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?
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.
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!
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 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
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.
True. He’s more a symptom than a cause. He certainly isn’t helping.
It also existed since long before Fox News and even Televangelists
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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.
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.
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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.
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The Catholic church has nearly entirely considered abortion a sin since the first century (yes there are exceptions, but a minority). You are thinking of the adoption of “life begins at conception”, which was ruled in 1869. Prior to that the church considered early abortion an immoral sin on par with contraception. What changed in 1869 was the category from sin of contraception to sin of murder. But it was still “sin” beforehand.
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.
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 @Copernican@lemmy.world
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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.
Because “conservative” isn’t an ideology, it’s a mindset. It’s based on the idea that the in-group is good, not because of what they believe but because of who they are. So because they are good, whatever they want is good. It does not matter if their wants are contradictory or hypocritical or irrational in any way. They define the parameters for what is worth preserving, and then anyone who wants to stop them is part of the out-group and therefore bad. The out-group is not bad because they hold bad positions. The out-group could change their positions, and they would still be bad becauae it is part of their identity.
Conservatives also do not require any justification for their wants, but having a religious justification is like catnip. Because of the conservative mindset, they have no problem picking and choosing the religious beliefs that support what they want while ignoring or attacking the ones that don’t.
This is honestly an extremely weak take. Not going to start a debate with you, I’m not a conservative, but oversimplification and vilification does more harm than good.
Eh, is it vilification when they are actual villains?
Are you kidding me? Do you see the current conservatives in the United States right now?
Because they only use the Bible to pretend to be more holy than everyone else. It’s just a moral license, they don’t actually believe in the teachings of Jesus. They want to be in a holy club where everyone on the outside is inferior.
Its like libertarianism in America. They look at it like you can do anything you want. But the ignore the “not affecting anybody else” part of it.
And expect corporations not to shit in your water
Because they’re generally religious in name only. To them, religion is a tool to be used to get ahead. Networking through your church, appealing to other religious people in order to get votes, etc… etc…
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.
I think what leads one to hold onto their religion and to support the social status quo are the same things: Attachement to what is familiar and reassuring and rejection of what is new and scary. Conservatives often try to appropriate religion to appear as the side of comfy, reassuring tradition, and represent progressives as the side of scary disrupters.
I didn’t check all of the comments, but most of the ones I saw were really poor jokes or just plain wrong. The reason that religion is so tied into conservatism goes back to Nixon, and the attempts made by Roger Ailes and others, including Ronald Reagan, to make sure a right wing president could never be held accountable again. This included a meeting with Reagan and hundreds of pastors in which they literally trained the pastors on how to convert their congregations to the rights hateful rhetoric, a big part of which was the demonization of abortion and the lionization of “the free market”. They’ve since been exporting this hateful rhetoric around the world by force and through traditional missionary style missions.
While I don’t doubt this happened, this isn’t the first real link between capitalism and religion, specifically Christianity. It can actually go way further back, like to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Capitalism was beginning to take on its early forms, and doing what capitalism does best, which is reinforcing currently existing social hierarchies. When European ‘ancient farmers’ came over to the americas they needed labor, and ended up using Africans. Problem was, under English common law you weren’t supposed to own christian slaves. (Some slaves actually used this defense to escape slavery see Elizabeth key), and the region where slavery first popped off was Angola which was a largely christian country, so the colonies detached themselves from English comon law (which was one of the many stepping stones leading up to the American revolution) and changes various rules so that they could. That way they can keep holding slaves while using their religion to justify what they were doing. Religion was used to bolster capitalism, capitalism made religions people rich.
Abrahamic religions (as are most organized religions) are insanely heiarchical. Like we said before, capitalism has a habit of reinforcing those social heiarchies, so it’s not really that surprising that there a huge overlap there. Just like there’s a huge overlap between billionaires and capitalism supporters, or landlords and anti-union support.
I appreciate that addition, and agree. Thanks for adding on.
An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.
The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.
The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.
FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.
Important to add that it’s really just in the US that this tie exists between religious conservatives (especially evangelicals) and capitalism. In many other parts of the world, religious people are more leftwing, especially to take care of the weakest among us.
Yeah. In my country, the religious conservatives and the turbo capitalists still sit in the same party, so they generally work with each other, but they clearly are different factions. The capitalists mostly arent religious at all, and the religious conservatives care way more about the state of the agrarian sector and the social system than about capitalism.
Didn’t the evangelists in Brasil massively support Bolsonaro?
Yes. Brazil and the US are among the few countries where evangelicals are hard right.
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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/
Because it’s remarkably similar in form:
“each one takes care of himself and god takes care of all”
Vs
“Everybody pursues their own gain and the market takes care of everything”
PS: “the lord works in mysterious ways” Vs “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/306397/
Market takes care of is a liberatarian myth !
I know, but when you said religious conservative, I immediately assumed American and economically conservative, but there are plenty of Christian social democrats in Europe.
I think I may have misunderstood your question: which ideology did you expect religious conservatives to support? And, where/when? Maybe they could be socialists, because the new testament encourages generosity. Or maybe they could be really conservative and rabidly monarchist, imperialist like in the past. Maybe it does not matter and they just “support” what there is in their country at the time or it doesn’t matter where religion is separate from the state.
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 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).
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.
Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” goes into how protestantism cradled capitalist growth. But I think it’s a bit heavy handed to say folks support capitalist ideology. You don’t really support ideology. The ideology is what supports capitalism or is capitalism itself. But Protestantism is generally has individualistic beliefs. No longer does the clergy intermediate relation to God. Protestants believe individuals have a personal and individual relation to god. This sense of individualism can overlap with capitalist mentalities of individual success and profit.
But I think your use of ideology is too vague and understanding of religion is too generalized. You really need to talk about particulars of specific religious beliefs and particulars of specific attitudes towards capitalism. There’s not much to really comment on with such broad and vague brushstrokes.
