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I wonder what authoritarian[0] evangelicals' sleeping dreams are like. I have read theories[1] that suggest their waking dream of establishing Gilead is because they fear the the outside world[2], and considering that even I don't care much for this XXI, I suppose they must be near paranoia with progress.

[0] the adjective is very important here; supposedly Carter has complained in public about the hijacking of US evangelical churches by godbotherers, but while plausible I haven't confirmed the quote.

[1] Bob Altemeyer had academic studies of correlation between fear levels and willingness to follow authoritarian leaders; to me it sounded awfully like the phenomenon of fear-biting in dogs (a vice to be avoided if one is looking for a good hunting prospect).

[2] evidently never having heard « Il faut de tout pour faire un monde » ?

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You speak in propaganda terminology, your assumptions cloud your views imo.

If you explain which assumptions you find cloudy, I can either justify or reëvaluate them.

If you explain which wordings you find propaganda terminology, I might attempt to restate them.

====

Edit: following Linebarger's injunction from Psychological Warfare[0]:

> The point will invariably arise: "This tells me how to listen to a foreign radio. Okay, I'll get the news, the lectures, the plays—all the rest of it. But so what? How am I going to know what's the truth and what's propaganda? How can I tell 'em apart? Tell me that!"

> The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."

let's do an analysis of my post:

Source: 082349872349872 (ostensible, first-use, and, I claim, also the true source), transmitted on HN

Time: Monday morning, no retransmission, non-peculiar time.

Audience: HN

Subject: query on the relation between fear, dreams, and authoritarian evangelicals

Mission: white propaganda soliciting information about content of dreams outside the author's social circles, and informing about the existence of academic studies relating fear and following authoritarian leaders. potential ostensible second-use wrt James "Jimmy" Carter.

Exercise: perform your own analysis, according to the STASM model or your own.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...

He’s probably talking about the Gilead reference. This is the peril of reading fiction - you get some version of the author’s weird fantasies and dreams rattling around in your head. What you have is Atwood in your head. Indeed I originally just downvoted the beginning of this thread, because it seemed really inflammatory, but it seems like you’re posting in good faith.

In real life, approximately zero evangelicals want some kind of Gilead. If you talk to them, the most ideological want some sort of idealized, non-racist high-tech version of the 1950-80s. No doubt there are some cranks out there, but they’re about as common as Westboro Baptist Church members (one family) or the series of weird niche western US cults. The generalization is totally wrong and informed by propaganda.

I’ve thought a lot about how strange it is fiction can have such a powerful effect on people’s perceptions, and people often seem unaware of the propagandistic nature of it. Another example is Atlas Shrugged.

At any rate, being fascinated by the subject of dreams, I have talked to a lot of evangelicals about their dreams and have not noticed any deviation from the norm.

Thank you. [Edit: and thank you very much for the dreams! that's very reassuring, assuming you've also talked with representatives of the authoritarian subset]

Of the approximately 55m conservative evangelicals who don't want some kind of Gilead [edit: is there a proper evangelical term for lone cranks who do wish to immanentise the eschaton, so I can use less loaded vocabulary?], how many would you say:

* believe the US is a secular nation

* believe in maintenance of the separation of Church and State (yes, just like the Haskell weenies?)

If there are substantial numbers who don't (after all, someone is electing the representatives espousing the opposite — but maybe someone else?), what is the difference between their position and my head-canon for Gilead (to be clear: a theocratic state, eg Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, Saudi, the Vatican etc.)?

PS. Being partial to disco, and neither Argentinian nor El Salvadoran nor Pakistani, of that range I'd be happiest with an idealised non-racist high-tech late 1970s. As it appears that even Baptists dance in the twenty-first century, who are the evangelicals with whom I could find common ground on this project?

PPS. Upon reflection, if I were to roll back time, how about the 1990s but part of the idealisation is we actually get a Peace Dividend?

PPPS. ...and neither Canter&Siegel nor Eternal September nor the Yugoslav wars ever happened. maybe idealisation is not as easy as it appears...

P4S. was it at least clear that "authoritarian" was meant to constrain, ie pick out a subset, not generically describe, "evangelicals"?

The US currently implements (and I support) one of the most thorough versions of religious egalitarianism anywhere in the world, which dates to the work of James Madison (whose writing on the topic is instructive). The UK, on the other hand, has a state religion (Anglicanism), and many countries in Europe (including Germany and Sweden) retain a "church tax". Does that qualify as "Gilead"?

No.

> my head-canon for Gilead (to be clear: a theocratic state, eg Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, Saudi, the Vatican etc.)

cf https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-016... , found thanks to https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel05.html#obj142 .

> In real life, approximately zero evangelicals want some kind of Gilead. If you talk to them, the most ideological want some sort of idealized, non-racist high-tech version of the 1950-80s.

I talk to a lot of american evangelicals and this isn't true either. A fair portion of them do want the racism back in the form of segregation, they just know not to use either term to describe their ideal.

They also do want moderate-to-heavy restrictions on or punishment for abortion, birth control, homosexuality, miscegenation, divorce, women owning property. It's not quite gilead but it's a lot closer to that than to "the 80s without racism."

You'll probably rarely run into people who are actively and openly pursuing a government that would implement all of those policies. But framed individually and neutrally for example "should no-fault divorce be removed" these are mainstream positions.

I didn't get my opinion here from fiction or the internet. I've lived a lot of my life among american evangelicals and am a practicing christian even now. I have a lot of ties to this world still for complex reasons. Walking back and cracking down on a lot of the social freedoms gained in the last few generations are unfortunately popular ideas that you can't dismiss as "just some cranks."

Weird. Your circle and my circles must have zero overlap. Your description is entirely alien to me.

Yeah seems likely. I don't want to get too much into the details but I know a lot of "George W." type christians; converted under hardship, their core belief is likely sincere but they aren't necessarily invested in nuanced understanding of its role in a broader public life. They look to their church leadership for that, locally but also in the vast mainstream of evangelical bookstores, podcasts, radio stations.

A domain that is becoming more narrow in its understanding of scripture and extreme about applying it. Look at someone like Beth Moore, a highly prominent figure in this world and by no means a liberal or progressive, viciously chased out for openly holding a view on marriage¹ that would have been easily accepted by evangelicals even a generation ago, and that many probably do privately hold still.

So yes it's entirely possible our evangelical acquaintances have little overlap. But still, these are mainstream views right now and growing more so. You can find dominionist books by prominent christian authors in the window displays of christian bookstores. It may not be the majority of evangelicals, but it is a significant portion and making it the majority is explicitly one of their goals. Dismissing this movement as fringe is irresponsible imo.

¹: The view is "egalitarianism" the idea that both genders have equal privileges and responsibilities within marriage. This is not "wokeism" my southern baptist grandparents believed this.

Between your footnote and https://religionnews.com/2021/03/09/bible-teacher-beth-moore... I am left speechless.

> viciously chased out

Now that you mention it, I recall the Dixie Chicks getting cancelled for openly suggesting that maybe the Iraq adventure wasn't such a good idea.

If you are from the commonwealth(?) yank religion might be strange. I don't know how your country does things; my adopted country requires preachers of whatever religion to have accredited degrees (DTh? I don't know how strict). But as mentioned elsewhere, there is (in light of this year's news, ought to be?) an arm's length relationship between church and state in the States, and so anyone is free to hang out their shingle as a Pastor, eg https://www.ulc.org/minister-store/doctor-of-divinity-degree

The problem with generalizations about “evangelical christians”, which often means unaffiliated baptists, is that you can’t generalize them… there’s no meaningful governance.

Most people of faith are just people who are trying to make sense of the world. But sometimes Pastor Bob is a controlling Nazi, and uses faith and religion as a way to spew his worldview and poison those around them.

Political operators and others exploit that faith too. The Giliad stuff gets pitched as faith adjacent, so parents or faith leaders who don’t know better get it in the hands of kids etc. It’s one of the reasons why keeping politics away from religion is important.

> The problem with generalizations about “evangelical christians”, which often means unaffiliated baptists, is that you can’t generalize them… there’s no meaningful governance.

Indeed. I grew up in a church that called itself "Evangelical Lutheran". Most of the stories I read about "evangelicals" online are completely alien to me. Like evangelicals supposedly taking the Book of Revelations seriously.. my pastor described it as ancient science fiction, allegorical at best but mostly incoherent nonsense. Any "mark of the beast" talk was considered raving lunacy in my evangelical church. That position on Revelations doesn't square with what the internet says evangelicals believe.

I've also never heard the word 'Gilead' before this thread. I'm not sure what it means.

I think 'Gilead' is the setting of the Handmaid's tale. Threw me for a loop also till I saw the Atwood reference in a reply.

Yes, sorry. Maybe I should have used a less literary term, such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_nationalism#United_S...

> you can’t generalize them

An example I thought of this evening: compare and contrast Joel Osteen with Jimmy Carter. (or even just the house of the former with the houses of the latter)

Both evangelical, but living very different theologies.

I tried to reply but hn stopped me because 3 comments in 15min is too much so had to wait hours.

Consider the term "evangelical authoritarian" and the conclusion you cane up with about fear and paranoia in their dreams.

The propaganda interpretation is a reductive "basically white americans who support trump" but in reality if you took time to understand what that phrase means perhaps you will see how your conclusion or the phrase itself make no sense at all.

My intention was to nudge to the direction of critically examining your assumptions not to say you had bad intentions or that I was free from incorrect assumptions myself.

No worries, unfortunately I've passed the time limit when I can edit the original post to clarify.

    [e for e in evangelicals where authoritarian(e)]

Assuming ~100m US evangelicals, only ~55m are conservative, and presumably only some fraction of those are authoritarian, in the sense that they could willingly support the kind of authoritarianism under which dreams change. Trump support was, at 74m, substantially higher than the number of people I had been intending to discuss.

(Also feel free to directly point out my errors next time; I married into a culture which is far more direct than the anglophone and may have gone native in areas)

Cheers!

Why would the term "evangelical authoritarian" be nonsensical? There are some very hierarchical evangelical subcultures, that frown on criticizing higher ups have very strict rules and do nurture "us vs them" way of looking at the world.

The "evangelical authoritarian" does describe them well.

And I am saying that as someone who grew in evangelical church. Mine was significantly less authoritarian then it gets to be, but I still read enough texts produced by authoritarian ones and had enough contact to know it is not made up construct.

Useless comment. Brings absolutely no new information to the table.

Anyone can accuse anyone of speaking in propaganda terminology, it doesn't mean anything in itself, as there's no clear distinction between "propaganda terminology" and "non-propaganda terminology" - propaganda often uses terminology that is also used in non-propaganda conversations.

And our assumptions are always influencing our views, that's kind of a given - you can't have views without assumptions. Are you implying that you, yourself, don't have any assumptions, but instead rely on some kind of divine truth?

> ... don't have any assumptions, but instead rely on some kind of divine truth?

No. But I would appreciate it when others point it out when my conclusions are incorrect because of my assumptions. It helps me self-reflect, that was my intent when commenting.

Pointing out someone's conclusions are incorrect is useless unless you also point out why they're incorrect. Everyone has an opinion, it's the reasoning that matters.

In some fields, like mathematics, pointing out "this result is incorrect" can be useful in itself, but that's because of the deeply technical nature of mathematics itself - mechanical verification of correctness is feasible.

In ordinary conversation, things aren't that black-and-white, and pointing out that something is wrong doesn't in itself provide valuable input for self-reflection. Providing some more information why is always more helpful than just saying "you're wrong, figure it out".

You didn't point anything out though. I'm sure in your mind there was a meaning to "propoganda terminology" but that set of associations doesn't exist outside your head. So from our perspective, all that you expressed was, "I don't like your ideas, I think you should rethink them, but I'm not going to offer you any criticism or point you in what I think is the right direction."

If your statement hinges on understanding the working of someone's mind, it should be rephrased to rely on the ideas expressed in their comment; your opinion on whether someone's thinking is "clouded by assumptions" isn't worth discussing because it's not something you could possibly know. If you're right about it, you're right like a stopped clock.

If you nebulously posit someone is wrong without highlighting specific views and indicating why you believe they're wrong, you haven't made a criticism, you've made a swipe. This is a more wordy was to say, "you're dumb."

"propaganda" is overstating it, but it's hardly a respectful engagement (e.g. "godbotherers"). They appear to have no deep engagement with real evangelical Christians, preferring to argue from stereotypes and pure conjecture arising therefrom.

Anyway, you're not entirely correct, but they're pretty clearly bordering on trolling.

Sorry. To me, a "godbotherer" is someone who is more Churchy than (in this case) Christian. Would pharisee be better? (I had avoided this choice originally due to the slur on actual Pharisees) Or something else?

(see also the note in sibling thread about the importance of the adjective "authoritarian": the godbotherer reference was not meant to be respectful, but neither was it meant to refer to real evangelical Christians.)

In my experience, "godbotherer" is a pejorative description of religious people generally, usually Christians. If "authoritarian" is referring to the "subsetting" p4s, no, it was not at all clear that it was intended to subset rather than describe. I definitely see it as describing rather than subsetting.

This read mostly as a "those damn Evangelicals, am I right?" which is a common enough sentiment, especially in tech circles.

Sorry, I had thought the footnote highlighting the importance of the adjective, the mention of Carter (for those unaware of last century's US politics: an evangelical who became President) as being in a different camp from the authoritarian camp, and the image of real evangelicals as having been hijacked, would all have sufficed to convey the subsetting usage, but I erred. peccavi

No worries. In the interactions, you're much less trollish than I first took you as. Perhaps we can all get along after all. :)

Cheers!

To me, "godbotherer" is a pejorative term specifically referring to people who try to convert others to their religion (in annoying and intrusive ways), not religious people in general.

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