Thread by @lymanstoneky

Torn about this piece.

On the one hand, there's some basic truth to it: ex-Trump admin folks hawking conspiracy theories are packing events at some churches.

On the other hand, interpreting that requires more care.

https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1492890181988458500

First and foremost, selling out thirty churches doesn't even sell you enough books to get on NYT's bestseller list for a week. America is a big place and this kind of rally tour ends up covering a shockingly small share of people.

So the first thing I think worth noting is that human psychological intuitions about crowd size are misleading. We see huge crowds and imagine them to be majorities; but America is a country of hundreds of millions, crowds of people the mind cannot even imagine.

This is the strength of physical assembly: it creates a delusion in the minds of participants that they are part of the mainstream, that their movement is a majority. But nowadays, even teeny-weeny fringe movements are big enough in absolute scale to produce a roaring crowd.

This is dangerous because it means even movements with 1% population adherence can create a delusion among their members of extraordinary scale. Fringey groups can access the psychological resources historically only available to majorities.

But it's important to keep in mind that change doesn't change the fact that in an actual numeric contest the fringe still gets curb-stomped. There's no actual threat to majority power there. The worry is if the delusion pushes people into suicidal civil war.

But I don't think that's highly likely for big thing #2, which is that these rally attendees skew heavily towards the elderly. These folks will not start a civil war. They will vote, but there's no actual appetite or ability to sustain an insurrection.

Third, I think @DavidAFrench is way too credulous about "Christian nationalism" as an explanatory concept. This field of research is young and my view is that it is empirically way overextended and not extremely well-supported.

In particular @DavidAFrench makes the important jump of emphasizing the role of charismatic movements in "Christian nationalism," but the actual survey evidence we have suggests this isn't incidental: it's the *whole story*.

The Christian nationalism-extremism relationship *completely evaporates* once you control for prophetic/charismatic Christianity. There's just nothing there. I haven't seen data exploring prophetic belief and extremism independent of CN, but I suspect the tie is strong.

To be quite blunt, this phenomenon is almost entirely a problem of nondenominational or weakly-denominational charismatic and otherwise schismatic movements. This kind of extremism is the poisoned fruit of ecumenical/antidenominational/fusionist evangelicalism.

This makes it inherently hard to address, because, and here's a thing I know my broadly-evangelical followers won't like to hear: for every really wonderful and beautiful and sane nondenom, there's one of equal size *which is absolutely psycho*.

In 21st century America, many of the most popular "Christian" leaders are blatantly heretical. We have actual real Arians out there again! Monarchianism is popular!

And then you look at the putatively orthodox movements and they're all the less-impressive scions of the evangelical superstar generation, a generation we increasingly understand was less deeply invested in faith than one might have hoped.

The apotheosis of this is the Falwell family, but folks Franklin Graham is no Billie either. And we still have CS Lewis' stepson running around publishing books that sell on his stepfather's reputation.

Without the guardrails of denominationalism, American evangelicalism exploded in numbers and built institutions that rested on those numbers: now those institutions have their own interests, and to survive must maintain ties with a large base...

... but that large base is increasingly composed of Arians and Monarchians and Montanists and various and sundry other heresies and schismatics. The result of surrendering denominational rigor has been the collapse of actual Christianity.

Here's a prior thread I did on the empirical evidence about CN and prophecy:

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1484181442707947522?s=20&t=fnv_XdldENnqAXhlzBWNaw