My experiences with Christian Fundamentalists come from growing up in rural Florida, where this cult was widespread and entrenched (not so much today). In my family, Southern fundamentalism was considered hypocritical, and rather barbaric. In English, we called them Holy Rollers. In Spanish, aleluieros, (hallelujoids). It was, at best, just another goofy thing our Cracker neighbors did.

I myself had no formal religious upbringing. I was baptized a Roman Catholic, but only because my mother felt if I ever decided to become one I would already have that out of the way. I was circumcised too, for presumably the same reason. It was supposedly for hygienic, not religious purposes. For myself, I felt God would not punish anyone for doing, or not doing, anything in infancy.

God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’.
Abe said, ‘God, you puttin’ me on?’
God said, ‘Abe?’, Abe said, ‘What?’
‘Abe, you can do what you want, but,
Next time you see me comin’ you better run.’
Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?’
God said, ‘Down on Highway 61′.

-Bob Dylan,

Highway 61 Revisited.

My parents were not atheists, everyone in my family believed there was some sort of supernatural force that created and ran the universe, but there was no specific ritual or ceremonies that were required, no theology that had to be memorized, no holy books to be consulted, and prayer was optional. I was taught the Golden Rule, and that Jesus was a great and good man with a wonderful philosophy, but all my questions (prompted by my childhood friends) were met with a shrug. Nobody really knew for sure if there was a God, and if there was, nobody really knew what he wanted from us. I was taught to treat others with charity and fairness, and with love, just like Jesus taught, but that was it.

By the time I was 12, I realized that there was probably no God at all, but even if there was, I had no way of proving or disproving it one way or the other. Not only was there probably no god, even if there was, there was no way to know what he expected from us. And once you accept that, you can clearly see how cruel and capricious, how utterly irrational, how vicious the whole religious program actually is.

It simply doesn’t make any sense, and furthermore, if followed strictly and conscientiously, it leads
inevitably to the same horrors pointed out in your linked article.

Any scheme or program for organizing a human community, that is, any political philosophy or ideology, based on religion is not to be trusted. No good or decency can come from that view of the world, or from any government that embraces it.

I’m well aware there are born-again Christian Liberals and atheist Conservatives. Think Jimmy Carter and Ayn Rand. But these are outliers, the exceptions that make up the rule.

The very high correlation between Christian Fundamentalists and Political Conservatives, at least in the USA, is no accident. The two have fed off each other and to a very great extent depend on one another. There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that this connection is deliberate and carefully fashioned, it is not a coincidence, it is causal, it has been planned, crafted, implemented and nurtured. How and why these two pestilences always seem to occur together may be a matter of debate, but the fact that they are reliant and dependent on each other in today’s American political landscape is not.

https://chrisstroop.com/2018/06/14/escape-from-jesus-land-on-recognizing-evangelical-abuse-and-finding-the-strength-to-reject-the-faith-of-our-fathers/

I see some childhood friends that never escaped the prison of that culture posting on facebook- posting smug feel-good religious memes and bible quotes, while praising Trump’s actions… Pro-life, but not even flinching when toddlers are killed in their name.

For the vast majority of them religion isn’t about becoming a better person, its an excuse to treat others as inferior, immoral, unworthy.

My experience with it as a young man was primarily about their attitude to science, particularly the Evolution/Creationism issue, but the connections with nationalism, racism, nativism, militarism, misogyny, capitalism and fascism were as clear and obvious to me back then as they are to me now. American religious fundamentalism may have its origins in colonial Puritanism, but its final form is a product of slavery and Jim Crow. Th correlation is undeniable. There’s not much difference between burning witches and lynching Negroes.

The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

They’ve always been that way. There is nothing new or novel about this movement. Like violence, they’re as American as cherry pie.

Festinger and his associates read a story in their local newspaper headlined “Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood.”

The prophecy came from Dorothy Martin (1900–1992), a Chicago housewife who experimented with automatic writing. (In order to protect her privacy, the study gave her the alias of “Marian Keech” and relocated her group to Michigan.) She had previously been involved with L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics movement, and she incorporated ideas from what later became Scientology.[1]

The group of believers, headed by Keech, had taken strong actions to indicate their degree of commitment to the belief. They had left jobs, college, and spouses, and had given away money and possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer which was to rescue the group of true believers. She claimed to have received a message from a fictional planet named Clarion. These messages revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21, 1954.

After the failure of the prediction, she left Chicago after being threatened with arrest and involuntary commitment. She later founded the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Under the name Sister Thedra, she continued to practice channeling and to participate in contactee groups until her death in 1992. The Association is active to this day.

Festinger and his colleagues infiltrated Keech’s group and reported the following sequence of events:

Before December 20. The group shuns publicity. Interviews are given only grudgingly. Access to Keech’s house is only provided to those who can convince the group that they are true believers. The group evolves a belief system—provided by the automatic writing from the planet Clarion—to explain the details of the cataclysm, the reason for its occurrence, and the manner in which the group would be saved from the disaster.
December 20. The group expects a visitor from outer space to call upon them at midnight and to escort them to a waiting spacecraft. As instructed, the group goes to great lengths to remove all metallic items from their persons. As midnight approaches, zippers, bra straps, and other objects are discarded. The group waits.
12:05 am, December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.
12:10 am. The second clock strikes midnight. Still no visitor. The group sits in stunned silence. The cataclysm itself is no more than seven hours away.
4:00 am. The group has been sitting in stunned silence. A few attempts at finding explanations have failed. Keech begins to cry.
4:45 am. Another message by automatic writing is sent to Keech. It states, in effect, that the God of Earth has decided to spare the planet from destruction. The cataclysm has been called off: “The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.”
Afternoon, December 21. Newspapers are called; interviews are sought. In a reversal of its previous distaste for publicity, the group begins an urgent campaign to spread its message to as broad an audience as possible.

Festinger stated that five conditions must be present if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation:

A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves.
The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

Like most of Trump’s evangelical supporters, Falwell has never tried to claim that Trump is a good person. But it’s helpful to see his argument for why that doesn’t matter. The idea of dividing God’s sovereignty into “two kingdoms” comes from the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther, and it generally refers to a kind of separation between church and state: the idea that spiritual righteousness and civil righteousness are two different things, as economist Lyman Stone put it last year in a helpful essay titled “Two Kingdom Theology in the Trump Era.” In more extreme versions, however, the doctrine is used to dismiss the prospect that individual morality is relevant to the ruling of the state. As Falwell put it, “Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome.” And it’s a “distortion,” he said, to imagine that the country as a whole should love its neighbors and help the poor just because Jesus told individuals to do so. Some interpreters have used the doctrine’s renewed popularity as evidence that Luther paved the way for Trump.

Tyler Huckabee, an editor at Relevant magazine, pointed out that Falwell’s willingness to cleave the personal and the political puts him at odds with his own institution. Liberty University, founded by Falwell’s televangelist father, has a mission statement that promotes “a commitment to the Christian life, one of personal integrity, sensitivity to the needs of others, social responsibility and active communication of the Christian faith.” That’s boilerplate evangelical language, and it implies a kind of natural blending of the spiritual and the political that is hard to square with Falwell’s breezy dismissal of the importance of morality in the public square.

At one point, reporter Joe Heim asked Falwell whether there is anything Trump could do that would endanger his support from Falwell and other evangelical leaders. He answered, simply, “No.” His explanation was a textbook piece of circular reasoning: Trump wants what’s best for the country, therefore anything he does is good for the country.