Reading Russell Moore’s article left me feeling dissatisfied – particularly on the issue of why Evangelicals, and American conservatives more generally, are so especially vulnerable to believing, and therefore acting on, fake news and conspiracy theories – such actions tending to further inflame the ‘culture wars’.
I am starting this as a new, Side Conversation, in an attempt to facilitate freer flow of conversation.
I should start by saying that I am by no means claiming that the following viewpoints are either canonical, nor necessarily the complete picture.
This blog post struck me as providing a good explanation:
Religion, too, has an important role to play in the political learning process. Not only is American Christianity increasingly intertwined with Republican partisanship, but religion itself provides tools for resisting information from secular sources of information. Evangelical Christians are taught to resist “worldly” influences in favor of trustworthy, Godly resources. In my 2019 paper, I find that religion has an independent negative effect on media trust and—consequently—knowledge of surveillance-policy issues. Contrary to what some on the left might think, I do not find that religious Americans are any less politically aware overall than secular citizens, controlling for other factors. However, on questions that require attention to and learning from the media to know, highly religious Americans are less likely to answer correctly, in large part because of high levels of distrust in and disdain for mainstream media outlets. To answer the question of whether religion affects political knowledge, the answer depends on what type of knowledge we’re talking about and whether the person has adopted a religious worldview that lends itself to rejecting secular authority and credibility.
This credibility problem becomes more acute when politicians such as Donald Trump double-down on sowing distrust for sources that report critical information. Trump carefully cultivated his supporters’ animus toward so-called “fake news,” which increasingly referred to anything that painted him in a negative light. Conservative white evangelicals were effectively presented with the following choice: believe Trump, who embodies your political aspirations, and protects your status and interests; or follow the secular news media, which despises your values and lifestyle. Trump White House advisor Kellyanne Conway was widely mocked by Democrats for saying the Trump administration used “alternative facts,” but this really gets at the heart of the phenomenon. It is quite politically useful if you can routinely discredit negative reporting from sources out of your control and construct an impenetrable reality that your supporters will adopt and are already trained to defend.
This dovetailed with something else I had read:
[Underyling research article here]
Donald Trump would seem to be to be the epitome of a Low Conscientiousness influencer, and I think I can discern a similar tendency in both many of his MAGA acolytes and in many of the action of the current House Leadership.
Where “Evangelical Christians are taught to resist ‘worldly’ influences” such as the mainstream media, and science, and to trust more “Godly” sources, which are increasingly being infested with Low Conscientiousness Conservative-injected misinformation, it is hardly surprising if their views, and thus their actions, are at ever-increasing divergence both to mainstream America, and to reality.
I think this misplaced trust is the direct consequence of Evangelical culture, a culture that Russell Moore has been one of the leaders in shaping in recent decades, and I really don’t think that some additional prayer and Bible-reading is going to have any appreciable impact on its trajectory.
[Mod edit: adding link to previous discussion.]
