We’ll name it here: Church

The Associated Press VoteCast survey interviewed over 110,000 people about various aspects of their lives, and about how they voted in the 2020 presidential election. The survey found a strong correlation between church attendance and support for the dangerous, radical agenda of Donald Trump.

Only 35% of voters who never attend a Christian church chose to vote for Trump. By contrast, 61% of voters who attend church at least once a week voted for Trump. The relationship was clear and progressive: The more often a voter attends church, the more likely they are to support the abuses, lawbreaking, bigotry, violence, animosity to science, and crude behavior of Donald Trump.

There are two plausible causal interpretations of this data. First, it’s possible that churches are especially attractive to people who enjoy crude behavior, racism and sexism, xenophobia, proud ignorance, disdain for the law, cruelty, and conspicuous corruption. If this is the case, Christian worship services aren’t the cause of dangerous radicalization, but are places that nasty bigots like to go.

A second possibility is that churches actively radicalize Americans, leading people who might otherwise be nice neighbors to become crude, rude, violent extremists.

It’s likely that both interpretations are correct to some extent. Christian churches have become stages upon which performances of defiant rejection of social norms take place, as preachers scream loud condemnations and passionate opinions that are disconnected from empirical evidence, in displays of raw emotional fury. These performances both attract misanthropes who seek the company of other hateful people, and normalize hateful attitudes and behaviors among other churchgoers.

Christian ideology also consistently teaches churchgoers that there is no need to have a factual basis for one’s opinions, even advising that dependence upon evidence and careful, rational thinking are sinful. Churches thus have become radicalizing training grounds for voters who are willing, and even eager, to believe whatever Christian politicians tell them to believe, without regard to the factual accuracy of any proclamation.

So it is that, even though the facts of Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020 are rationally undeniable, Donald Trump’s Christian supporters are quite willing to accept Trump’s absurd assertions that he is the victor. A new verse of the old Sunday school tune for children could easily be sung:

Trump’s the winner, this I know, for my leaders tell me so…

Churches remain centers of political power in America, and have in recent years abandoned previous restrictions on explicit campaigning for political candidates, commonly hosting pro-Trump rallies and fundraising events.

The good news is that church membership is on the decline, along with Christian identity. In most Christian churches, the vast majority of congregants have grey hair and wrinkled skin, as young families with children are frightened away by the right wing radicalization of church culture. Younger generations of Americans are turning their back on church life and Christianity, constructing their political identities around critical reasoning skills and a more compassionate, secular vision of citizenship.