🇺🇸 How Christianity’s Decline Impacts White Christians’ Emotional and Attitudinal Response
“Racial resentment predicts Christian nationalism, Christian persecution beliefs, and White persecution beliefs. In other words, negative stereotypes about Black Americans are related to Christian nationalism and persecution beliefs. But while Whiteness and Christianity are undeniably intertwined among Whites, our experiment provides evidence that they cannot be conflated.”
@bibliolater@politicalscience I will just say this much. For a couple decades or so I attended fundamentalist/evangelical churches, but if I had had even the slightest inkling that they were racist I would have been out of there so fast it would have made their heads spin. I got disillusioned with the church after I realized that they had not been telling the truth about several things (in particular about hell, they never bothered to mention that three or four very different words with completely different meanings in the original languages had all been translated to the English word "hell" and that dishonest preachers conflated all those words in order to control people) but even then I had not seen any overt racism. It was such a shock to see the type of people I had fellowshipped with for years suddenly turn into Trump supporters and racists and generally awful people. I mean, I knew that black people generally went to their own churches but I never heard anyone say that they couldn't come into the ones I attended, but then in retrospect they probably would not have made a big scene about it.
Now the way I feel about it, I would never go back to one of those churches again. They have lost me forever. In a way I feel sorry for them because they are being played big time by politicians that are just pandering to them as long as they are "useful idiots", but who will drop them like a hot potato once they are no longer useful. But having seen how easily they abandoned their core beliefs (in particular the teachings of Jesus) I have to conclude that there is nothing to their religion. They are like all of us in that they believe what they want to believe, but when what you believe includes hate and authoritarism, then I want no part of your beliefs.