this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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GMS notes that a lot of theists, especially Christians are traumatized by early indoctrination regarding Hell. Ex-Christians still have to process Hell-related anxiety both those lingering doubts that they might be doomed to eternal suffering, and also concern for their friends and loved ones who are still in the fold being manipulated to serve an abusive institution.
This is one of his videos about Hell and how it is inconsistent between faiths, yet each one condemns apostasy more than any other alleged sin.
I don't understand how Americans practice Christianity that it traumatizes people? I remember hearing from someone else how religion had traumatized him from childhood. Which is strange to hear for me since I've been introduced to Christianity as a child, but don't care much about religion or "hell" nowadays...
Christianity in the US is less about the message of love your neighbor and more about calling out sin and demanding repentence. In 2017 during analysis of the 2016 General Election it was traced that 80% of White Protestant Evangelists (a bloc of about 80 million Americans) voted for Trump knowing full well of his character. When asked, evangelists routinely were forgiving of his history of philandering while being critical of Clinton for what her husband did.
Sins, according to American Evangelical voters, are for other people, what I hypothesized was about what kept parishioners coming to service and filling collection plates. Even the USCCB is more concerned about the wars against gays and women than the wars against hunger and poverty. True to Christian nationalist rhetoric, sermons of hate are more popular than sermons about responsibility to the community.
That said there are some good studies about the rise of the Religious Right with Jerry Falwell, freshly sore in the 1960s over interracial marriage and the end of segregation, who used the abortion controversy to create a voting bloc of single-issue voters who were concerned about no other platform. The Moral Majority figured largely in Reagan's 1980 landslide and the shift rightward of US culture from then forward.
So yeah, Christianity in the US has completely been repurposed into a far-right hyperconformist, white power ideology.