I wonder why religious conservatives are mostly synonymous with capitalism supporters ? I mean arent most religions inherently socialistic ? What makes conservatives support capitalism , despite not being among the rich?
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Fox News. Televangelists. Trump.
Religion can be a very positive tool to bring communities together and support one another, but capitalism means exploitation, and nothing’s easier to exploit than blind faith.
Religion has been sucking the teet of conservative politics for a LOT longer than Fox News, Televangelist, and Trump have been around.
It goes far deeper and is way more fundamental than those things.
I agree completely, but on the surface, those are the three biggest modern contributors.
A lot of people’s “sincerely held” beliefs are only skin-deep, so surface-level agitators and misinformation peddlers do have a lot of power in our society. If they ceased to exist, I suspect a lot of the hatred and vitriol their followers spew would cease, as well - assuming an equally-evil replacement didn’t immediately rise.
A lot of people are stuck in their stale echo chambers, and just getting a breath of fresh air could do them wonders.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
He’s a bit of both, I’d say.
I wonder why would a person keep a rich persons interest over their own ? Free or affordable healthcare and college would be such a great help , and while the planet can support food and housing for all , many are deliberately kept hungry and homeless and that is rooted in corporate greed most of the times . Gulliblity at another level!
I wonder why would a person keep a rich persons interest over their own ?
There’s no such thing as a poor Republican voter, just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
Omg 😂😂😅
Temporarily embarrassed billionaires now.
They get told the current hierarchy is gods will and they’re not allowed to subvert that
The guise that they will someday be the one with the boot, they don’t wanna miss their chance be be the very boot they lick. Propaganda is a powerful tool.
I mean I know people who think that elon is making them rich coz their tesla shares jumped, and at the same time they dont want college to be affordable because they paid for it in whole ( tho these ppl are mostly boomers and older gen)
I agree with the other two. But I think it’s disingenuous to say Trump, because this behavior has existed since long before Trump was relevant in politics.
It also existed since long before Fox News and even Televangelists
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True. He’s more a symptom than a cause. He certainly isn’t helping.
While I 100% agree with you, I think you listed the symptoms rather than the root cause. Religious people have been supporting the Republican party well… religiously since as long as I can remember, well before Trump and Fox News.
I think it’s something that the Republican party has specifically built their messaging around and then those things have grown out of it as a result. Someone posted a good article the other day about how politicians supporting segregation were able to manufacture a wedge issue (abortion) in the 70s to capture the religious vote, who didn’t see it as a religious issue until they were basically told it was.
In a term? Dominion mentality. Add a little master/servant hierarchy, a pinch of patriarchy and stir well.
…with a heavy does of the Property Gospel to keep the plebs in line.
Because conservatism is more important to them than religion, essentially.
Does not explain why do they support capitalistic policies , and this is not just in the US but other countries too!
It does.
(You can say the same about existing socialist democratic policies, too.)
It’s just indoctrination.
People believe what they are taught, and relatively few questions anything seriously.
The majority of people continue to believe the religion they were raised in.
The majority of people believe in the economic system they were raised in.
The majority of the world’s countries use mixes of capitalist & socialist policies (ie free-market economies with social safety net programs).
So most people support capitalist free-market systems, and would say they are pro-capitalism.
They also don’t want you to cut their retirement government program levels.
And though most won’t claim to support socialism, they love firefighters or libraries or roads, and they can’t tell there’s no difference. Because they aren’t taught to question.
And most don’t want to replace their existing systems with completely different systems. They just want them to provide better tesults and be less costly.
Religion is most effective at converting those more inclined to believe propaganda & appeals to authority.
So these dichotomies are even worse & more prevalent for the religious.
Those people breed children of mostly similar sentiment. If raised capitalist, those religious children won’t question the obvious conflict. Their authorities tell them it’s ok.
Their authorities may even modify the religion to fit the mold (ie Prosperity Gospel).
The religious authorities who suggest questioning existing systems receive pushback from followers and the system itself when they encourage critical thinking regarding the conflicts of capitalism and religion.
Examples include Martin Luther King Jr & the current Pope, both of whom were not well received with their criticisms of capitalism.
So again, it is just indoctrination with a sprinkling of ignorance.
The just-world hypothesis plays a big part.
Basically karma ? So do they believe that their actions will reap them benefits ? While they want to discrimiate people on basis of race and sexuality ?
There’s an authoritarian theme to it all. They believe their god to be all-powerful and all-just. Therefore, that god must reward good actions and punish bad ones. The reward that our global society seems to run the most on is money. Therefore, any actions that gain you a lot of money must be good actions, thereby justifying the means of capitalism.
Prosperity theology, they call it.
Here’s a satirical passage from Terry Prachett’s Small Gods that I absolutely love:
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.
The Protestant Work Ethic equated Christian values with material success.
Diligence, discipline and frugality? In America?
You will find that very often the scams, advice, self-help, doctrine, etc that draw these populations have one thing in common: if whatever it is doesn’t work, it is because you are doing it wrong, not because the guidance is bad. That’s why conservatives will defend the tax rates of people who have 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than they do - they believe that it is their own fault they aren’t rich, and that anyone can become rich if they just try hard enough. It is why religious conservatives will still attack birth control in the face of their own kids having unwanted pregnancies. It is why natural medicine people will defend their practices even after it sends them to the hospital. They are more willing to believe that they themselves are at fault than the principles they believe in.
This should be higher up
See also the Prosperity Gospel.
Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it’s a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.
The people that aren’t wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they’re not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.
But it seems like in general white conservatives are at the extreme bottom in most scenarios… they’re just also blinded by the “it’s just not my turn to be rich yet” fallacy.
If you’re at the extreme bottom there’s little chance to move upwards in capitalism but it’s comforting to have some undesirables who have it even worse than you.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. JohnsonBoth religion and capitalism ensure white conservatives always have someone to look down on and they in return lends them their loud voice & violence.
ETA : Religion + capitalism’s symbiotic behaviour is not restricted to white conservatives. They have the same relationship with every ethnic & religious majoritarian conservative. India has been experiencing it since 2014 where Hindu supremacists support big corporates even when the corporates have created enormous inflation. In return these corporates control mainstream media and fund Hindu supremacist leaders who paint targets on the back of minority religions (currently, Muslims & Christians).
They don’t really support capitalism. They are simply submissive to authorities and support whatever their leaders say.
Have you considered that they happened to just be born into the best country in the world, the one true religion, and it’s everyone else’s job to step in line?
They have socialistic choices too , if we dont talk about the US , there are actual socialistic parties , and still the religious conservatives support partys those are capitalistic.
Let’s use Hong Kong as an example.
Conservatives in Hong Kong are pro-Beijing. Most Buddhist and Taoist organisations in Hong Kong are pro-Beijing as well. Catholic communities in Hong Kong seem to be very divided politically.
That’s what I observed in Hong Kong. Most of the conservatives don’t seem to care about capitalism vs socialism, they just blindly follow their leaders.
Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing!
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The comment that it took two thousand years for the church to land on its current stance on abortion is not entirely accurate. The Didache, an early Christian writing including a section on Christian ethics, explicitly forbids it.
Your KJV is a really weird tangent. The KJV is the cornerstone in the Anglo-world because it was one of the only English translations. The Catholic Church continued to primarily use Latin Bibles (The Vulgate) until Vatican 2 when the Novus Ordo used local vernacular.
Wanting a Bible in the language you speak and your subjects speak isn’t putting yourself over God. Please let us know what critical changes were made in the KJV that supports capitalism, a mode of economics that wouldn’t be theorized for atleast another century.
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The first widely published English Bible was the Tyndale bible, which heavily influenced the Geneva Bible, both of which is what the KJV is mostly based on and competed with until King James banned the Geneva Bible.
While no Bible mentions or supports capitalism for the reasons you mentioned, both of those earlier translations had an anti-authoritarian bent to them that King James certainly didn’t like, and had edited.
Soon after Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, the flaws of both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible (namely, that the Geneva Bible did not “conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy”) became painfully apparent.
The Bishop of London added a qualification that the translators would add no marginal notes (which had been an issue in the Geneva Bible). King James cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the marginal notes offensive to the principles of divinely ordained royal supremacy: Exodus 1:19, where the Geneva Bible notes had commended the example of civil disobedience to the Egyptian Pharaoh showed by the Hebrew midwives, and also II Chronicles 15:16, where the Geneva Bible had criticized King Asa for not having executed his idolatrous ‘mother’, Queen Maachah (Maachah had actually been Asa’s grandmother, but James considered the Geneva Bible reference as sanctioning the execution of his own mother Mary, Queen of Scots). Further, the King gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England. Certain Greek and Hebrew words were to be translated in a manner that reflected the traditional usage of the church. For example, old ecclesiastical words such as the word “church” were to be retained and not to be translated as “congregation”. The new translation would reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and traditional beliefs about ordained clergy.
Tyndale’s use of the word ‘Congregation’ instead of church had pretty far reaching implications:
When Tyndale translated the Greek word ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía) as congregation, he was thereby undermining the entire structure of the Catholic Church.
Many of the reform movements believed in the authority of scripture alone. To them it dictated how a “true” church should be organized and administered. By changing the translation from church to congregation Tyndale was providing ammunition for the beliefs of the reformers. Their belief that the church was not a visible systematized institution but a body defined by believers, however organized, who held a specifically Protestant understanding of the Gospel and salvation was now to be found directly in Tyndale’s translation of Scripture.
I wouldn’t say any of that explains how the KJV would influence religious conservatives to support capitalism, but I guess it could potentially have an influence over an acceptance of dogmatism within the Republican party? But I think most religious people don’t actually read the Bible anyway, so even that is a stretch. The more likely explanation is due to Protestant ‘work ethic’ as mentioned by @[email protected]
Because most religious conservatives don’t think beyond “what is acceptable to my group” and do that. Or appear to do that. And not rocking the boat is highly valued in those communities, so people who want to abuse others financially find ripe ground for it.
Because most religious conservatives don’t think beyond “what is acceptable to my group” and do that. Or appear to do that. And not rocking the boat is highly valued in those communities, so people who want to abuse others financially find ripe ground for it.
I’d assume same reason most politicians are. In a capitalist society, those that pool the most money will tend to gain the most power and influence. So the churches that talk to the rich man and say “of course god is blessing you because you are such a good person” get more money, and thus more influence, than the churches that pay attention to the “It’s harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven”. “Succesful” religious leaders become the ones to teach the next generation of religious leaders. Causing more drift into the same idea.
Then of course the pro-corporate candidates also do really good virtue signaling. Because when the religious leaders do not want to focus on the Rich, they still need a bad guy to rally against, and since nobody needs the church to tell them murderers and thieves are bad… the church takes a more strong stand against things that are accepted by society that they can consider against their faith. (abortion, LGBT etc…)
Besides some of the other good points brought up here, I’d like to say that it’s because communist countries typically were/are anti-religion, so it makes sense that religious leaders in capitalist countries would oppose any form of government that seeks to limit organized religion. So, they support capitalism because it’s the opposite of communism.
They do it because of capitalism’s decentralized properties.
First, they fear a government having power over them. This can seem irrational, but they interpreted WW2 as 1.) proof that a government can be used to wipe out people it disagrees with, and 2.) that absolute sovereignty in the hands of man made institutions is a thread to god as the supreme sovereign.
The decentralization of capitalism, and democracy, gives them the ability to disconnect as much as possible from anything they dont agree with. This is why they talk about freedom while doing hateful things in the name of their lord. Theyre economically free (to be hateful).
A lot of this mentality really starts after WW2. First the war is won. Then they push to make America as christian as possible. About 50% of US citizens claimed to be christian in 1950, but it is 90% by the 1970’s. In God We Trust is put on US money and added to the national anthem in the 50’s. This is important because the US is starting to fight the cold war against atheistic communists. The power of capitalism becomes part of a global propaganda effort to demonstrate the weakness of the godless systems. The republicans align themselves with christianity, locking it in with Reagan’s election in 1980, and now capitalism and christianity are intertwined and propagandized to the point of not resembling the original ideas anymore. Give that 44 years, and here we are.
On Christian Soverignty, written by an influential christian just after WW2 https://providencemag.com/2020/07/christian-view-sovereignty/
What is the percentage of the Western world that believes in profit motive and private ownership of property, 90%? I don’t think it’s BECAUSE they are religious conservatives.
I don’t think religions are inherently socialistic. There’s a socialist reading of the text, but in terms of like the historical role of the Catholic church it was more like a government than a commune. Governments aren’t inherently socialistic (unless you’re using a pretty broad view of the word). They help the poor and set rules to follow but they’re only directly managing their portion (10%-30%) of the economy, the rest can be anything.
