Thread by @lymanstoneky

This blog post is really interesting.

Basically, they show that almost the *entire* relationship between "Christian Nationalism" and "support for extremist violence" is mediated through "belief in religious prophecy."

https://twitter.com/Religion_Public/status/1484171527830519810

They use four questions to assess belief in prophecy, described here, and I only have any appreciable objection as an indicator to one of them, "God is in control," which also happens to be the most common belief, so probably the least strongly predictive. religioninpublic.blog/2022/01/20/the…

This is the key chart. On an index of expressed support for violent political activity, Christian Nationalism ONLY predicts support for violence IF you have high belief in prophecy. For low-prophecy-believers, More "Christian Nationalism" = LESS support for violence!

This is not the exact point I've been yelling at @socofthesacred , but it's related: a lot of the "Christian Nationalism" questions are double-barrelled survey instruments: they are asking multiple questions at once or admit of multiple obvious interpretations.

And here we see that problem revealed: with a simple control for other religious ideas, not just the *size* of effect but the *sign* of effect for Christian Nationalism switches!

The "least violent" people are people who believe in Christian Nationalism but *don't* have highly prophecy-friendly beliefs.

By the way the name for those people is "The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod."

Now, there's good reason to believe that this prophecy finding is more credible than the Christian Nationalism finding.

What is that reason?

History.

Go through the history of large-scale religious violence and you'll basically find two categories dominate:
1) State-sponsored religious repressing new rivals
2) Prophetic movements creating insurgencies that kill millions

Let's do some "greatest hits" of historic religious violence!

Taiping Rebellion! Prophetic movement.
30 Years War! State-sponsored repression mostly, but one can argue Medieval Catholicism was a prophetic movement, or that Lutheranism kinda was at first!

The Rise of Islam! Prophetic movement.
Shi'a resistance to the Caliphate! Prophetic movement and conflict with state-sponsored religion.
Crusades! Exception case.

Early Anabaptists come to mind as a case of prophetic violence.

The point is, the belief that God has given special revelation *to a living or recently-deceased person* is a very powerful way to suspend the usual checks on violent behavior.

Special revelation is a kind of super-powered moral license. It suspends normal morality and replaces it with the voice of the prophet, and thus is conducive to the effort to reshape society through normally-disapproved methods.

These survey findings are still young, but I've gotta say I suspect they will outlast Christian Nationalism, provided that they continue to get re-surveyed and studied.

The key thing to understand is that Christian Nationalism *could* plausibly predict violence *to the extent that it has a sponsoring state*. Christian Nationalism is the kind of ideology useful for a country with a state religion.

The US doesn't have that.

When a "Christian Nationalist" says "The US is a Christian nation," he or she has no vehicle to turn that belief into violence, UNLESS he or she also believes there is some special license to override normal morality: belief in prophecy.