In the wake of the Pew Research Center’s findings that 84 percent of the white evangelical Protestant vote went to former President Donald Trump in 2020, it is more important than ever for the American public to face the uncomfortable truth about the authoritarian Christian right’s deleterious impact on society, culture and politics.
Some of us have been pushing for this conversation for years, with various iterations of relevant data and scholarship helping to elucidate key points. During the 2016 primaries, a few political scientists drew attention to a link between authoritarian personality traits and support for Trump. For Religion Dispatches, I wrote at the time, “if ‘a desire for order and a fear of outsiders’ predicts Trump support, the question of why white evangelicals are backing a trash-talking billionaire can be easily […]
There are disturbing echoes of “les Pétainistes”and the Vichy regime in the 1940s, its mix of xenophobia, authoritarian, law ‘n’ order folks who wanted a return to Christian values and who feared those Résistance “terrorists.”
It seems like the same thing that happened to us “hippies” who wanted to stop war, and make love the motivating factor with wellbeing and happiness for everyone, yet we were compared to “terrorists”, also!