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."
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.

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More from @lymanstoneky

Jan 21
What's so dumb about this is that the EXACT SAME AUTHORS of the paper reviewed here ALSO did a paper studying ONLY ADOPTIONS, and find that the negative effects on women are EXACTLY THE SAME.
Here's the paper. They ask "Does biology drive the motherhood penalty?" and they find the answer is "No, not at all." aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Adopted children hurt mothers' incomes just as much as gestational children.

What impacts mothers' career trajectory is child*rearing* more than child*bearing*, tho having a baby and putting up for adoption probably impacts as well.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 21
Your quirky demographic history fact of the day:

here's the historic *marital completed fertility* for five well-documented Chinese lineages going back WAY before modern birth control.

Source: etheses.lse.ac.uk/4223/ Image
There's absolutely no way you get these numbers without having widespread *marital fertility control*.

Folks the Zhou, Zha, and Gu lines here are marital TFRs around 3 or 4. That's not that much higher than many modern post-contraceptive marital fertility rates!
Especially once you account for different child mortality. Probably if MCFR was 3.5, the share surviving to puberty would be just 2.5 or so, whereas today an MTFR of 2.5 yields surviving fertility of like 2.4 or 2.45, and we commonly see MTFR of 2-2.5 in western societies.
Read 19 tweets
Jan 20
"Why should parents have any right to know what is being taught?"

literally the argument here
And nobody ever lies!

(spoiler: there are lots of lies)

Read 6 tweets
Jan 20
One of the big issues here is that we won't know if artificial wombs create developmental problems until like 40 years after they have begun to be used on a large scale.
Suppose there are 1,000 conditions we "care about" and the average condition impacts 1% of births in the real world and 5% in artificial wombs, and that there's no way to ID the condition while in the womb.
Suppose conditions manifest on average at age 20, normally distributed.
Read 13 tweets
Jan 20
ahaha, it's gonna be funny if Russia is telling the boys they'll be home by Christmas.
i regret to inform you that it is unlikely that the wholesale conquest and pacification of ukraine will in fact be accomplished in three months
can the Russian army make it to Kyiv in 3 months?

Heck, they can make it to Kyiv in 3 days most likely!

Can they actually *hold the country* and pacify resistance in 3 months?

Seems far less likely.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 19
Apropos @elonmusk 's demography comments and an exchange with @ikashnitsky , it's interesting to ask, "Just how reliable are major global demographic databases?"

My view: not very!
This is not because the demographers at UNPD or IHME are doofuses or something; it's because producing big global forecasts is extremely difficult even when the data is all homogenous and reliable. But sorting through competing data sources that disagree is even harder!
Infamously, very smart demographers disagree about China's population to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of people, and China's TFR is debated to be anywhere from 0.9 to 1.7 in recent years! Right there, that tells you global forecasts are gonna be dicey.
Read 27 tweets

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