Thursday, December 14, 2017

Will organized religion 'take ownership' of the President?

Thoughts on this book:

The main learning I took away from Stephen Mansfield's Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him (Baker Books, 2017) was the personal influence of Norman Vincent Peale over Donald Trump as a young man. Apart from this biographical detail, I struggled with complex reactions to this book. It didn't hit the nail on the head but neither did it have fatal flaws.

Mansfield appears to tread a fine line between heavily criticizing President Trump for transparently ridiculous behavior that cannot but be criticized and yet grasping for biographical details — if only, perhaps, in the interest of fairness or charity — that make Trump seem like a heavyweight who can coherently assume, if not deserve, the mantle of the President of the United States. Most readers will probably feel that the author goes too far in one direction or the other in its opposition or support for the President. Mansfield acknowledges says the book he's written is "dangerous" (at least for its publisher) because it "critiques a sitting president" yet also "takes [the president] seriously" when he is deeply unpopular. This nebulous idea of taking the president seriously makes the book a little maddening or bewildering. What exactly does it mean to take Trump seriously? He is a wealthy celebrity who has made high-stakes business transactions throughout his life and got elected president. He has a biography similar to others who grew up in a wealthy family. He has psychology and motivations that, like any other human's, can be examined, analyzed, and interpreted. In that regard, the book takes him seriously. But I am not certain that the book — which doesn't mention global climate change or the North Korean nuclear tensions — fully and directly engages the extent of the influence the president has on others and the lasting damage he can do to the nation and the world.

On a related point, the author does not directly reveal his own religious and political beliefs. (At his most explicitly theological, he writes of "the good that courageous voices of faith can do. If they will set themselves to tell the truth, if they will remember that they are emissaries from another land, they can remind leaders — who are too often mired in the temporal — of higher purposes and surer boundaries. They have the power to fix vision upon the eternal.") What peeks through occasionally is a form of political moderateness that rings either a bit insincere or underinformed. For example, on “the all-important issue of race,” he says that the president has delivered “at least racially inappropriate if not outright racist statements on many an occasion.” If one really believes the issue is all-important, the president's well-documented outright racism should be easy to call out. "Inappropriate" is far too mild a word, unless one believes that racial justice and race relations are mostly about being well-mannered (and thus not genuinely all-important). For another example, the author describes the record of Barack Obama on LGBT rights and the position of Hillary Clinton on abortion rights as “extreme.” It is hard to tell if that is his personal view or if he is reflecting how he thinks many religious people perceive them. But, again, if you really believe in LGBT rights and abortion rights, defending them is not "extreme." Trying to toe some kind of moderate line in these contexts doesn't work very well, especially if you don't attempt to explain what your view is and exactly why you believe it to be fair and good despite its avoidance of the "extremes" of nondiscrimination and liberation movements. Mushing around the topic results in a kind of diplomacy that, while trying to be polite and reassuring, achieves the opposite. This undefined moderate stance, perhaps attempting to represent neutrality, does not help the reader understand the author's view and therefore it muddies his moral portrait of the president because it is hard to understand exactly where his points of disagreement are.

The analysis ends at events that happened shortly after the January 2017 inauguration, but the book was not released until Oct. 3. The details of Trump's tumultuous first year in office could not have been anticipated, so Mansfield does not address how bad the presidency really is, and therefore the book will strike many readers as a little tone-deaf. For example, the problem of the president's persistent falsehoods is ever more serious and means something different as he approaches a year in office. The Washington Post counted "1,628 false or misleading claims" through mid-November. We are no longer mainly interested in evaluating his character to know whether to vote for him or to predict how he will govern; we are (or should be) interested in how the government is now being run and how foreign relations are being conducted. We have passed the point where his character flaws are impacting people's lives and causing lasting damage.

True, the purpose of the book is only incidentally, and not primarily, to do the three things discussed in the previous paragraphs — respectfully and seriously assess the president as a full human being who has lived over 70 years on Earth, project one's own moral beliefs to judge how he handles his current role, or concretely assess from a historian's viewpoint what he has accomplished since his inauguration — but rather to explain, as its subtitle announces, "why Christian conservatives supported him" in the election. This it does in a general sense. The answer provided is: Because they were angry and Trump's personality appealed to them. The book is far more about Trump than it is about the Christians who supported him. For a sociological study of those Christians, I recommend The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, released four months before the 2016 election, a book that Mansfield unfortunately doesn't reference.

Trump's Character

First, this is a man who "has lived the life of a celebrated hedonist."

He developed a "juvenile" obsession with the size of the crowds who came to see him. "When he spoke at Liberty University in 2016, his first words had to do with breaking an attendance record. He was in a church service at the time."

He avoids taking expert advice. As a result, his wife Melania's inaugural speech was plagiarized from Michelle Obama's eight years earlier. Melania's interesting life story was "worthy of a great speech" and there was no reason for her to "borrow from the one person on the planet from whom she most needed to distinguish herself". Mansfield believes this was an accident due to incompetence, and he attributes it to Donald Trump's reliance on advice and assistance from a disordered family team where "[n]o one was put in charge." A professional speechwriter would never have made such a sophomoric error.

He also likes to fight. At school, he threw things and needed constant attention. He has asserted that his own "temperament" hasn't changed much since first grade. In second grade, he disagreed with a lesson and gave his teacher a black eye. In business, he said that "most people aren’t worthy of respect” and in Think Big he wrote, "You need to screw them back fifteen times harder...go for the jugular, attack them in spades!" At his campaign rallies, he incited violence.

Americans note his "almost complete lack of the character that is usually the fruit of sincere religion." Americans expect that a president's character is fixed by the time he or she is elected, unlike the Pope whose ordination transforms him, and, when considering Trump, a "deeply imperfect man" with apparent "deformities" and "oddities," the thought of him remaining the same "can be a disturbing experience."

Influence of Norman Vincent Peale

The famous religious leader Norman Vincent Peale was Trump's greatest personal mentor during formative years, and in return Peale called Trump his "greatest student of all time," Stephen Mansfield wrote. Even though this faith "largely failed him [Trump] as both a public and a private man," he returned to these roots in the 2016 campaign, revealing "a softening in religious matters". The nature of this softening is not clearly identified.

Peale was one of the earliest promoters of "the power of positive thinking" as demonstrated in his book of the same title. Mansfield sees limitation in this approach. As he explains it, adding what seems to be his own theological commentary: "Trump took from this that it is God’s will to carry him further in the direction he was already going. He did not understand from his time under Peale’s ministry that God empowers a man only after he remakes him."

Ignorance of religion

Speaking to pollster Frank Luntz, Trump was unable to name anyone in the Bible he admired, and, when asked for his personal beliefs about God, "he spoke at length about buying a golf course." Asked by a radio host to name a favorite Bible verse or story, he babbled and the only thing he could come up with was "an eye for an eye." He said he'd never asked God for forgiveness and was unable to say whether he preferred the Old or New Testament. To Fox News, he identified himself as "Presbyterian" but "also busy." In church, where he said he went mainly for Christmas and Easter, he seemed not to recognize a communion plate. Addressing Liberty University, he showed off his baptism photo and certificate but had no personal conversion story. Moreover, Mansfield believes, the students saw that Trump's vengeful attitude in business and past marital difficulties did not align with their idea of Christianity and they had hoped to see "'fruit,' evidence of a life changed by conversion and modeled on the message of Jesus Christ." "It was, in short, the worst presentation of religion by a presidential candidate in recent memory," Mansfield opined.

Yet Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University, in 2012 called Trump “the greatest visionary of our time.” This seems key to understand. Why was he elevating Trump, if Trump was so ignorant of religion? What did he hope to get? Mansfield addresses this.

Ohhh, here's Luntz.

Honestly, one of the funniest tweets I've ever seen.

[image or embed]

— Ol' Chef Dan (@olchefdan.bsky.social) May 25, 2026 at 5:36 AM

Why religious conservatives wanted Trump

First, they

"were traumatized by the Obama years and fearful a second Clinton presidency would mean more of the same. They would back anyone who could win. They would take a nonbeliever. They would accept a candidate of doubtful morality. They were even willing to risk racial and gender offense on the part of their candidate. They could not endure more years of bombardment from a religious left intent upon remaking the nation."

Exactly how they thought liberals in power would "remake the nation," and why that was more exhausting or existentially more threatening to them than ordinary policy disagreements, is not made clear in this book.

They were angry — that much is made clear. They had a sense of being

"sidelined by history and feared their country as they knew it was slipping away. They wanted change, at nearly any cost, and they looked beyond more experienced candidates to set their hopes upon the sharp-tongued, hard-hitting, angry-as-they-were billionaire from New York. He won them by promising to give their country back to them and to win a future for their children. They believed him, largely because he spoke of faith like a crusader, like one who understood religion as a perpetual call to arms."

In 2016, voters wanted the angry candidate. They asked themselves: "Who best gave voice to our political rage? Who best channeled the anger that kept us up at night? Who was the standard-bearer of our wrath?" When they saw Trump, they felt "they would take him, flaws and all, if he would help them take their nation back."

Donald Trump publicly announced early on in the campaign that he felt he could do better with religious people than Hillary Clinton could. Mansfield wonders why Clinton did not pay closer attention to this and act on it. After all, she "possessed a deeper religious history and wider religious knowledge, and was more articulate in expressing her faith than her opponent" yet she managed to "neglect" those voters. Her choice to give her first speech after receiving the Democratic nomination at a Planned Parenthood event may have been principled, but it wasn't savvy.

Religious people were attracted to how Trump "speaks publicly in the same way that millions of Americans do around kitchen tables, at bars, and among their closest friends. Crass, insulting, bullying, sometimes ill-informed, always opinionated, usually prejudiced, Donald Trump is very much the private voice of millions of Americans." Mansfield continued: "When Trump declared at the 2016 GOP convention, 'I am your voice,' he meant it mainly in an economic sense. Yet he may have inadvertently stated a broader truth. He is a supercharged version of what America has become." This is well put, but it's not obvious what it has to do with religion. Plenty of people are ill-informed and have reason to be angry. Religion, in its most noble self-declared intentions, is supposed to do battle with the ego and replace it with humility and patience. Are white Christians angrier than everyone else? Why? And why do they think, more than anyone else, that Trump is the answer?

(One possible answer I found: Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, wrote in May 2017 that today's American Protestant evangelical "religious fervor...is not born of traditional, innocent faith" but is rather "intellectualized" and "highly politicized". They are suffering from "an alienating hyper-commercial culture" that breeds "emotional insecurity." Evangelical support for Trump is transactional; what they seek is "community and identity".)

Moreover, Mansfield omits the early sexual harassment accusations against Trump and other politicians. The most he says is that Trump's "treatment of women was sometimes obscene" including occasional "disparaging" or "raunchy terms" for them. It seems he is mincing words out of a sense of propriety. The president has said worse things about women than Mansfield is willing to print. This is a book about voters, so everyone is over 18, and we need to address our adult issues head-on. If we can't call out big issues like this, then it is hard to figure out why people voted the way they did in the past; if we can't say what should be done differently in the future, then it is hard to know why we care why anyone voted the way they did in the past. Sexual morality used to be a matter of concern for religious voters. Now something has changed. Sexual harassment and the changing response to it has become part of the zeitgeist, such that the many women who reported harassment were named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2017. We need to understand the religious conservative response — or, more accurately, the lack thereof — to abusive behavior by men in the Republican Party. Why is it tolerated? Why don't such accusations hurt candidates at all today? (Marie Griffith recently called it an "extreme politicization of Christianity" and said that evangelicalism "has become so focused on power.")

Trump does like being gently challenged by people he trusts, and so the "reticence to urge him toward a broader faith and deeper character was unfortunate...The religious leaders who surrounded him in the 2016 campaign might have been just such teammates, had they been willing to take the risk of calling him to a more vibrant Christian faith."

Ed Simon wrote on Dec. 31, 2017 of the large majority of white evangelicals who voted for Trump and Moore that it is human nature to resist or abandon the demanding ”countercultural” commitment of Christianity and to betray the faith "for thirty pieces of silver." The irony he sees is that, since the evangelicalism of Reagan’s time, "many apocalyptic minded conservative Christians made a sort of prophetic parlor game out of conjecturing who the potential anti-Christ could be. Figures from Hal Lindsey, to Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and Jerry Falwell often fingered world leaders or liberal politicians as being in league with Satan. An irony since if the anti-Christ is supposed to be a manipulative, powerful, smooth-talking demagogue with the ability to sever people from their most deeply held beliefs who would be a better candidate than the seemingly indestructible Trump?" Simon does not wish to identify a "literal ant-Christ" but worries that so many Christians "seem to lack the self-awareness to identify something so anti-Christian in Trump himself. Or worse yet, they certainly recognize it, but don’t care."

Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic July/August 2020:
The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

How much of our differences are due to religion and how much to race?

Words like “white,” “black,” “African-American,” “Hispanic,” and “race/racial” — used in their racial sense and not in other senses like “race for the White House” — occur, in total, about 75 times throughout the book. That is to say that the subject of race is addressed substantially but isn’t the main focus. The term "white supremacy" doesn't appear at all. Many people have come up with the answer that white people voted for Trump because they are white but this is not quite the same answer Mansfield finds. He recognizes that Trump supporters are mostly white, but he wants to focus on religion. It's fine if he has a different conclusion or passionate interest. The question for me is how well he makes his case. For an entire book focusing on how Christians vote, the words “Protestant” (6), “Catholic” (7), and “evangelical” (20), alongside “Jew” (8) and “Muslim” (8), seem relatively underused. And I am including the bibliography. (These demographics are critical to understand because, as Pew Research found, three-fifths of white Catholics and four-fifths of white evangelicals voted Trump over Clinton, but for Hispanic Catholics it was the other way around, and black Protestants preferred Clinton almost nine-to-one. The vote looks more predictable along color lines than along theological lines.) When I find myself searching an ebook I’ve just finished for keywords so I can retroactively piece together the themes, it underscores for me that something was a little off from my experience as a reader.

Johnson Amendment

As someone who likes to fight, Trump could not understand why clergy did not pick political fights from the pulpit even when they felt themselves "under attack in nearly every arena of American culture." Some clergymembers explained to Trump that they could not make political statements or endorse candidates due to an IRS restriction called the Johnson Amendment. Trump "saw an opportunity both to right what he considered a moral wrong and to unchain a vast army of influential supporters. The Johnson Amendment had to go." He announced this on stage in Dallas on Feb. 26, 2016. The crowd was elated to see an atypically secular candidate nevertheless recognizing their needs and rising to meet them. In so doing, "Trump could win support from some of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders." After his election, he told his evangelical advisory council: "The only way I’m going to get to heaven is by repealing the Johnson Amendment." (One of the members corrected him on that theological point.)

Joy-Ann Reid didn't mention the Johnson Amendment in Fracture in which she traces the current manifestation of racial/political polarization to Johnson's election to the presidency, ten years after the Johnson Amendment was passed. Johnson's rival, Barry Goldwater, was a racially polarizing figure. By the time of the election, religious leaders had been ten years' silenced about political campaigns, thanks to the previous work of Johnson, who was a Democrat, and the last Democratic presidential candidate ever to win a majority of white voters. He got 59 percent of the white vote, but his popularity declined while he was in office, and, in the next election, the Democrat got only 38 percent of the white vote. The man behind the Johnson Amendment may explain why, to this day, it is white evangelical leaders who object most vocally to this rule.

Neither did Robert P. Jones mention the Johnson Amendment in The End of White Christian America. He spoke instead about the broader issue of so-called "religious liberty," emblematized by the example of Christian bakers who are asked to provide wedding cakes for same-sex couples. This would allow the freedom to refrain from speaking or acting in the way ordinarily required by antidiscrimination law, whereas the repeal of the Johnson Amendment would allow the freedom to actively speak or act. These are different problems. The complete absence of the Johnson Amendment from Jones' book, plus the self-undermining assertion by Mansfield that most Americans, including the religious, "not only do not understand what the Johnson Amendment is but may not wish it abolished once they do understand it," makes me curious to confirm the importance of the Johnson Amendment in the minds of evangelicals today. If they don't know what it is, they can't be angry about it, much less be willing to negotiate its repeal in exchange for willfully discarding their fervently held beliefs about, say, sexual harassment and assault and public morality and piety for politicians. My sense is that Mansfield meant that it is mainly the religious leaders who are aware of and concerned about the restriction.

Christianity Today reported in December 2017:

"...overall, most evangelical leaders — and most people in the pews — did not want to see pastors endorsing politicians. Among the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 90 percent of its board of directors, including the leaders of major denominations and ministries, said they opposed pulpit endorsements in a survey conducted earlier this year.

A LifeWay Research survey conducted during the 2016 campaign found that 73 percent of Americans with evangelical beliefs said pastors should abstain from endorsing candidates, and about 65 percent said churches overall should abstain."

Repealing the Johnson Amendment is not the only way religious people can feel powerful. Mansfield praises, by contrast, "the art of prophetic distance" through which a religious leader delivers a message and models right action to political candidates without endorsing any candidate over another.

Furthermore, Mansfield observes that, if the Johnson Amendment is repealed, then liberal as well as conservative clergy can become politically active. Indeed, most of them, Mansfield believes, "are more left-leaning and will become champions for the other side. Trump may be dealing both himself — if and when he runs for a second term — and other conservatives a difficult hand to play."

What does it mean to take ownership?

Mansfield believes that "the religious voices Trump allows a hearing" may be able to hold sway "between the better angels of human nature and the lesser spirits that lurk in the dark". He warns that for clergy "[t]o support Donald Trump without caveat, to extol him as chosen by God without identifying what is morally objectionable in his politics and behavior, is much the same as extolling American culture without expressing any moral reservation." If religious leaders are not "courageous" and "true," then "they may pay a great price and draw the ire of later generations for being cowardly and unprincipled — all while owning Donald Trump."

But what does it mean to "own" him? The word suggests to me that they already have a particular level of influence over him as well as the future ability to take credit and blame for his deeds. It also suggests to me that Trump has somehow insinuated himself into the religion so that the ownership is mutual. Mansfield does not pinpoint the level or scope of influence nor does he anticipate exactly who might need to apologize for what in the future or, more pressingly, who might be able to fix it. If there is a catastrophe and the best we can hope for is a public apology, then "owning Donald Trump" isn't a very high stakes wager for the faithful to take. This is what we really need to know: not only why white Christians voted for Trump, but what everyone is going to do right now as 2018 rolls in about the terrible mess we are in and how we are going to avoid a similar outcome in the 2020 election.

Updates

For more on the Johnson Amendment, please see the June 2018 blog post on Disruptive Dissertation.

White evangelicals continue to stand out in their support for Trump, by Chip Rotolo, April 28, 2025, Pew Resesarch


Here's Jeff Sharlet in 2023, writing about Peale's influence on Trump:

"Trump was impious, but he didn't reject faith. Instead, he returned it to the roots of Christian business conservatism, which is where he had been all along: Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. Since Trump announced his candidacy, he had been talking about Peale, 'my minister for years' (Peale died in 1993), but long before that--before he began declaring on the campaign trail that 'nothing beats the Bible, not even The Art of the Deal--the book that beat them all for Trump was Peale's. In Iowa, Trump held up the Bible his mother gave him, but it was Positive Thinking that Trump inherited from his developer father, Fred. In the books he claimed to have written, Trump invoked a personal trinity: his father, Fred, 'a rock,' who taught him 'toughness'; his mentor, Roy Cohn, the Red Scare mafia lawyer who taught him how to get away with anything 'without admitting any guilt'; and his childhood pastor, Peale. As a child, Trump has said, he watched Billy Graham on television 'for hours and hours,' but what he took from it was merely method, the hard sell presenting as a soft one. It was from Peale that Trump learned 'a very positive feeling about God,' he 'wrote' in his stream-of-consciousness campaign book, Crippled America, 'that made me feel positive about myself.' The point wasn't God; it was him, Donald J. Trump, alpha and omega. Peale, Trump boasted, 'thought I was his greatest student of all time.'

The irony of Trump's religion, mostly mocked as a campaign put-on, was that it was one of the few consistencies in his life. Of course, consistency doesn't equal depth, but then, to 'God's Salesman,' as Peale marketed himself, depth was a distraction. Positive Thinking--still in print and popular--'makes no pretense to literary excellence,' Peale wrote, 'nor does it seek to illustrate any unusual scholarship on my part.' 'Positive Thinking' isn't about serving God; it's about using God, through what Peale called 'applied Christianity,' to achieve 'a perfected and amazing method of successful living.' The method is like a closed loop, a winners' circle of the soul. 'The man who assumes success tends already to have success,' Peale wrote, a tautological spirituality as instantly recognizable in Trumpism as the drumbeat of his words: success, perfect, amazing. For Peale, and Trump, these were magic words..."

— Jeff Sharlet. The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. pp. 47-48.

In August 2025, he told Fox News: "I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole." Later in the week, he said: "If you’re not a believer, and you believe you go nowhere, what’s the reason to be good, really? There has to be some kind of a report card up there someplace, y’know, like ‘let’s go to heaven, let’s get into heaven.’"

In October, he again said "there's no reason to be good" apart from getting into heaven, and that this was indeed the extent of his own motivation to be good.

later that month,

"Fox News’ Peter Doocy on Sunday [Oct 12, 2025] asked the president on board Air Force One, as he headed to Israel, if he thought his plan for peace between Israel and Hamas “would help” him access the great beyond.

“I’m being a little cute. I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven, OK? I really don’t,” Trump replied."


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Read my essays on Medium by paying for a membership on the platform.

You may also be interested: Christmas Trees Are Not Pagan: a Brief History of the Christmas Trees, White Supremacist Propaganda, & Popular Related Lies, by Jewitches, Substack, Dec 11, 2025

Maybe somebody at CNN can explain the difference here because I don’t qwhite understand it 🤔

[image or embed]

— Eric Haywood (@erichaywood.bsky.social) February 20, 2026 at 1:18 PM

A free tip for the dunces manning the Washington Post opinion page these days, when the third paragraph of your draft “There Aren’t Enough Evangelical Leaders” essay is “Some might say, who cares?”, that’s a good sign you should scrap it and blog something else www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

[image or embed]

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:02 AM

As far as concessions go, “the people for whom I am advocating are objectively unable to do the jobs I want them to have, and also have a nasty history of disqualifying themselves with their own rank bigotry” is an incredible thing to have to write

[image or embed]

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:07 AM

Yes, “low cultural impact” is the type of phrase that any halfway competent editor will be like, hang on, what do you mean by that

[image or embed]

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:11 AM

Characterizing Hobby Lobby, who went to SCOTUS to preserve their right to not provide healthcare they don't like to their employees among other overtly political activities, as a business with "low cultural impact," is certainly a choice.

— Devon Unger (He/Him) (@devonunger.bsky.social) March 6, 2026 at 10:06 AM

The growing influence of the Maine church behind Portland’s Turning Point USA event, Sean Scott, The Maine Monitor, May 14, 2026

Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission Reveals Its Priorities | HuffPost

So Many People Have Left The Church In Recent Years — And The Reason Why Says A Lot About Where We Are As A Country Former churchgoing Christians reveal what pushed them to step away from their places of worship. Brittany Wong, HuffPost, May 28, 2026

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Roy Moore's movement to promote the Ten Commandments in American civic life

For years, there has been a movement to place large monuments representing the Ten Commandments outside U.S. courthouses. An activist in this movement is Roy Moore, who is currently running to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate in tomorrow's election (Dec. 12, 2017).

Roy Moore's monument

In August 2003, Alabama's Judicial Inquiry Commission suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore because he refused to obey a federal court order to remove a 2.6-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama state judicial building. Moore claimed that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of U.S. law. "Moore installed the privately funded monument in the early hours of August 1, 2001, without consulting any of the other justices on the Alabama Supreme Court," according to CNN. He personally supervised the installation. Three Alabama attorneys claimed offense and sued in October 2001. In 2002, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in favor of the attorneys and, upon Moore's appeal, in July 2003 the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in favor of the attorneys. Moore was given a deadline of August 20, 2003 to remove the monument. A week in advance of that deadline, he argued: "It is not a question of whether I will disobey or obey a court order. The real question is whether or not I will deny the God that created us." Responding to a last-minute appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to involve itself in the case.

Moore did not comply with the order to remove the monument and he was suspended with pay. The monument was moved out of public view on Aug. 27 and, the next day, about a thousand supporters of Moore rallied at the building. Rev. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, addressed the crowd: "The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution." Dobson also complained about rulings against prayer in public schools, abortion rights, and the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, attributed these rulings to "activist judge[s]" and said: "The symbolism as well as the substance of this moment cannot escape us. One federal judge has placed the Ten Commandments in a closet. That came after the United States Supreme Court recently welcomed everything else out of the closet." Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove offered to display the monument at the Mississippi capitol building for a week "to show support for our common Judeo-Christian heritage."

It was not Moore's first time doing this:

"Moore was a circuit judge in Etowah County, northeast of Birmingham, in the late 1990s when he fought a lawsuit seeking to remove a wooden plaque depicting the commandments from his courtroom.

The legal battle propelled him to statewide office in 2000, when the Republican jurist was elected chief justice after campaigning as the 'Ten Commandments Judge.'" [CNN, 8/28/2003]

Choosing a version of the Ten Commandments to display, Bob Minor wrote in 2003, “is to take sides in centuries-old battles between Protestants and Catholics as well as in the history of anti-Semitism” and, furthermore, to accept the final commandment in its entirety is to accept a definition of property that includes a man’s “slaves, his animals, his land, and also his wife.“

As a result of Moore's 2003 protest, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed him from office in November 2003.

He returned to the bench when he was elected Alabama's Chief Justice in 2012. The previous year, he had expressed interest in running for President, but his early campaign in 2011 did not succeed.

Influence throughout the nation

In 2003, the city of Casper, Wyoming voted to move a Ten Commandments monument out of a public park where it had been since 1965 and into a separate plaza to be dedicated to showcasing history. The city had been threatened with two lawsuits: one from the Freedom From Religion Foundation and one from the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. The latter wanted to install their own monument in the park to announce that a gay victim of a hate crime was burning in hell.

In 2006, the Christian ministry Faith and Action built a large granite monument outside its headquarters in Washington, D.C. The headquarters are located behind the U.S. Supreme Court, and "the group's president said the tablets were angled so that justices arriving at the high court would see them." (As per Fox News, Sept. 23, 2013. I have removed the link so as not to link to Fox News on principle.) It was vandalized in 2013.

In 2011, in Ohio, Judge James DeWeese, upon being challenged by the ACLU, removed a poster of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and replaced it with a poster called “Philosophies of Law in Conflict” [see it here] that contrasted the Ten Commandments with the “humanist precept” of "moral relativism." The poster asserted that there are “only two views: either God is the final authority, and we acknowledge His unchanging standards of behavior. Or man is the final authority, and standards of behavior change at the whim of individuals or societies.” The 6th Circuit ruled against DeWeese, who was represented by Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. (The ACLU had previously sued DeWeese in 2000 and 2008 for similar displays.)

In 2012, two state representatives in Tennessee, Mike Bell and Matthew Hill, "introduced a bill authorizing counties and cities to set up displays of 'historical documents and monuments and writings' that have been 'recognized to commemorate freedom and the rich history of Tennessee and the United States.'" Bell said that "the Ten Commandments would be one of them." [read the bill] Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said that the other documents mentioned in the bill were already legal to display, so the bill was only aimed at permitting the display of the Ten Commandments. Lynn pointed out that Protestants, Catholics and Jews recognize separate versions of the Commandments; half of the commandments are not reflected in current laws; and it is "absolutely false" that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of the nation's law.

In 2012, Oklahoma City placed a 6-foot-tall granite Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol in late 2012. (Two years later, a man who claimed to be mentally ill and off his meds and on a mission from Satan pissed on it and drove his car into it, and then walked into the federal building and threatened President Obama and the federal government.)

In 2013, American Atheists designed a 1,500-pound granite monument for the Bradford County Courthouse in Starke, Fla. in response to a Ten Commandments monument that had been placed there the previous year by an organization called Community Men's Fellowship. Bradford County agreed to allow the atheist monument following court-ordered mediation. (The county's attorney said: "What the atheists agreed to is something they could have originally been approved for without a year of money and litigation.") The atheist monument was funded by Stiefel Freethought Foundation and was to have "quotes related to secularism from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O'Hair" and the Treaty of Tripoli. American Atheists director of regional operations Ken Loukinen said: "We'd rather there be no monuments at all, but if they are allowed to have the Ten Commandments, we will have our own." Community Men’s Fellowship posted a statement on Facebook acknowledging that “this issue was won on the basis of this being a free speech issue, so don't be alarmed when the American Atheists want to erect their own sign or monument. It's their right.” In 2014, Florida's Levy County, which already had a Ten Commandments monument outside its courthouse, denied a request by the local group Williston Atheists to build a monument similar to the one in Bradford County. The Levy County Commissioners said that the proposed atheist monument did not meet county guidelines because the quotations in the intended design were incomplete.

In 2017, a new Ten Commandments monument outside the Arkansas state capitol was intentionally destroyed by a man who drove his car into it. It was the same man who had driven his car into the Oklahoma monument several years earlier.

In mid-2023, Donald Trump was found liable for raping a woman; the media doesn't figure this topic as prominently into stories about Trump as they did when it was sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

Read: The Republican Effort To Remake Schools In God’s Image: A movement to dismantle the existing school system and remake it in a Christian nationalist image is well on its way across America. Nathalie Baptiste, HuffPost, Sep 28, 2025

Wondered what is happening with the Supreme Court? 👇 They are part of the administration of chaos, corruption, cruelty. #taxTheRich #immunityRuling www.nber.org/papers/w34643 #Voices4victory #USDemocracy

[image or embed]

— Do Not Obey. We are Democracy. (@zangerliberia.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 10:46 AM

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Why the American president is a 'Despot's Apprentice'

According to Brian Klaas, who has studied despots and their victims in many countries, Donald Trump isn’t a despot — yet. He was democratically elected and is bound to the institutions of U.S. democracy. Yet much of what protects democracy are people’s expectations, not law. In “careening through the soft guardrails of American democracy,” the president “is corrupting political norms, as Americans gradually come to accept previously unacceptable behavior.” Ultimately the Constitution is “ink on a piece of parchment.” People must be responsible for upholding democracy.

How can we understand what Trump is doing and where he is leading the country? Klaas explains it in his excellent new book, The Despot's Apprentice, a lively and enjoyable read despite its grim diagnosis.

Distinguishing himself through unusually harmful deeds, hateful words, and useless noise

He does things that most other U.S. politicians of any party would never do. During the campaign, his staff tweeted an anti-Semitic meme of the Star of David, stacks of money, and the word “corrupt.” Trump never apologized; his Jewish son-in-law covered publicly for him. Trump attempted to prevent Muslims from entering the US, refused to release tax returns, criticizes Democratic opponents more severely than foreign leaders, and has refused to clearly condemn domestic hate groups. He has tweeted approximately 1,000 times about “ratings,” “crowds,” and “Fox and Friends” (a television show that “offer[s] only overwhelmingly positive coverage of his administration, even in the midst of its most egregious scandals”) but only 40 times about Afghanistan, 12 times about poverty, and about “human rights only once—to mock them”.

Sowing distrust of the press

Trump deliberately turns public opinion against journalists. As Klaas puts it, for a despot, “[w]hen you can’t bend the press to your will, the next best thing is to bend public opinion against the press itself.” In one poll, only 9 percent of Republican voters said they trust the press generally, and a large majority of Republican voters said they would trust information from Trump above information from longstanding respected news outlets (whether liberal-leaning or conservative-leaning).

In March 2017, Trump tweeted “Change libel laws?”, meaning he wanted to make it easier to prosecute the press for unflattering coverage, given that the New York Times has “gotten me wrong for two solid years.” Klaas pointed out that the complaint was about “’wrong’ analysis or interpretations of him” and not malicious or deceptive reporting. Prosecuting the press ought to be difficult to avoid a chilling effect; this is part of longstanding First Amendment interpretation. In June, Trump tweeted a threat against Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, to inflict sales tax on Amazon because he doesn’t like the coverage in the Washington Post. Another despot might think to threaten “something other than,” Klaas quipped, “a tax they already pay.”

The New York Times reported that a senior administration official discussed using the potential merger as “leverage” against CNN. “In other words,” Klaas said, “they are openly acknowledging a terrible conflict of interest—even embracing it, contemplating an egregious abuse of power—in order to threaten CNN into submission.” More childishly, Trump retweeted a video showing a person with “CNN” over his face being punched. The Internet user who modified the video had the word “Asshole” in his username and had also posted numerous comments “using the N-word and joking about killing African-Americans.” Trump thereby “amplified the voice of a racist who joked about murder while endorsing a culture permissive of violence against media representatives”.

Legitimizing outlets that lie

Years ago, Joseph Farah claimed that Democrats intended to open concentration camps, soybeans turn people gay, and Obama was born outside the US. Trump connected with Farah and promoted the so-called “birther” conspiracy theory about Obama. Trump also appeared on InfoWars which has claimed “that the parents of twenty young schoolchildren who were murdered [at Sandy Hook] made the entire thing up as part of a government conspiracy” and he has retweeted “people who peddle bogus conspiracy theories like the now infamous Pizzagate hoax, which falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizzeria.”

“It goes without saying that the president should never be even remotely tainted by such people,” Klaas said, much less encourage them.

More subtly, after a press conference in Riyadh featuring Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, American journalists had to rely on “a transcript from Saudi state television. In this absurdist twist, the world’s most powerful democracy had to rely on journalists from one of the world’s most brutal autocracies—one that lacks a free press—in order to report on a press conference featuring a US secretary of state.”

Telling his own lies

"In modern American history, no president has ever told so many easily debunked lies in such a short period of time," Klaas asserts. In this book he spends a lot of time explaining different types of lies and different motivations for them.

In the 2016 election, the popular vote went to Hillary Clinton. These votes were cast legitimately by American citizens, according to everyone who has looked into it, including Trump’s lawyers. It is Trump himself who insists, without evidence, that immigrants voted fraudulently. (Of course, “40% of American adults didn’t vote at all,” and therefore “[a]pathy beat Trump by 10 points”.) His electoral college win was fairly narrow yet he asserts otherwise. Lest we mistakenly believe that Trump cares in general about the validity of democratic elections, we must note how quick he was to congratulate the Turkish president Erdogan on his 2017 “win” of a rigged election and accept Trump’s own explanation of his “conflict of interest” in matters concerning the Turkish president due to owning property in Istanbul.

Six months into his presidency, when Trump claimed that he’d signed more legislation than any president since Harry Truman, he had in fact “signed fewer bills than Presidents Clinton, Carter, Truman, and FDR,” and none of them were the ten pieces of legislation that, as candidate, he’d promised to implement within his first 100 days as president “as part of his ‘Contract with the American Voter.’” Twelve of the 38 bills he'd signed simply “renamed buildings or memorials, made low-level appointments, or were procedural tweaks.”

In July, after giving a speech to the Boy Scouts of America “in which he thanked the children attending for voting for him (they can’t vote)” and then telling them about an orgy on a yacht, he said that “the head of the Boy Scouts had called him to say that ‘it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them.’ This was untrue," Klaas writes. "The Trump administration later acknowledged that no such call had happened.”

Trump continues to insist on the guilt of the Central Park Five in a crime that occurred in 1989, “ignoring clear and acknowledged evidence that he was wrong about a clear-cut racist miscarriage of justice,” after DNA evidence and a confession pointed to someone else and the Central Park Five have been released.

The consequence of so much lying is to normalize it and make it a joke. Sean Spicer, Trump's former spokesperson, appeared on the Emmy awards in September, joking, “This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period...’” It was a reference to the first and perhaps most famous lie Spicer was instructed to tell: that more people had turned out for Trump’s inauguration in Washington than for anyone else’s inauguration, even though aerial photography, police records, and subway records indicated otherwise. The fact that Spicer could transform his lie into a public joke alarms Klaas. “When you live under the cloud of an incompetent government that routinely lies, jokes are a common coping mechanism,” Klaas explained, noting that he’s seen it “firsthand while living in authoritarian states.”

Sowing distrust of courts, intelligence agencies, science agencies, and the Congressional Budget Office

As a candidate, Trump said that a judge should recuse himself because of his “Mexican heritage,” which Paul Ryan called “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Trump was “encouraging the public to believe that the courts and their representatives are not independent arbiters of law, but biased by their own race and therefore untrustworthy.”

Intelligence agencies determined that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal. Trump ordered them to find Iranian noncompliance within three months so that he would have a reason to back out of the deal. It is dangerous, Klaas notes, when intelligence agencies are asked to give "politically motivated findings rather than dispassionate, objective ones.” The information is already distrusted based on partisan identity. A poll in June found a Republican/Democratic split among the American public: Democrats accepted “the unanimous conclusion of the intelligence community” that Russia interfered in the US 2016 election, while Republicans rejected this information.

Under the Trump administration, an EPA climate scientist was reassigned as an accountant. In August, “a group of scientists leaked their latest climate change report to The New York Times before it could be buried by the Trump administration. That’s a truly shocking canary in the coal mine—when researchers from thirteen government agencies, including NASA feel the need to leak the latest findings of a clear scientific consensus for fear that their government would refuse to publish it.” In September, Trump picked Rep. Bridenstine of Oklahoma, a climate change denier with degrees in business and psychology, to lead NASA.

He casts doubt on the “independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office” (“fake news” according to the White House, “deep state” according to Newt Gingrich), even though Trump’s own Health and Human Services secretary hired a Republican to lead it, so “it’s hard to see how it would be biased against the Trump administration.” Reports like the CBO’s “serve a crucial function in a democracy: they are the legislative scorekeepers that everyone can trust.” Today, however, “undercutting the gravitas and authority of independent institutions is crucial to eroding democracy and amassing greater power.”

Shrugging off other countries’ violations of human rights and democracy

As candidate, Trump publicly “mocked the international condemnations” of the 1988 chemical attack that killed thousands of Kurds in Halabja. He also endorses torture, which is “a crime under both international and American law” and “despite just about every military official in the United States disagreeing” that torture yields usable, accurate information.

Rodrigo Duterte, elected in 2016 as president of the Philippines, promised that he would assassinate journalists and give police impunity to kill 100,000 criminals during his first six months in office. Under him, police have indeed been killing people in the street, and some people have been tortured. The European Union has condemned Duterte, but Trump gave Duterte a personal phone call to compliment his approach to crime.

Before Trump took office, he swore he would not allow Putin to invade Ukraine, something Putin had already done years previously. When a talk show host pointed out to him that Putin kills journalists, Trump responded on air, ”I think our country does plenty of killing also,” adding of the assassinations, “I haven’t seen any evidence,” and that Putin “hasn’t been convicted of anything.” (Most authoritarian despots are not convicted of their crimes, Klaas helpfully notes.)

While the European Union tried to push Poland toward better democratic principles, Trump chose to “endorse Poland as a model for the West” because, according to Klaas, he preferred Poland’s “good optics with rapturous crowds chanting, ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’...he sold out democracy in a friendlier major European nation, in exchange for a good photo opportunity.”

Nepotism and conflicts of interest

Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner know about “jewelry design, how to run a fashion business, or New York real estate development,” yet are leading the way on “counterterrorism, trade deals, and how to cope with the threat of a nuclear North Korea.” Ivanka did not even register to vote in time to vote for her father in the presidential primary. Between the election and inauguration, she tried to sell access to herself for a coffee date for tens of thousands of dollars (before being forced to call it off as it violates political ethics). She was given the formal title “Special Assistant to the President” despite the Trump Transition Team having said she would not get a title. Klaas compares Ivanka Trump’s role to that of Gulnara Karimova and talks about Trump’s nepotism having reached a level

“unfathomable in other functioning democracies. It’s hard to imagine German Chancellor Angela Merkel or British Prime Minister Theresa May surrounded by a cadre of men in uniform, jockeying for influence against a daughter and son-in-law. This is banana republic stuff. If this staffing pattern existed in some other country, with generals being hailed as saviors rescuing the people from the civilian leader, alarm bells would be going off for every pro-democracy monitoring group in the world.”

Klaas also discusses “a core tenet of democracy: that public service should be dissociated from private interest.” These conflicts of interest play out in numerous ways. “But at least Americans never had to wonder,” Klaas said, “whether Clinton failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide because he was worried about Clinton Tower Kigali, or whether Obama failed to stand up to Assad in Syria because his daughter Malia had a clothing line pending in Damascus.” In April, Trump’s family hosted China’s President Xi for dinner at their private resort. Ivanka Trump’s brand sells shoes that are manufactured in China, and, during that dinner, China approved the sale of new Ivanka products. In July, Trump praised Xi “hours after prominent human rights activist and Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobao died in China while in state detention for his outspoken pro-democracy, pro-human rights views”.

Anything else?

In addition to all the despot-in-training approaches above, Trump exploits the fact that “[p]artisanship has become more about tribal identity than about disagreements on how to govern American society,” and he wearies people with the sheer number of onslaughts “because you can’t fight 100 battles all at once. Citizens are forced to pick and choose.”

The conclusion by the author, an expert in despots, is that Trump is uncomfortably similar to one and can swiftly lead the country down the path to authoritarianism if ordinary citizens are not careful and do not make a greater effort.

Published in the US on Nov. 14, 2017, this book is a timely accompaniment to the neverending cascade of scandals besetting the president. If there is a book of similar quality challenging this argument or its conclusions, I am not aware of it. No need to "Buy Ivanka's Stuff," but I will give you a "free commercial" (as Kellyanne Conway might put it) and suggest buying The Despot's Apprentice.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

On tolerating intolerance: Thoughts from 'The Atheist Muslim'

Ali Rizvi begins The Atheist Muslim with his memoir of his formative years growing up Muslim and then proceeds to general atheist arguments. He is concerned about human rights and also about logical arguments for the existence of God. He identifies “when I let go of religion completely” as the moment when he learned that the Big Bang created time itself and therefore eliminated the necessary frame for the idea of creation.

The most valuable chapter for me is the sixth one, “Islamophobia-Phobia and the ‘Regressive Left,’” where he ties together modern identities and arguments for Islam and atheism. In this chapter, he begins by identifying as a “free speech absolutist” because individuals, not governments, should decide what constitutes “hate speech.” For one thing: “Criminalizing hate speech like France does infantilizes people. It doesn’t just take away someone’s right to speak; it takes away your right to form your own opinions and response to them.” Furthermore, “The uncomfortable truth is this: if you really wanted to ban all hate speech, the Bible and Quran would be the first to go. Next would be the preachers who read from them and quote them in their sermons.” (p. 132)

He goes on:


“In their well-intentioned effort to protect what they see as a targeted minority [people with Muslim identity], Western liberals unwittingly find themselves fighting to guard and protect the same backward values [of the Muslim religion] that their counterparts in Muslim-majority countries are fighting against.” (p. 133) He asks us to “Consider the case of my friend Raif Badawi, the liberal Saudi blogger who is currently serving a ten-year prison term with a sentence of one thousand lashes; or all the Bangladeshi bloggers who have been hacked to death for writing critically about Islam.” (p. 134)


It is more important now than ever to challenge and criticize the doctrine of Islam. And it is more important now than ever to protect and defend the rights of Muslims. Both of these must go together. … The only rational position between Islamic apologism and anti-Muslim bigotry is one espousing secular and liberal values. This is the only position that allows both the right to criticize bad ideas and the right to believe in them — both of which must be protected in order to set the stage for meaningful dialogue. (p. 135)


"Again, it’s crucial to emphasize the difference between criticism of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry. The first targets an ideology. The second targets human beings. This is an obvious, significant distinction, yet both are frequently lumped together under the unfortunate, reductive umbrella term ‘Islamophobia.’ Again, human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Ideas, beliefs, and books don’t and aren’t. The right to believe what one wants to believe is sacred. The belies themselves aren’t. Challenging ideas moves societies forward. Demonizing people rips societies apart. If anything, it’s precisely because of how I’d seen ordinary Muslims suffer under theocratic policies and Sharia law that I wanted to start a dialogue to help shatter the taboo of criticizing religion." (p. 137)

Some nuance is missing here. Much of the modern debate over tolerance of sexual orientation has centered on the question of whether same-sex desire is something that one chooses or something that is an immutable feature of one's being, and therefore whether same-sex behaviors (and the tolerance thereof) can be said to be ideologically motivated. My point in bringing this up is not to shift the topic from tolerance of Muslims to tolerance of gays, but rather to suggest that a similar dynamic might be at play in assumptions about how much of religious belief is ingrained in someone's personality from an early age and can't easily be unwound upon mere instruction from others.


“Criticizing, satirizing, and even mocking any belief system is never bigoted or racist.” (p. 143)


“When legitimately criticizing illiberal elements of Islam — as we might do any other religion or political ideology — elicits accusation of bigotry and racism, it abruptly ends an important conversation that needs to be had. Calling someone a bigot, racist, or Islamophobe isn’t a counterargument. It’s a lazy substitute for one. Yet we all fall for it.” (p. 146)


He quotes Reza Aslan: “People don’t derive their values from their religion — they bring their values to their religion...Those interpretations have nothing to do with the text, which is, after all, just words on a page, and everything to do with the cultural, nationalistic, ethnic, political prejudices and preconceived notions that the individual brings to the text.” Rizvi challenges Aslan’s overstatement that religious texts have “nothing” to do with values. “So, every time a jihadist yells ‘Allah Akbar!’ and severs an infidel’s head from his body with a knife, citing verses like 47:4 and 8:12-13 from the Quran,” Rizvi asks, “you would blame every possible factor for his actions except the one that literally contains the words, ‘Smite the disbelievers upon their necks’?” (pp. 148-149) He also observes that blaming the people (identified, for example, by their culture that supposedly determines their values) does tend toward bigotry.


“Our criticisms of religion aren’t an attack on people, but a challenge to what we consider bad ideas that drive bad behavior, and the sacred status afforded to them. Our opposition to religion isn’t a demonstration of bigotry; it is a demonstration against it.

Bigotry against bigotry isn’t bigotry, and tolerance of intolerance isn’t tolerance.

...

Liberalism isn’t just about tolerance of dissent. It is also about an intolerance of those that don’t tolerate dissent.” (pp. 159-160)


Page numbers from:

Ali A. Rizvi. The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Fatal flaws in 'Mere Christianity' by C. S. Lewis

the words MERE CHRISTIANITY on a mustard yellow background, in the font from the cover of one of the printings

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis is a book beloved by millions of people. When I first read it out of curiosity, at age 18 and having just started college, I found it to be a string of fallacies. I didn't expect ever to change my mind about this. Twenty years later, I reread the book and wrote up my assessment. Indeed, my basic assessment did not change. My long essay is on Medium.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

'War eunuchs' in Hirschfeld's 'The Sexual History of the World War' (1930)

In 1930, Magnus Hirschfeld published Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges in German. Panurge Press produced an abridged, adapted English translation as The Sexual History of the World War in 1934. Another English edition was produced by Cadillac Publishing Co. in 1941. The last one, since 2015, is available to read free online through the Internet Archive. Chapter 12, "Genital Injuries, War Eunuchs, etc." includes the following information.

"Above all, it was shot wounds in the testicles and also injuries to the spinal marrow which induced a complete disappearance of the sexual functions. Injuries of this sort were not uncommon during the war which explains their frequent occurrence in literature. Yet it appears that poetry gave much more attention to this problem of emasculation during the war than did science. One of these cases became famous in medical literature because the patient became a subject for transplantation experiments."

Dr. Robert Lichtenstern reported having to remove both testicles from a soldier in 1915 in Vienna due to an infected gunshot wound. The patient immediately ceased to have erections "despite various devices calculated to arouse him"; he rapidly lost his facial and body hair; and

"he read nothing and manifested no interest whatever in the war....For the most part the patient sat near his bed or at the window, ate voraciously, slept a lot, and busied himself with absolutely nothing at all. The loss of both testicles resulted in a remarkable increase of adipose tissue, especially around the neck which gave the patient a peculiarly stupid appearance."

Doctors then transplanted another man's testicle into him, with these alleged results: "Various castration symptoms, such as adiposity, altered trichosis, loss of libido and psychic indifferentism, all receded temporarily so that the patient actually entertained the idea of marrying."

Dr. F. Pick's study found "commotion neurosis" in 10 out of 25 officers and in 7 out of 75 soldiers. These men were unable to ejaculate and in some cases also unable to get erections. Pick attributed this to physical and psychic stresses of battle, including sexual abstinence.

Several literary passages are referenced in this same chapter of Hirschfeld's book:

From an author named Bruno Vogel: "I saw Sczepczyk again. With amazing precision his generative organs had been shot from his body. 'Herr Leutenant,' he whispered, a little bit ashamed and in deep confidence, 'Herr Leutenant, and I have never yet had a girl.' He gladly accepted the cigarette I gave him and I softly stroked his hair and forehead. Finally I slipped my hand over his eyes and, as a little smile of pleasure curled over his mouth, I pushed my mercifully brutal sword into his side." The title was not mentioned, but possibly this was Vogel's Es lebe der Krieg! (1924).

The Siberian diary of Edwin Erich Dwinger The Army Behind Barbed Wire: A wounded soldier says that his wife (whose picture shows her to be "a perfect child-bearing machine") wanted at least six children. "Until now we weren't able to have any children because there wasn't any money for them." When he is told that he cannot have children due to his wound, "he turned around slowly and walked to his bed, stretched himself out painfully and never spoke to anyone else until they sent him to Siberia. It is significant that we meet the tragic figure of this emasculated man further on in the novel, but at this later stage, he rejoices that he does not have to suffer the sexual hunger which the others are being plagued by."

The poet Ernst Toller has a man named Hinkemann who "may be regarded as the final literary formula of the emasculated soldier who returns home from the wars, and the inability of his wife to continue a veritably inhuman sacrifice in his behalf....we are dealing with a group of men who will never be able to find their lost happiness by the side of a woman. From every outcry of Toller's hero, we hear the whole dismal and appalling tragedy of a creature who has gone through the vast hell of war, and it is a cry which can never be silenced. How brutal is the reply to Hinkemann by his wife's seducer, Paul Grosshahn, who rebukes the cripple for seeking to keep his wife a nun. Hinke- mann is informed by the seducer that he is in reality nothing more to his wife now than a ground for divorce!"


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Panurge Press and other early 20th century distributors of erotic books

Jay A. Gertzman's Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940 gives an engaging history of the difficulties in New York City with distributing literature that had any sexual content. "The federal antiobscenity statues, lobbied through Congress by Anthony Comstock in 1873 and enforced just as powerfully half a century later, called their wares 'obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or vile.' * * * By the early 1920s, a group of young New York publishers was providing Americans with literature from European writers whom the older publishers considered too subversive to touch. Beginning in 1922, a series of court rulings made it more difficult to suppress sexually explicit material that could not be termed flagitious by any general consensus." (pp. 1, 10)

The most detailed figures in Gertzman's history include Esar Levine of Panurge Press (Esar was editor, and his brother Benjamin was business manager) and Benjamin Rebhuhn of Falstaff Press (he ran it with his wife and nephew). The Levines and Rebhuhns both had mail-order businesses and were close friends with each other. "Many Panurge titles were transferred to Falstaff in 1936 (and reprinted as new editions), and later became property of Metro Books, distributed by Benjamin Levine." (p. 30) The most important character is probably Samuel Roth, whose Golden Hind Press at 122 Fifth Avenue was raided on October 4, 1929. (p. 16) These men endured repeated prosecutions and incarcerations.

The majority of the names of booksellers in this narrative belonged to Jews. "In New York at least, during the period from 1880 to 1940, many [erotica dealers] were members of Jewish immigrant families," Gertzman writes. He adds that "German immigrants were skilled printers, lithographers, and typesetters". (pp. 28- 29)

"Although avoiding ethnic scapegoating, John Sumner [secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice] sometimes specifically described the purveyor of 'obscenity' as a Jew (or Italian or German). Rooted in his opposition to erotic literature was a fear of contamination by the unclean outsider. Society as a whole, as well as the immigrant neighborhoods, was in danger of contagion. Sumner's annual reports stigmatize individuals arrested (whether convicted or not) as 'foreign looking,' 'mentally defective,' 'exhibitionists,' 'fly-by-night.' 'Most of these defendants,' he wrote in his 1928 report, 'were of the young, radical, irreligious and over-educated type. Their personal writings wherever found, indicated an utter disregard for the law, public decency or any of the proprieties of organized society. They are literally anarchists.'" (p. 45)

The Panurge books were overpriced for the Depression era. Consequently, "Panurge classified its clients into groups. There were twenty-five 'prominent individuals'...ten 'professors'; fifty 'army officers'; twenty 'reverends'; two hundred eighty 'lawyers'; and fourteen hundred 'doctors,' including more dentists than physicians — thirty-five fully typed pages were needed to list them." (p. 57) Gertzman also says: "Judge Learned Hand appears to have recognized the more complex reality, when he found Esar Levine guilty of pandering to prurience with the circulars for his Panurge Press books. He refused to admit into evidence the Panurge Press mailing list, with its 'professors,' 'army officers,' and 'physicians.' 'Even respectable persons may have a taste for salacity,' he wrote." (p. 144)


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Alan Turing's story as told in the film 'The Imitation Game' (2014)

"The Imitation Game" (2014) stars the actor Benedict Cumberbatch playing the mathematician Alan Turing. Turing was famous for his work on early computers. During World War II, he worked for the British government on a team that deciphered intercepted Nazi communications. His successful cryptography is believed to have shortened World War II.

In the film, Turing is portrayed as a reclusive personality without strong ties to friends or family. He knows from an early age that he is attracted to other men. This was illegal in Britain at the time; sexual relations between men were punishable by prison. He is briefly engaged to a fellow codebreaker (Joan Clarke, played by the actor Keira Knightley), but he breaks it off with her, admitting his true feelings.

When finally convicted of "gross indecency," Turing was given the choice between prison and a "treatment" of chemical castration that was supposed to moderate or eliminate his sexual feelings. Both possibilities devastated him; Turing chose treatment. The film depicts him as gaunt and frail after beginning the chemical castration. He lasted one year on treatment and then committed suicide on June 7, 1954 by biting an apple poisoned with cyanide.

Another retelling

Another way you can learn about Turing's story is through the 2018 novel Murmur by Will Eaves. A reflection on this novel was published on the Firestarters blog of Tiny Flames Press.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

The long and misguided history of swearing in on Bibles

Image by: Adrian Pingstone, 2005. The photograph is of a Latin Bible made in Belgium in 1407. © Public domain. The Bible is on display in Malmesbury Abbey in England. Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks for stopping by! This article has had nearly 2,000 views in its nearly 8 years on Dead Men Blogging. In October 2024, I rewrote it for Medium.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Avoiding and correcting false beliefs

In the United States, many people believe, as comedian David Letterman says, "that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked."

People sow disinformation

For example:

"In June of 1921, a man traveling by steamship under the alias “Arthur Staley” landed in New York. He walked into a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the United States, no doubt looking over his shoulder as he did so. The leadership of the party had been meeting in secret—to avoid the now frequent raids conducted by agents of zealous Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer— but Staley had been told the location. He handed the committee a document marked with the seal of the Communist International or “Comintern,” the governing body of all the world’s communist parties which met in the Kremlin. “This is to certify that Comrade A. Staley is duly sent by the Executive Committee of the Comintern to American Agency for Party work,” it read. A further document in Yiddish explained Staley would establish a Yiddish newspaper for communist propaganda purposes targeted at America’s thriving Jewish labor movement.

Staley’s 1921 visit should have a greater place in the history books. It marked the launch of Russia’s first disinformation campaign against America."

— A Century of Russian Disinformation: Part One: The Little Known Story of Russia's First Efforts to Provoke Revolution in America, Catherine Prendergast, Catherine's Substack, Dec 8, 2023

See also my story: "Who Paid For Millions of Fascist Pamphlets in the US in 1940?" Nazi Germany did, explained in ‘Prequel’ by Rachel Maddow. It's a 7-minute read on Medium. I've unpaywalled the link for you.

People avoid knowledge

Information avoidance, according to several authors in a 2010 paper published in the Review of General Psychology, is "any behavior designed to prevent or delay the acquisition of available but potentially unwanted information."

On the topic of avoidance, Katy Montgomerie in 2023 notes a similarity in argument styles of “GC people” (i.e., so-called Gender Critical people) and “religious cultists.” Montgomerie says:

“When you find something in their worldview that's an internal contraction or that's disproved by evidence they do this thing where they avoid confronting the realisation just before they get there. Like you set them up and just before they close the loop they deflect. They do it in a way where it could only happen as consistently as it does if they were already aware of the contradiction and are just unwilling to face it.” (tweet 1, tweet 2)

One way to avoid learning: Choose leaders and authorities who don't know anything

Someone who is committed to a conspiracy theory probably spends a lot of time deep in their denialism, because they have to buttress those walls, and so they have less time to spend learning things broadly. Things they learn about the world broadly might eventually challenge their conspiracy theory on a limited topic, and they won't allow that. This amounts to a refusal to have useful knowledge of multiple kinds. When people elevate these limited knowledge conspiracy theorists to, say, political office, everyone is stuck with an incompetent leader.

People believe these things

Lawrence Davidson characterized the arguments in Rick Shenkman's 2008 book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter as saying that Americans are: "(1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble." Davidson then said that this is "a default position for any population," but that it is still a concern when, for example, "polls show [that] over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was." Such confusion isn't unique to the United States. "In the middle of March 2008," wrote Javier Cercas (translated by Anne McLean) in The Anatomy of a Moment, "I read that according to a poll published in the United Kingdom almost a quarter of Britons thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character."

In 2013, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (reported in The Week on May 10) found that 19 percent of Americans believed that the Affordable Care Act, known popularly as "Obamacare," had already been repealed or overturned, and another 42 percent weren't sure.

In 2014, the National Science Foundation said that only a slight majority of Americans polled were able to correctly respond that viruses can't be treated with antibiotics and that 26 percent said that the sun revolves around the Earth. Citing a prior poll by this organization on this same question, Susan Jacoby wrote in 2008 that "The problem is not just the things we do not know...it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism...The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation." Tom Nichols, commenting on Jacoby's column in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, said: "Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It might even be too kind to call this merely “anti-rational”; it is almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of mouth — except with all of it now sent along at the speed of electrons."

Since 2014, a small but growing group of "Flat Earthers" has met regularly in Fort Collins, Colo., with sympathetic meetings occurring in a half-dozen other U.S. cities. A leader recalls seeing a YouTube video that promoted the idea of a flat earth. “It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was real. I started the same way as everyone else, saying, ‘Oh, I’ll just prove the earth is round.’ Nine months later, I was staring at my computer thinking, ‘I can’t prove the globe anymore.” The article in the Denver Post says of this group: "Many subscribe to the 'ice wall theory,' or the belief that the world is circumscribed by giant ice barriers, like the walls of a bowl, that then extend infinitely along a flat plane." In 2017, searching YouTube by the exact phrase "flat earth" (with quotation marks) yields three-quarters of a million videos. In 2018, CNN reported, "a YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media."

In 2010, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting received funding amounting to 0.00014% of the U.S. federal budget. CNN/Opinion Research found early the next year that "Forty percent of those polled believe funding the CPB receives takes up 1 to 5 percent of the budget, 30 percent believe public broadcasting takes up 5 percent or more of the budget and 7 percent of respondents believe the non-profit receives 50 percent or more of the federal budget." The final cohort of respondents who thought it was more than half of the budget may also suffer from general mathematical or political illiteracy, but it seems nonetheless fair to say that many people have false beliefs about the funding for public broadcasting. (For comparison, when a Roper poll in 2007 accurately informed participants that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) receives funding equivalent to about $1 per American per year, half of the respondents said this amount was "too little.")

In 2019, when asked about Arabic numerals by an opinion polling firm, a majority of Americans (56 percent) said the numerals should be excluded from the curriculum in American schools. ("Arabic numerals" are the shapes we recognize as numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.) The question was designed to highlight how quickly most Americans would respond in a prejudiced manner to anything labeled "Arabic."

"There’s no shame in not knowing; there’s shame in not wanting to know. For years I’ve said this to my college students as a way of telling them that learning should never stop. But I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that, at a certain point, there should be shame in not knowing," Charles Taylor wrote in an opinion piece for the Boston Globe. He fretted over "creative-writing students who have never heard of Edith Wharton or Ralph Ellison; journalism students who can’t identify the attorney general; students who don’t know what the NAACP or the Geneva Convention are."

"The emerging narrative of this election is that Donald Trump was elected by people who are sick of being looked down on by liberal elites. The question the people pushing this narrative have not asked is this: Were the elites, based on the facts, demonstrably right?

* * *

That Trump voters chose an easily disprovable myth over readily available facts is one sign of their willful ignorance.

And still this imperviousness to fact pales next to the racism and xenophobia and misogyny — in other words, the moral ignorance — that Trump’s supporters wallowed in. All of the condescension of which liberals have been accused can’t begin to match the condescension of the current storyline that Trump voters are too disenfranchised or despised or dismissed to be held morally responsible for their choices.

* * *

The apologists for Donald Trump voters have given their imprimatur to a culture that equates knowledge and expertise with elitism, a culture ignorant of the history of the country it professes to love and contemptuous of the content of its founding documents."

It isn't clear from this brief column how Taylor thinks factual knowledge and moral knowledge might be related. Most people would say that moral knowledge depends on drawing conclusions that incorporate factual knowledge. (For example, you have to know whether someone else is threatening you before you can properly decide how to act in "self-defense." As another example, you have to know whether a crime occurred before you can express your opinion about it. Berel Lang wrote: "...the most extreme Holocaust 'revisionists' — Faurisson, Rassinier, Butz — do not deny that if the Holocaust had occurred, it would have been an enormity warranting moral reflection, judgment, and whatever else followed from these, presumably including condemnation and punishment; they deny only that it did occur.") Some would also say that moral knowledge is not merely a concatenation of ordinary beliefs and social agreements but that it exists in some separate sphere.

Brian Klaas' 2017 book The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy provides this example of people willing to give up a democratic norm due to a false belief about how a previous election was conducted.

“According to a poll taken in August 2017, 47% of Republicans believe he [Trump] won the popular vote — even though he lost it to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Even more horrifying, 68% of Republicans mistakenly believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 contest. And here’s the authoritarian kicker for good measure: 52% of Republicans surveyed said that they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election if President Trump suggested that doing so was necessary to ensure that only legal citizens could vote. Democracies die when presidents can postpone elections based on the mythology of a pernicious lie.”

Nearly a year later, in May 2018, 48% of Republicans still held the false belief that millions of votes had been cast illegally, and 35% said they were unsure.

And in November 2020, days after Joe Biden won the popular vote by at least 4 million votes and also won the Electoral College (with the same number of electoral votes that Trump had won in 2016, incidentally), a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 6 in 10 Republicans said Biden had won. The false belief grew more popular and stuck. An Ipsos poll conducted March 30-31, 2021 found that 6 in 10 Republicans believed that Trump was the rightful victor and that the election had been somehow stolen from him, while nearly as many believed more specifically that Biden had won due to some form of vote fraud or election rigging.

Some political choices are motivated by beliefs that are not merely incidentally false, but superstitious and, I would argue, horribly immoral. Newsweek reported in January 2018 that "many evangelical Christians believe that Trump was chosen by God to usher in a new era, a part of history called the 'end times,'" and, accordingly, this group "overwhelmingly support[s] President Donald Trump because they believe he'll cause the world to end." [Emphasis mine.]

Many Americans said in an August 2018 poll that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” despite the First Amendment guaranteeing the freedom of the press. The breakdown was partisan: 12 percent of Democrats, 21 percent of Independents, and 43 percent of Republicans believed the president should be allowed to shut down newspapers.

Across various countries, in a 2019 study, about 10-30% of atheists have superstitious beliefs. Agnostics are a little more likely to be superstitious. Meanwhile, 30-70% of the general population, which includes religious believers, is superstitious. This shows that while atheism correlates with a lower likelihood of superstitious belief, it does not root out superstition entirely. Belief in God and belief in superstitions are separate things.

Truth ought to matter

More reasoning skills or relevant knowledge background does not always help someone arrive at the correct answer. If their reasoning is motivated by something other than seeking truth (see the definition of "motivated reasoning"), then their enhanced reasoning skills will only abet them in seeking their ulterior motive. Ezra Klein wrote in Why We're Polarized:

If the problem was truly that people needed to know more about science to fully appreciate the dangers of a warming climate, then their concern should've risen alongside their knowledge. But here, too, the opposite was true: among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.

This will resonate with anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It’s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in researching counterarguments end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven’t spent much time studying the issue. This is true for all kinds of things, of course. Ever argued with a 9/11 truther? I have, and they are quite informed about the various melting points of steel. More information can help us find the right answers. But if our search is motivated by aims other than accuracy, more information can mislead us — or, more precisely, help us mislead ourselves. There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right.”

Other times, people simply don't care whether what they're saying is true, regardless of their ability to investigate the relevant facts. A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 14 percent of US adults have shared fake news despite knowing that it was fake.

But, as Daniel DeNicola wrote in "You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to":

"Consider those who believe that the lunar landings or the Sandy Hook school shooting were unreal, government-created dramas; that Barack Obama is Muslim; that the Earth is flat; or that climate change is a hoax. In such cases, the right to believe is proclaimed as a negative right; that is, its intent is to foreclose dialogue, to deflect all challenges; to enjoin others from interfering with one’s belief-commitment. The mind is closed, not open for learning. They might be ‘true believers’, but they are not believers in the truth.

* * *

Beliefs shape attitudes and motives, guide choices and actions. Believing and knowing are formed within an epistemic community, which also bears their effects. There is an ethic of believing, of acquiring, sustaining, and relinquishing beliefs — and that ethic both generates and limits our right to believe. If some beliefs are false, or morally repugnant, or irresponsible, some beliefs are also dangerous. And to those, we have no right.”

We care more about facts when we feel good about ourselves

“The 2000 [presidential] campaign was something of a fact-free zone,” said Brendan Nyhan, who was an undergraduate at Swarthmore at the time and who subsequently founded a political fact-checking website called Spinsanity that led to a book All the President's Spin. In his doctoral program at Duke University, he moved on to ask, as Maria Konnikova put it: "If factual correction is ineffective, how can you make people change their misperceptions?"

From Konnikova's article:

"Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. He found much speculation, but, apart from his own work and the studies that Nyhan was conducting, there was little empirical research.

* * *

One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief — that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge — and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct.

* * *

When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.

[For more examples of how this might work, see these Disruptive Dissertation blog posts. In religious thought: "The specious claim that human calamities are caused by an angry God" In political thought: "False reports that President Obama is a Muslim"]

Konnikova went on to say:

In a series of studies that they’ve just submitted for publication, the Dartmouth team approached false-belief correction from a self-affirmation angle, an approach that had previously been used for fighting prejudice and low self-esteem. The theory, pioneered by Claude Steele, suggests that, when people feel their sense of self threatened by the outside world, they are strongly motivated to correct the misperception, be it by reasoning away the inconsistency or by modifying their behavior.

* * *

Normally, self-affirmation is reserved for instances in which identity is threatened in direct ways: race, gender, age, weight, and the like. Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming? As it turns out, it would."

It is also important to note the difference between actually believing something and merely claiming to believe it to maintain one's public image. Public image is more obviously related to one's identity and also to one's material interests. Alexander C. Kaufman provided this example:

"In December 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. convened a two-day summit of environmental and ethics experts at a rural retreat near the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia....For decades, Exxon had funded far-right think tanks that seeded doubt over the scientific consensus on climate change. [The new CEO Rex] Tillerson and Ken Cohen, Exxon’s PR chief and chair of its political action committee, wanted to broaden the company’s political reach. One step was changing their messaging about climate change, moving away from the denial the company had been attacked for supporting....Not long after the summit, Exxon began to modify its public stance on climate change."

Sometimes what is claimed publicly is done to maintain relationships and make money. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky on how the American mass media operate:

"But a critical analysis of American institutions, the way they function domestically and their international operations, must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences. One has to work hard, to produce evidence that is credible, to construct serious arguments, to present extensive documentation — all tasks that are superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional framework of the doctrinal consensus. It is small wonder that few are willing to undertake the effort, quite apart from the rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence."

A user writing as "Exiled Consensus" in December 2018 said that it gives "too much credit" to climate change denialists to say that they are primarily motivated by science denialism.

It is equivalent to saying that cigarette company lobbyists analyze the facts, read the studies, conclude that cigarettes do not cause lung cancer, and are happy when their children develop smoking habits. Quite simply, such analysis does not occur, as author Ari Rabin-Havt explains in Lies, Incorporated. The intention of denial is to pollute discourse and sow doubt. That alone is considered a victory as it stalls action which can harm cigarette sales, or fossil fuel production. It is not science denial; rather, it is anti-profit denial, as the science is not even considered in the first place.

Or consider that Trumpist radio host Bill Mitchell tweeted in March 2020 that the coronavirus was "climate change 2.0," his way of saying that politicians were scaremongering. Mitchell is inclined to worry neither about climate change nor pandemic — or so he publicly claims. Intentionally ignoring scientists is part of his political ideology, as "GOP Climate Change Denial Set The Stage For Trump’s Coronavirus Conspiracies" more broadly (to quote a Huffington Post headline in July 2020).

Nyhan's work, by contrast, seems to be about more privately held beliefs.

Pessimism can drive down the accuracy of our estimates, according to Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now:

"In a recent survey Hans Rosling found that less than one in four Swedes guessed that it [the average global life expectancy] was that high [71.4 years in 2015], a finding consistent with the results of other multinational surveys of opinions on longevity, literacy, and poverty in what Rosling dubbed the Ignorance Project. "The logo of the project is a chimpanzee, because, as Rosling explained, 'If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, they'd have done better than the respondents.' The respondents, including students and professors of global health, were not so much ignorant as fallaciously pessimistic."

So they say

Albert Einstein said, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former." Elbert Hubbard: "Everyone is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit." George Bernard Shaw said it would be better to know that one does not know: “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” As hope, nonetheless, the words of Phyllis Bottome: "There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final."


Cryptids

"According to Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears, more than 20 percent of Americans believe Bigfoot is real, the same number who believe the Big Bang actually happened," William Giraldi wrote in 2019.


Animals often act smarter than us

Brian Klaas wrote in The Evolution of Stupidity (and Octopus Intelligence): What we can learn about intelligence, stupidity, and ourselves—from some of the smartest, strangest, alien-like creatures on the planet (The Garden of Forking Paths, April 23, 2024):

"Sadly, so much of our discourse around intelligence and stupidity gets hijacked by pseudoscience, racism, and debates over whether arbitrary measurements like IQ are valid. We ignore more interesting questions around intelligence and stupidity that we can learn not from ourselves, but from other species. In particular:

1. What, specifically, does it mean to be “intelligent?” What do we mean when we say that humans and chimps and dolphins and crows are intelligent?

2. Why did some species—including us—become smart, while others didn’t?

3. Why is stupidity still so widespread in humans?"


Lies of Big Tobacco and Big Oil

Jared Yates Sexton wrote in The Midnight Kingdom (2023):

"Powell had earned his fortune as a lawyer representing the tobacco company Philip Morris, parrying the blows of critics who asserted that cigarettes were causing an epidemic of cancer in America. Though Powell and his associates fought these accusations tooth and nail, secretly they knew them to be true. ... This tactic would later be replicated by the oil industry as their own scientists confirmed that the burning of fossil fuels was beginning to endanger the environment and contributed to calamitous global climate change. By 1968 they already knew their businesses were creating 'serious world-wide environmental changes' that could lead to 'the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of oceans,' and a whole host of apocalyptic scenarios. Rather than deal with the looming crisis responsibly or ethically, the oil companies borrowed a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook by using their resources to fund spurious science, often relying on the same individuals and companies to break consensus and inspire falsified skepticism."


Maybe everything's determined and we believe we have free will only because we haven't observed and identified why everything is happening?

"Richard Herrnstein, one of [B. F.] Skinner’s most-accomplished students, later his colleague in Harvard’s Psychology Department, and a luminary of radical behaviorism, once explained to me that any action regarded as an expression of free will is simply one for which 'the vortex of stimuli' that produced it cannot yet be adequately specified. We merely lack the means of observation and calculation."
— Shoshana Zuboff



Comemierda

Dec 16, 2023 on Bluesky: Kendra 'Gloom is My Beat' Pierre-Louis posts: English needs a word that we could replace stupid and dumb with that isn't about intellect but kind of a mashup of 'willfull ignorance' and 'incuriosity'. Doctora Malka Older replies: 'comemierda'
Bluesky

U.S. Supreme Court

In 2023, we're seeing the Supreme Court's "systematic discounting of, & even hostility to, the expertise of administrative agencies. It's an aggressive, assertive form of ignorance from a very powerful body", i.e., the court is embracing "populist epistemology". — Kevin Elliott on Bluesky

In reply to which, someone mentioned this paper: Populist Constitutionalism 101 North Carolina Law Review 1763 (2023). Anya Bernstein and Glen Staszewski.

Also

This is one reason (among several) that it’s worth society’s trouble to fully fund a community of *full time nonsense specialists*: scholars, reporters, and communicators on misinformation, disinfo, pseudoscience, and fringe, quack, and paranormal claims (plus research on extremism, propaganda, etc)

[image or embed]

— Daniel Loxton (@danielloxton.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 9:14 PM

Most working scientists are traditionally very reluctant to engage with fringe claims because it wastes time, invites abuse, and also *is not their area of expertise* (except for a few who make nonsense an additional specialty). Creationists clobbering scientists in debates is the classic example

— Daniel Loxton (@danielloxton.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 9:18 PM

Society has never come close to supporting skeptics, debunkers, misinfo reporters, and disinfo researchers at any level remotely approaching the scale of the problem—and even today, during the “infodemic” or “misinformation apocalypse,” there are Very Serious People who deny there’s any such need

— Daniel Loxton (@danielloxton.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 9:22 PM

"...Republicans are often significantly better at ignoring the policy details and focusing instead on shaping schemas within which voters perceive the world. Too many people in politics wrongly think you’ll win the argument if you have better facts. But winning the argument in politics isn’t often about finding more or better facts. It’s about perception and the cognitive shortcuts we use to process information as we sort our world into neat categories that make sense."
Brian Klaas, Schemas and the Political Brain: The neuroscience and psychology of why better facts don't make winning arguments in politics. Garden of Forking Paths, Apr 18, 2025

Chandler Fritz: In an essay for our April 4, 2024, issue, you wrote about how scholars of the early modern world must contend with deeply strange things, like flying saints and levitating nuns, without getting stuck between “the dogmas of unconditional faith and unconditional secularism.” How can a scholar embrace those strange things without looking silly?

Erin Maglaque: Historians of the premodern world must reckon with strange things all the time; it’s one of the delights of the job. For a long time, influenced by anthropologists, historians of premodern Europe tried to make these strange things make perfect sense. We tried to decipher the early modern past as if it were an alien planet; we tried to piece together the symbolism of early modern religious rituals; we tried to understand the social functions of various odd aspects of early modern popular culture. In short, we tried to smooth early modern belief into something rational. But this is not always satisfying, because people are not always rational—not then, and not now.

Some historians of a more conservative bent have reacted strongly against those earlier, broadly accepted cultural approaches. These scholars have argued that all those odd things—levitation, bilocation, miracles of all kinds, witchcraft—really did happen. To my mind that is bad history, not least because it puts us out of a job. If we accept that saints really did fly in the seventeenth century, what would be left to explain? I suppose the early modern past would become the intellectual terrain of gravitational physicists rather than historians.

...it might be more useful to think about the texture of that fantasy and what it suggests about the interior lives of the people who believed it.

— Interview in the New York Review of Books, emailed to subscribers, March 21, 2026

New type of prosecutorial misconduct just dropped cases.justia.com/new-mexico/s...

[image or embed]

— Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. (@clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social) April 30, 2026 at 8:47 PM

People also believe false things about electric cars.

Who Counts the Rain: African climate. European ink. Old empire, new format. Roberto Suarez, Medium, April 11, 2026

"This latest phase of U.S. war [against Iran] is going horribly, of course, because this gang of fascist goons are not only reprehensibly vile and cruel and bigoted, but also they're just as incompetent as you could expect a gang of fascist goons to be. They think that strength is only achieved by murdering, so they've torched their soft power and isolated themselves from our former friends and allies, and they've fired top generals with experience in military strategy and tactics to make way for more fascist goons who can be trusted to follow illegal orders from their fascist goon bosses. This confederacy of goons think that their wealth and whiteness and maleness conveys automatic competence, so they never bothered to learn anything about anything, and they fired everyone who knew anything about anything, and dismantled all the programs that helped make anything work or might have created any advantage of any kind. They fired the knowledgeable for the offense of being knowledgeable. They dismantled the programs for the offense of being incomprehensible to them." — A. R. Moxon, A Confrontation With Truth, The Reframe, April 13, 2026

Sources

"Why Americans Are So Ignorant: It's Not Just Fox News," Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News, April 8, 2013.

Javier Cercas. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination. (2009) Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. p. 3.

"Poll: Americans way off on public broadcasting funding," Politico.com, April 1, 2011.

"Highlights of the 2007 Roper Public Opinion Poll on PBS."

"Yes, there is shame in not knowing." Charles Taylor. Boston Globe. Dec. 19, 2016.

Berel Lang. Heidegger’s Silence. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. p. 14.

Ezra Klein. Why We're Polarized. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020. Chapter 4.

"I don't want to be right," Maria Konnikova, New Yorker, May 19, 2014.

"Rex Tillerson Supposedly Shifted Exxon Mobil’s Climate Position. Except He Really Didn’t." Alexander C. Kaufman. Huffington Post. Dec. 26, 2016.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988. p. 305.

Elbert Hubbard, quoted in The Village Voice, quoted again in The Week, Feb. 22, 2013. p. 19.

George Bernard Shaw, quoted in RefDesk.com, quoted again in The Week, July 18, 2014. p. 15.

Phyllis Bottome, quoted in the Associated Press, quoted again in The Week, June 13, 2014. p. 15.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

To avoid false beliefs, don't use AI.
Read: Oops! State Dept. Mislabels Every Country On A Map Of Africa At Global Conference: Profoundly embarrassing. Ryan Grenoble, HuffPost, Jul 30, 2026

Just ask someone who knows.

Lots of things will “remain a mystery” if you don’t take twelve seconds to ask someone who knows the answer

[image or embed]

— David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈 (@whysharksmatter.bsky.social) September 25, 2026 at 12:11 PM

Trump Threatens To Sue Think Tank Over Study That Found He’s Wrong The Center for American Progress said it will not retract the report despite Trump’s pledge of a $5 billion lawsuit. Ryan Grenoble, Aug 21, 2026


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.