Abortion, Authoritarian Self-Deception, Evangelicals, and Trump: a collected Twitter essay from Christopher Stroop
Anyway, I wanted to share this Twitter essay with you, gentle readers, because there are enough people who read DET or follow me and DET on social media who are within or close to evangelicalism and will be aided by this analysis. Stroop was gracious enough to allow me to collect his tweets and make them available. If you've made your way here on a mobile device, however, you would probably prefer to read this material in its Storify form.
Since we're talking about Stroop, here are a couple other things he's written that you may find to be worth your time:
--another Twitter essay, this time on the similarities between Russians and Americans.
--this article at Political Research Associates: Russian Social Conservatism, the U.S.-based WCF, & the Global Culture Wars in Historical Context.
Now, here's the tweets.
1. Certain anti-Nazi figures, esp. Corrie ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are held up as heroes in white Evangelical subculture. But. https://t.co/2LmljRt9mI
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
2. White Evangelical subculture, as I've argued many times (e.g. here https://t.co/GtW6gIz6jf), has a twisted, indeed authoritarian, outlook
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
3. White Evangelicals are pretty sure they would pass the test of resisting Hitler. They are sure they can withstand persecution, because...
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
4. They are sure that they already are persecuted! That right there tells you how divorced their worldview is from reality. It gets worse.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
5. White Evangelicals are failing the test we Americans are facing now at a greater rate than any other demographic. But they don't see it.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
6. There's a glowing (bad) biography of Bonhoeffer by one @ericmetaxas, who has blocked me and basically anyone who ever criticized him.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
7. Metaxas came out for Trump during the election. This was the occasion for much of the recent criticism he's chosen to ignore.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
8. This Bonhoeffer devotee is so blind thinking abortion is a literal holocaust that he'll make common cause with overt anti-Semites, Nazis
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
9. And that, dear tweeps, is pretty much the story of right-wing/specifically Evangelical projection in microcosm.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
10. White Evangelicals are unable to face their actual fear and trauma, so they convince themselves they're heroic defenders of the unborn.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
11. In Lacanian terms, abortion functions for them as a "defensive fetish." E.g. "Well, I would vote against the Neo-Nazis, but - abortion!"
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
12. If it weren't abortion, it'd be something else. The fetish lets them to justify their authoritarian rigidity and avoid personal growth.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
13. This is more or less how authoritarian psychology works. Very insecure people strive to dominate others to make themselves feel safe.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
14. But they claim they are doing it in the name of a higher good and are being persecuted for that. It's a doctrine of preemption.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
15. Conservative white Evangelicals thus get to claim they support "a culture of life" while directly enabling harm, violence, death.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
16. The convenient thing about "unborn babies," of course, is they're blank ciphers. They will never challenge the Evangelical worldview.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
17. Evangelicals get to resist the "Hitler" of abortion, to "save" people w/o saving anybody, and their insecurity is never threatened.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
18. In the vast majority of cases, they are completely unaware that abortion is historically a very new focus for them, dating to the 1970s.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
19. But again, if it weren't abortion, it would be something else. You're dealing with projection, fetishes, in short, defense mechanisms.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
20. At the end of the day, fundamentalism is a misdirected response to trauma, and hurt people hurt people. Then refuse to admit it .
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
21. To get back to the thread I quoted at the beginning of this one, white Evangelicals have the same problem as white America write large.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
22. Namely, an inability to face up to harm done, to past crimes, to things that cause discomfort. Germany after WWII took a different path.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
23. But Russia is more like the US in this regard. Russia represses its past crimes. Freud taught us that the repressed will return.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
23-a. This would probably be a good place to re-up this thread on the similarities between Russians and Americans: https://t.co/UmvJHmpYWH
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
24. If you want to break these cycles of abuse, a critical mass of the majority population has to be willing to face hard truths.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
25. Conservative, authoritarian Christianity protects its adherents from facing hard truths, impedes self-reflection and systemic thinking.
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) January 26, 2017
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