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"Manipulation in the name of religion" is a matter of great concern to me, particularly as it relates to the Radical Right and to Trumpism, but it is also a subject I need to define precisely before I can talk rightly about it. It is an odd concept, I think, to people who do not profess or follow any particular faith or spiritual practice. When we consider that religion deals primarily with matters of faith, morality, or spirit, rather than observable, demonstrable principles and even the thought processes associated with reason and deduction, it is curious in a way to make a claim that the adherents of this or that faith or practice have been manipulated. "Well yes," a skeptic might say, "they've been manipulated into believing something not provable in the first place!" So any assertion that some religious practitioners/ believers are more manipulated than others, or that a particular denomination or type of religious person might be more susceptible to manipulation, might require distinguishing further the particular manipulation to which it refers.
In the case of Evangelical Trumpism, this distinction is fairly clear in my mind: The Protestant Christian tradition does not by definition make assertions that are provably not so. Or at least, the claims it makes and the values it teaches are not centered on objectively disputable claims. Yes, historic and scientific scholarship can find many faults in fact with the millennia-old observations of both Old and New Testament sacred texts. But I am not talking about these kinds of factual disputations. What I call manipulation, and its basis in asserting that which is not so, is willful misrepresentation by Evangelical Protestant leaders of what Biblical texts essentially mean, and what their stated principles imply for moral growth and ethical behavior, including how they do interact with bodies of objectively established knowledge.
The sense the Christian church has as a whole of how to reconcile ancient Biblical ideas and notions with modern scientific discovery and historical scholarship is a sense of the need to reconcile what we once believed with what we now know, or feel confident in accepting as fact. In contrast to this, the Evangelical schools of Christian thought that I call manipulative repeatedly doubt, question, and deny many of the discoveries of scientists and historians, even flatly rejecting the intellectual reasoning processes that support much modern thought and objective observation. Leaders of these religious groups consider the newer, more objectively established findings to be symptoms of evil, heathen, or politically biased indoctrination of society: itself a form of manipulation. At least, that is what appears on the surface to motivate what and how they teach/preach.
But we can dig deeper in searching out why certain sects do this, and I think I have discovered some plausible motivations. As with many other problems of modern societies and reasons for manipulating or deceiving their members, one can find some answers initially by Following The Money.
When we examine the religious movements in American Evangelical Christianity that most visibly dovetailed their doctrine and societal interaction with GOP political tenets, particularly those of the Radical Right and the "Moral Majority," we see a set of beliefs and practices that put great stock in "traditional American values" and a love of God and Country in harmony with this. The sacredness of the birth process, of traditional marriage and gender roles, and of keeping oneself "unstained by the world" are central to this. The "other" is seen as a threat, and the religion-politics divide does not keep many or most of them from seeing America as a Christian Nation, one that should be kept so.
But what do we not see as guidelines for ethical behavior and moral character in those churches' teachings? For one example, their aforementioned scorn of science and intellectualism rejects new scientific information about what racial differences genuinely are, how industrialization and its resultant pollution threaten our planet, what are the biological forces behind gender identity and sexuality, and how old the Earth and the Universe are, as well as historical information on how human society began, how religion developed, and what were the forces behind war, conquest, and enslavement of human beings by other human beings.
What are the reasons for Christian churches to ignore or shun these matters, wrapped up as they are in concepts of right and wrong arguably as important as an embryo's right to life, the sacredness of marriage, or the need to have a government explicitly based on Christian principles? An answer may be found in identifying who might be threatened by an evolving moral sense with a greater knowledge of science, history, and the interconnectedness and diversity that benefit all of humanity.
Who might be threatened? People and organizations built to profit from traditional knowledge and values are endangered, in their view, from challenging those traditions. Dig deeper. Certain values held in certain ways by the populace as a whole benefit certain people and organizations, and they rise to the top in terms of wealth and power. Those who benefit in tangible ways from society's movements want to keep benefiting, and those with enough wealth and power have, through that wealth and power, the means to satisfy that want. But new ideas and sensibilities, manifest in America by evolving notions of equality, diversity, and interconnectedness, along with greater knowledge of what benefits and harms life on Planet Earth, threaten many established values that profited the White Male Landowners (and slave owners) of past centuries, that justified the exile and genocide of Native tribes in the name of our "Manifest Destiny," and that protect the coffers of today's corporate heads, industrialists, and investment bankers.
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has shown how racist ideas took root when planted by preachers and pundits funded by the shrewd and powerful beneficiaries of the spread of such ideas: the captains of industry and empire. I believe it is the ideological descendants, if not many of the financial heirs, to that industrial, imperial wealth and power, that have more than enough motive and means to manipulate millions of gullible religious minds in America today, in the Twenty-First Century, just as they did in our centuries past. And the damage done by these same shrewd and powerful becoming overconfident and advancing what became the Trumpist agenda, based quite predictably in racism, anti-intellectualism, sexism, and anti-environmentalism, can only disappear if we wake up from our gullibility and work together to fight forces that try to manipulate the faithful by indoctrinating them in what is demonstrably not so.
What are the reasons for Christian churches to ignore or shun these matters, wrapped up as they are in concepts of right and wrong arguably as important as an embryo's right to life, the sacredness of marriage, or the need to have a government explicitly based on Christian principles? An answer may be found in identifying who might be threatened by an evolving moral sense with a greater knowledge of science, history, and the interconnectedness and diversity that benefit all of humanity.
Who might be threatened? People and organizations built to profit from traditional knowledge and values are endangered, in their view, from challenging those traditions. Dig deeper. Certain values held in certain ways by the populace as a whole benefit certain people and organizations, and they rise to the top in terms of wealth and power. Those who benefit in tangible ways from society's movements want to keep benefiting, and those with enough wealth and power have, through that wealth and power, the means to satisfy that want. But new ideas and sensibilities, manifest in America by evolving notions of equality, diversity, and interconnectedness, along with greater knowledge of what benefits and harms life on Planet Earth, threaten many established values that profited the White Male Landowners (and slave owners) of past centuries, that justified the exile and genocide of Native tribes in the name of our "Manifest Destiny," and that protect the coffers of today's corporate heads, industrialists, and investment bankers.
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has shown how racist ideas took root when planted by preachers and pundits funded by the shrewd and powerful beneficiaries of the spread of such ideas: the captains of industry and empire. I believe it is the ideological descendants, if not many of the financial heirs, to that industrial, imperial wealth and power, that have more than enough motive and means to manipulate millions of gullible religious minds in America today, in the Twenty-First Century, just as they did in our centuries past. And the damage done by these same shrewd and powerful becoming overconfident and advancing what became the Trumpist agenda, based quite predictably in racism, anti-intellectualism, sexism, and anti-environmentalism, can only disappear if we wake up from our gullibility and work together to fight forces that try to manipulate the faithful by indoctrinating them in what is demonstrably not so.
