Thread by @mcjulie

I tossed this off as a joke, mostly, but ever since then I've been thinking "what ARE the evangelical weak spots and how can we use them?"

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1400997928517267456

The first evangelical weak spot that popped into my head was "extremely gullible." They're prone to snake oil, pyramid schemes, wacked-out conspiracy theories, plus grift and fraud of all kinds.

Can we use that against them?

And that presents a problem. Because, yes, if you just want to drain them of money, you can probably use the "extremely gullible" weakness to do it, but that probably doesn't lessen their political power in any meaningful way.

I think part of why we're in the space we're in, is that people grifting on evangelical gullibility -- from at least the satanic panic onward -- have driven them to be more extreme, more political, and more fascist.

Because their gullibility, while boundless, nevertheless falls into predictable channels. You can take the pre-existing evangelical distrust of liberalism, secularism, civil rights, science, history, anybody not an evangelical, etc., and turn that into Qanon --

But you can't use their gullible natures to convince them that liberalism & secularism are good, actually. THAT will never fly.

On the other hand, it does mean you could send spies into their midst and they would never know. But I'm not sure how that helps us NOW, except that we are already here, the spies, exvangelicals, we escaped & now we're telling you all their secrets.

And evangelicals really do that beehive thing where if you're going to their church and you dress & groom appropriately & say the right things, they assume you're one of them.

But the big secret, in a way, of American evangelicals as the terrible threat to democracy that they are, is that most of them don't actually understand the war into which they have been recruited on the wrong side, and this is both a strength AND a weakness.

A strength for them, because their numbers would be very, very much diminished if the average evangelical knew "it's about white supremacy" instead of being deceived to think "it's about Jesus."

A weakness for them, because as that knowledge spreads -- the knowledge that evangelicals are mostly concerned with maintaining the traditional power structure of rich white men at the top and everyone else down below -- they lose members.

Not only do they lose members, they also lose mainstream cover. Churches bank a LOT on their aura of respectability, which they are starting to lose, but it's hard going. They still get preferential treatment, even AFTER everything that's happened.

This tweet asks "what happened in 2000?" and you might know this, in 2002 the Boston Globe published a major investigative journalism piece exposing widespread sexual abuse in Catholic churches, combined with shameful & irresponsible efforts to cover it up.

https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1399885190542077952

And what's happened since?
Well, the Catholic church certainly hasn't cleaned up its act in any significant way. Instead. we've started to see the same pattern of abuse exposed, followed by cover-up, denial, and more abuse -- play out in Protestant churches.

Just one example of many

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1393942673887666179

Churches & church-related organizations have this reputation as a "good" or "safe" place to leave your kids, which is not only false, it's extremely false. The opposite of true. You can't trust churches with your kids.

I think if churches lost that reputation of being a good & safe place for kids, that would be a serious blow. If people were just like "nope, I'm not giving you people my kids, you cannot be trusted with them."

No more Christian schools.
No more Christian day care.
No more Christian summer camp.
No more Christian propaganda groups like Project Blitz worming their way into schools and trying to recruit vulnerable kids into their cult.

No more Sunday school.
No more youth group.
No more youth "retreats" or "lock ins" or one-on-one Bible study.

Christianity is for adults only.

Not that it's okay for your cult to abuse adults either, but children are uniquely vulnerable to abuse, and also, uniquely harmed by it.

And, yes, "children" includes teenagers.

My church lied to me when they talked about "adult" baptism, because they didn't mean "a totally free choice made by an actual adult" they meant "a ritually required choice made as an adolescent rite of passage"

I want to hold them to their original promise.

If you think your religion is this amazingly wonderful thing that an adult (21+, let's say) would freely choose, PROVE IT and keep your hands off kids.

I don't know if "Christianity is for adults only" will ever catch on as a social movement, but I do think it's a weakness for the right wing Christian nationalist types. If they stopped being able to get their hands on kids, that would be huge.

Just as a start, even if it accomplished nothing else, keeping Christian organizations from trying to influence & recruit children would also keep children out of the situations where they're getting abused.

But also, since a huge part of the Christian nationalist rhetoric is about selling a particular idea of the sanctity & importance of the white patriarchal Christian family, it hits them where they live.

Take "family" away from Christian organizations.

There's no such thing as a "Christian family" there are Christian adults and their children, who get exposed to Christianity the same way kids get exposed to other hobbies their parents have.

Evangelicals should stop acting surprised when people raised in the faith leave the faith as adults, they should learn to expect it.

But, and this is big, giving up the idea that children raised in the evangelical faith MUST stick with the faith as adults, that would mean giving up the idea that there exists a literal hell, to which everyone is doomed unless they become an evangelical.

Evangelical faith as it exists was built to serve the needs of colonizers and slaveholders, and one of those ways is emphasis on the infinite threat of hell and, therefore, the infinite excuse of salvation from hell.

You can justify ANY real-world atrocity if you frame it as saving people from a literal hell.

"Sure, we murdered them horrifically, but we converted them to Christianity first, so what we did was actually a good thing!"

And you can see the same framing at work in their current political efforts -- evangelicals will violate your rights without a care, because they see it as "saving" you from a hell you don't even believe in.

One of the things that makes evangelicals both obnoxious and dangerous is that they have no conception of the idea that it's okay for other people to not be evangelical Christians.

So they're going to fight to hang onto the idea that they have an inherent God-given right to try to pull kids into their cult. But, here's where I think the fight to take "family" away from Christians could be useful: it puts them on the defensive for once.

The Moral Majority used "family values" as cover for a white supremacist/Christian nationalist movement, and they chose the field of engagement, so they controlled it, they put everyone else on the defensive.

So, their side might be "we should put prayer back in schools" and we would be left arguing why that was a bad & unconstitutional idea. We were on the defensive.

I think there might be some value to coming back with an attack. "Are you kidding? Not only should we continue to keep prayer out of schools, we should go even further to keep religious organizations far away from our kids."

Anyway, that's what occurred to me when I thought about "evangelical weakness" I'm sure I'll have more thoughts later.

End of thread and happy Saturday!

Brief addendum: Cut off their funding sources, that's another weakness.

https://twitter.com/christnnitemare/status/1401225640796372992