementing their state religions and unless we increase mental healthcare and deprogram these individuals we’re going to have a religious extremist insurgency.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Barry Goldwater:
Except we’re not just dealing with Christian Nationalists, we’re dealing with Islamic and Hindu nationalists, and simply Chinese Nationalists and other fascists, all working together to carve out their own territories.
Being a Catholic in the NE used to be more about ethnic group/culture/family, and now it has become a political thing, just like the South. Makes sense. I had good reason to leave the Church, so I did. Apparently, I wasn’t alone.
Absolutely, I grew up in a NYC Irish Catholic family, and it was as much about being Irish-American as it was about being Catholic, and it was similar with all of the Italian Catholics that were married into the family or that I grew up with.
Now I have far too many family members and friends replacing Jesus with Donald fucking Trump, and it sickens me. I’m also non-practicing, I’ve moved onto Agnosticism trending very close to outright Atheism, but I at least respect the humanistic aspect of “the teachings of Jesus”, Trump is anything but humanistic, he’s much more opportunistic, I’m not sure how these deluded people could confuse the two.
It doesn’t matter what you call it, once you notice the church has gone too extreme you won’t ever go back. Especially Catholics, the American Catholic Church pushes sin. To save your soul you must leave because by its own dogma those who support what they ate doing will burn in hell for eternity.
There us a strong divide between Orthodox Catholics and Liberal Catholics to the point the extreme Orthodox are pushing the Liberals out of the religion. People are leaving because they don’t agree politically with what their Diocese is saying, especially on Family Planning. Even myself argued with the Diocese over such issues originally put in place after the black plague ravaged the human population.
I mean it’s been clear for a while. The culture of American Christianity has long had little to do with the text of the Bible, the traditions of the Hebrews, or anyone else who had traditionally held the religion.
Religion in the US has long been part of a larger culture of being a “good” American. A good American buys a new car every couple years, votes republican, raises their daughter to be a good housewife, goes to church 15 times a year, and just thinks American culture should be more like it used to. It’s always been so empty.
It’s sad that we don’t teach the history of symbolism / society media consumption patterns. Multimedia presentation of Fox News is way more televangelism than a dusty old book named The Bible. We just let advertising and marketing media act upon the population and people behave as if there are no side-effects or conflicting influence systems. We could educate everyone on the world-wide patterns of this and the history, but we do not. We behave somehow as if the Middle East / Levant is a role model of people fighting it out over their favorite story patterns.
I feel like this could be a college-level class all by itself!
Of course. Moreover, people who aren’t dicks grow up and move on from religions whose dogma justifies dick moves, while the dicks remain. It’s only natural.