The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter

If I asked you what most defines Donald Trump supporters, what would you say? They’re white? They’re poor? They’re uneducated?

You’d be wrong.

In fact, I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.

Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (executed by the Nazis in 1945) argued that stup/d people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stup/d ones we are defenseless — as reasons fall on deaf ears.

American Nazism and Madison Square Garden.

Before World War II, the German-American Bund was one of the most successful pro-Nazi organizations in the United States. On February 20, 1939, American Nazis gathered at Madison Square Garden for a mass rally for “true Americanism.”

In February 1939, more than 20,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a “Pro-American Rally.” Images of George Washington hung next to swastikas.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-usa/

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-nazism-and-madison-square-garden

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323/when-nazis-took-manhattan

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/

The Klan, White Christianity, and the Past and Present.

Kelly Baker rightly reminds us that the second Klan drew deep from the well of white Protestantism and nationalism. The organization’s fierce religious bigotry and xenophobia appealed to millions of Americans in the 1920s. The era marked by social experimentation, prohibition, a new morality, nativism, and drastic social change witnessed the rise of America’s most notorious homegrown brand of fascism. Klansmen and women, Baker notes, celebrated hearth and home, white America and patriotic nationalism, or “one hundred percent Americanism,” as they put it. “The maintenance of white supremacy,” says Baker, “becomes particularly obvious in the artifacts that white supremacists, like the Klan, create and use.” The American flag, the hood and robe, and the burning cross were their symbols of choice.1

Particularly interesting is Baker’s observation about the Klan’s nationalistic fervor and its use of Old Glory. “Under the Star-Spangled Banner, Americans might claim unity,” Baker remarks, “but the Klan’s unity was narrowly limited to those people they thought qualified as truly American—only white Protestants.” It seems to show how quickly American jingoism can, and still does, shade into ethnic hatred and violence. It is too easy to dismiss the Klan as part of a bygone era, un-American, a bump on the road to greater tolerance and acceptance. Efforts to contain the Klan or explain it away fail to take stock of its American-ness and its enormous appeal, though its numeric strength did drastically diminish by the late 1920s. Over 40 years after the movement’s heyday, the historian Kenneth T. Jackson argued that the neat dichotomies used to make sense of the KKK and the 1920s—rural vs. urban, religious vs. secular, wet vs. dry—obscured as much as they revealed. “The prevailing notion that tolerance and acceptance are more easily spawned in the heterogeneous environment of a large city than in a smaller community,” he wrote, “is at best too simple, and perhaps mistaken.”2

Christians in America may not like to acknowledge how influential the Klan was or how the group made strong connections between faith and racial/ethnic purity and God and country. “Religion remains a prominent part of the Klan,” contends Baker, “though many would like to pretend that it’s not.” The popular film Birth of a Nation (1915), which so inspired the second Klan, featured a concluding scene with a white, radiating Christ in Anglo-Saxon heaven. Such obvious links between white supremacy and Christianity, and others made by millions of Americans in the 1920s, cannot be wished away. Still, violence, so goes the logic, is something associated with non-Christian faiths. Or as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other shouting heads from the echo chamber of the Right might put it, such people are not “true Christians.” A 2017 report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that “50 percent of Americans in general say that violence in the name of Islam does not represent Islam—75 percent say the same of Christianity.” There is a clear double standard at work. “White mainline Protestants (77 percent) and Catholics (79 percent),” claimed the PRRI, “reject the idea that true Christians act violently, with 41 percent and 58 percent respectively being willing to say the same of Muslims.”3 Such popular perceptions keep Americans from coming to terms with the real presence of homegrown, vicious religious extremism.

https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2017/06/26/the-klan-white-christianity-and-the-past-and-present-a-response-to-kelly-j-baker-by-randall-j-stephens/

https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-abstract/28/1/155/1001087

The Racist Foundations of Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Slavery is the foundation of racism and power in American evangelicalism. Responses to slavery, both for and against, have fundamentally shaped the evangelical movement in a number of important ways. Many insightful works of history have been written helping to uncover and comb out this story. Drawing on them, this chapter builds out the essential foundation of the story in order to navigate the early period as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of evangelical racism that will form the rest of this book. As a historian, Butler knows that American evangelicals made important and substantial contributions to the abolitionist movement and to the education and uplift of African Americans during Reconstruction. Butler deliberately focuses this chapter on the trajectory of evangelical history that supported slavery, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow, and lynching because this history is the key to understanding how evangelicals used and continue to use scripture, morality, and the political power they gathered across the course of the twentieth and, now, the twenty-first centuries.

https://academic.oup.com/north-carolina-scholarship-online/book/42651/chapter-abstract/360591560

Evangelicals for Adolf: Christians in Hitler’s Germany

Hitler also reached out to opponents, like the Catholics, by signing a Concordat with the Vatican on 8 July 1933. Until then, Catholic voters were loyal to their Centre Party, and it was they who were mainly responsible for denying the Nazis their electoral majorities. Catholics soon adjusted to the dictatorship. Protestants, however, were more sympathetic to Nazism all along. In their church elections of 1933, two-thirds of the voters supported the German Christian sect that wanted to integrate Nazism and Christianity, and to expel Jews who had converted to Protestantism.

Hitler made a brief radio appeal to Protestants on the eve of these church elections, and asked them to show their support for Nazi policies. He could not have been disappointed by the pro-Nazi results.2It was once thought that Christians in Germany would have understood that Nazi ideology and Christianity are polar opposites — and why not, since this is undoubtedly true? But the historical record appears to be more embarrassing.

Several scholars have demonstrated the ambivalent and often positive stand that even members of the Confessing Church took toward the regime. We have come to realize with growing empirical certainty that many Christians of the day believed Nazism to be in some sense a Christian movement.

Even in the later years of the Third Reich, as anticlerical hostility grew, churchmen of both confessions persisted in their belief that Nazism was essentially in conformity with Christian precepts.3At least two matters need to be emphasized: 1) even members of the “Confessing Church” — the most openly evangelical Christians of the time — took an ambivalent or even positive attitude toward Nazi rule; 2) even in the later years of Nazi rule, both Protestant and Catholic church leaders continued to believe that Nazism was in conformity with Christian beliefs. In the later years, the meaning of Nazi rule should have been apparent, but the Christian response was weak or worse.At the root of this was the huge success of Nazi propaganda

https://theopolisinstitute.com/evangelicals-for-adolf-christians-in-hitlers-germany/

Christian Nationalism is a giant threat to our country. A danger to women, to minorities, to the marginalized and to democracy itself. While these white, Christian nationalists believe they’re saving the country from heathenism, what they’re really offering is a theocracy of top down control with themselves at the top. We must see this threat for what it is, and that starts with understanding.

Tim Whitaker is the founder of the New Evangelicals, an inclusive, Jesus-centered community that holds space for those marginalized by the evangelical church and advocates for systemic change.

Raised deep in the evangelical world – Tim had a crisis of faith watching his church leaders embrace a man who was so antithetical to what he had been taught to believe. He now holds the toxic churches and their leaders accountable, while still offering a home of faith to his fellow Christians. Please join us for this incredibly engaging conversation.