Churchgoing Christians are basically a hate group in the eyes of our liberal elites.
Religion, Richard Dawkins wrote 25 years ago, is “a ready-made system of mind control which has been honed over centuries. … To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.”
When Hollywood wants to give the audience permission to cheer on the mass murder of civilians, it sets the scene in a white rural church full of scolding bigots — see Kingsman: Secret Service.
The liberal media will say it’s not Christians they dislike, only extremist Christians. Their definition of extremists, though, is the Christians who believe their rights come from God rather than from the government, or those Catholics with a devotion to the Virgin Mary.
The only good Catholic is a cafeteria Catholic, and the only good Christian is one who doesn’t take it too seriously, they think.
Secular liberals cheered falling church attendance in the U.S. as part of a great enlightenment of our culture. Less church, they believed, meant less intolerance and more reason.
They were wrong.
The latest evidence comes from a Manhattan Institute survey on attitudes toward Jews and Israel. Holocaust denial, hatred of Israel, and self-professed antisemitism definitely exist among Christians — about 1 in 6 Republicans met the Manhattan Institute’s definition of “anti-Jewish.”
Here’s the most interesting finding: “Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.”
This all corroborates decades of evidence pointing in the same direction.
In 2019, the Democracy Fund looked at Trump supporters and found that church attendance had “warmer feelings toward racial and religious minorities,” were “more supportive of immigration and trade, and … more concerned about poverty.”
And while liberals assume that attending church makes one more of a gun nut, studies suggest the opposite: The folks who worship their AR-15s are less likely to spend Sunday morning worshipping their Lord and Savior.
Why? There are a hundred possible explanations, but here’s a simple one that undoubtedly explains these correlations at least in part: Going to church means you belong to something, you are less likely to feel alienated, and more likely to trust other people. And if every week, for at least an hour, you recall that you’re a sinner who’s getting an undeserved hall-pass out of hell, it’s harder to hate your fellow man.