Post
You know what's weird?
Being homeschooled in religious fundamentalism & being laughed at over the years for how irrelevant everything I have experienced supposedly is because it's outside the mainstream, only for those belief systems to become extremely important for everyone to understand because they are one of the major forces controlling the US government, thereby making the broader religious community I belonged to a huge problem for the whole world.
Unexpected plot twist in my life.
Having grown up on the inside of evangelicalism & just getting out just as Trump came to power, it was kind of a shock to me how few people outside of evangelicalism had ever considered the evangelical Christian Nationalist project to be a serious threat worthy of paying attention to.
In pop culture when I was a teenager, Christian fundamentalists were frequently nothing more than a fucking punchline, like people thought they were harmless.
@artemis They also, by and large, have no idea just how deeply Evangelicalism permeates American culture, particularly in the South and Midwest. Even the staunch atheists still have heads full of Evangelical ideas and often feel they need to give deference to Christianity if you frame it the right way to trigger the brainwashing.
American Catholics too...well, at least this one...
Well, Maronite in my heart..
But it's probably at least partly why I'm pro #ubi #UniversalHealthCare #FreeEducation #FullArtisticEmployment #UniversalHousing and and and...
As a reaction to the absurd (and DEADLY) work ethic
@VoxOfGod @faithisleaping @artemis
and often feel they need to give deference to Christianity if you frame it the right way to trigger the brainwashing.
I was like that too, in the 90s...
There's a long story behind why I in particular felt like I had to "be tolerant" of completely bonkers beliefs, despite having been raised in a more science-oriented, non-religious household and being intensely skeptical of of it from a very early age; the TL;DR is that I had a friend in high school who was herself brainwashed into Catholicism and who was pretty well-programmed with all those "tolerance" talking-points... and I ultimately didn't want to hurt her by attacking beliefs she felt she needed in order to survive...
(She later did a self-unalive for reasons which I suspect are related.)
Y'all, they were training kids on how to get access to politics as teenagers (you would not *believe* the number of pages in state legislatures who were homeschooled). The idea was always infiltration & takeover, & we talked about it *publicly* at big conferences & gatherings. It was in our curriculum as homeschoolers or Christian school students. Some Christian colleges were founded specifically with the purpose of training Christian young people to get access to political power.
And see... there's that cult shit: one of the ways Christian Nationalists have been able to gain so much power is because they have access to a lot of free labor, including *child labor*. If you can dovetail the religious purpose with the political purpose, you've got a lot of people who will work very hard for you for free in service of "God's" mission.
@artemis My first real political awareness started when Dubya inexplicably won re-election in 2004. Evengelicals made up a large part of his base -- and it was pretty clear to me that they were a large part of why such an incompetent dufus (who would have been much better for the world as a painter -- something for which he at least had apparent aptitude) was even electable the first time.
That's when I started Issuepedia -- and the first 5 years or so are heavily focused on analysis of that particular flavor of RW BS.
...so, yeah, I guess it really matters how much any individual is paying attention to what's going on beyond their front door. If you're just staring at the closed door, from the inside, I guess all the ominous chanting and shouting outside just sounds like normal traffic-noises or something.
