Reblog: “The Christian Right is Radicalizing White People I Love”

Years ago, I was very disturbed by things I heard from Tracy, Richard’s wife; her views on politics struck me as lacking in empathy and compassion–and very, very misguided (climate change, for example).  She claimed to be a Christian, but I did not see any evidence of this in fruits of the spirit.  It was a relief to cut off relations with her when her abuse of me, her children, and Richard finally became intolerable.  (If not for her being married to Richard, I wouldn’t have put up with her at all, let alone for two and a half years.)

As for Richard, he was a bit better in some ways–He was compassionate toward immigrants, having seen firsthand what draconian border policies do to people.  But he had extremist views of his own that began to get very disturbing.

When I started seeing a couple I knew in college start making similar comments on Facebook, I decided to cut the cord there, too.  I couldn’t make any political posts without this couple making some snide remark.

Lately, however, I’ve been seeing views like theirs showing up more and more on my Facebook news feed, whether people’s posts or their responses to mine.  I’ve already unfriended a few people and changed my settings so I can block another person from seeing certain posts.  But I can’t unfriend family or people I see all the time.

And it’s not just my imagination.  John Pavlovitz writes in The Christian Right is Radicalizing White People I Love,

I could rewind over the previous months and see all the alarmist Fox News talking points in their words at family gatherings and on Facebook: open borders letting in floods of rapists, baby-killing Democrats coming to take their guns, terrorist Muslims lurking everywhere, violent black men threatening police at traffic stops.

And looking back I could see that as they found Fox News, they began to lose their religion.

…

They abandoned any reference to Jesus’ words about kindness or generosity or welcoming strangers or sharing what you had with those who had not—instead, they slowly but quite clearly adopted a bastardized, angry, America First, gun-loving, immigrant-hating, racist white religion that has become the Republican usurping of God.

So whether it’s anti-Muslim legislation or LGBTQ hate crimes or migrant kids taken from their parents or children orphaned by mass shooting or Presidents fat-shaming protestors—there is always an excuse, always a justification, always a Fox News alternative reality or Franklin Graham tweet to bunker down in.

The same thing has happened in the white people I’ve served in churches here in the South over the last decade. Their social media feeds are increasingly littered with Brietbart fictional pieces about Hillary eating children and wild conspiracy theories about LGBTQ people converting their children.

The change in them has been as stunning in its velocity and stomach-turning in its depths—and the worst part is that I can’t reach them anymore. Before, I could meet them in the common ground of our shared faith in Jesus and in the clarity of objective truth. They no longer have use nor tolerance for such things.

…But this is what happens when decent, intelligent people become radicalized: they get polluted by the things they watch and the sermons they sit through and the nonsense they read, and they surround themselves with an echo chamber made of equally-deluded, equally frightened people—until one day they are the religious extremists that they always used to warn you about.

There is much more there about watching your loved ones turn into right-wing extremists.  Since I’ve started making political posts on Facebook again after years of avoiding them, I’ve seen comments that make my hair stand on end–from people I thought were better than that.  I’ve unfriended people I had crushes on in school.  I’ve unfriended the mother of a friend.

I’ve wished I could unfriend relatives and friends who see my posts on the treatment of immigrants and say “I’d vote for Trump again” and make snarky comments that mirror GOP talking points.  I’ve heard people say things that seem to come out of left field–then, sometime later, hear those same wacky comments come from some GOP politician or pundit or other right-winger.

And yes, I wonder if this is what it was like for Germans who kept their sanity but watched their friends/relatives/colleagues fall in love with Hitler.

Again, the article is The Christian Right is Radicalizing White People I Love by John Pavlovitz.  Comments here are turned off so you can put them on his blog.