I wonder why religious conservatives are mostly synonymous with capitalism supporters ? I mean arent most religions inherently socialistic ? What makes conservatives support capitalism , despite not being among the rich?
Fox News. Televangelists. Trump.
Religion can be a very positive tool to bring communities together and support one another, but capitalism means exploitation, and nothing’s easier to exploit than blind faith.
I wonder why would a person keep a rich persons interest over their own ? Free or affordable healthcare and college would be such a great help , and while the planet can support food and housing for all , many are deliberately kept hungry and homeless and that is rooted in corporate greed most of the times . Gulliblity at another level!
The guise that they will someday be the one with the boot, they don’t wanna miss their chance be be the very boot they lick. Propaganda is a powerful tool.
I wonder why would a person keep a rich persons interest over their own ?
There’s no such thing as a poor Republican voter, just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
I agree with the other two. But I think it’s disingenuous to say Trump, because this behavior has existed since long before Trump was relevant in politics.
While I 100% agree with you, I think you listed the symptoms rather than the root cause. Religious people have been supporting the Republican party well… religiously since as long as I can remember, well before Trump and Fox News.
I think it’s something that the Republican party has specifically built their messaging around and then those things have grown out of it as a result. Someone posted a good article the other day about how politicians supporting segregation were able to manufacture a wedge issue (abortion) in the 70s to capture the religious vote, who didn’t see it as a religious issue until they were basically told it was.
Religion has been sucking the teet of conservative politics for a LOT longer than Fox News, Televangelist, and Trump have been around.
It goes far deeper and is way more fundamental than those things.
I agree completely, but on the surface, those are the three biggest modern contributors.
A lot of people’s “sincerely held” beliefs are only skin-deep, so surface-level agitators and misinformation peddlers do have a lot of power in our society. If they ceased to exist, I suspect a lot of the hatred and vitriol their followers spew would cease, as well - assuming an equally-evil replacement didn’t immediately rise.
A lot of people are stuck in their stale echo chambers, and just getting a breath of fresh air could do them wonders.
The comment that it took two thousand years for the church to land on its current stance on abortion is not entirely accurate. The Didache, an early Christian writing including a section on Christian ethics, explicitly forbids it.
The Catholic church has nearly entirely considered abortion a sin since the first century (yes there are exceptions, but a minority). You are thinking of the adoption of “life begins at conception”, which was ruled in 1869. Prior to that the church considered early abortion an immoral sin on par with contraception. What changed in 1869 was the category from sin of contraception to sin of murder. But it was still “sin” beforehand.
Your KJV is a really weird tangent. The KJV is the cornerstone in the Anglo-world because it was one of the only English translations. The Catholic Church continued to primarily use Latin Bibles (The Vulgate) until Vatican 2 when the Novus Ordo used local vernacular.
Wanting a Bible in the language you speak and your subjects speak isn’t putting yourself over God. Please let us know what critical changes were made in the KJV that supports capitalism, a mode of economics that wouldn’t be theorized for atleast another century.
The first widely published English Bible was the Tyndale bible, which heavily influenced the Geneva Bible, both of which is what the KJV is mostly based on and competed with until King James banned the Geneva Bible.
While no Bible mentions or supports capitalism for the reasons you mentioned, both of those earlier translations had an anti-authoritarian bent to them that King James certainly didn’t like, and had edited.
Soon after Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, the flaws of both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible (namely, that the Geneva Bible did not “conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy”) became painfully apparent.
The Bishop of London added a qualification that the translators would add no marginal notes (which had been an issue in the Geneva Bible). King James cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the marginal notes offensive to the principles of divinely ordained royal supremacy: Exodus 1:19, where the Geneva Bible notes had commended the example of civil disobedience to the Egyptian Pharaoh showed by the Hebrew midwives, and also II Chronicles 15:16, where the Geneva Bible had criticized King Asa for not having executed his idolatrous ‘mother’, Queen Maachah (Maachah had actually been Asa’s grandmother, but James considered the Geneva Bible reference as sanctioning the execution of his own mother Mary, Queen of Scots). Further, the King gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England. Certain Greek and Hebrew words were to be translated in a manner that reflected the traditional usage of the church. For example, old ecclesiastical words such as the word “church” were to be retained and not to be translated as “congregation”. The new translation would reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and traditional beliefs about ordained clergy.
Tyndale’s use of the word ‘Congregation’ instead of church had pretty far reaching implications:
When Tyndale translated the Greek word ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía) as congregation, he was thereby undermining the entire structure of the Catholic Church.
Many of the reform movements believed in the authority of scripture alone. To them it dictated how a “true” church should be organized and administered. By changing the translation from church to congregation Tyndale was providing ammunition for the beliefs of the reformers. Their belief that the church was not a visible systematized institution but a body defined by believers, however organized, who held a specifically Protestant understanding of the Gospel and salvation was now to be found directly in Tyndale’s translation of Scripture.
I wouldn’t say any of that explains how the KJV would influence religious conservatives to support capitalism, but I guess it could potentially have an influence over an acceptance of dogmatism within the Republican party? But I think most religious people don’t actually read the Bible anyway, so even that is a stretch. The more likely explanation is due to Protestant ‘work ethic’ as mentioned by @Copernican@lemmy.world
The just-world hypothesis plays a big part.
Basically karma ? So do they believe that their actions will reap them benefits ? While they want to discrimiate people on basis of race and sexuality ?
There’s an authoritarian theme to it all. They believe their god to be all-powerful and all-just. Therefore, that god must reward good actions and punish bad ones. The reward that our global society seems to run the most on is money. Therefore, any actions that gain you a lot of money must be good actions, thereby justifying the means of capitalism.
Prosperity theology, they call it.
Here’s a satirical passage from Terry Prachett’s Small Gods that I absolutely love:
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.
Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it’s a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.
The people that aren’t wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they’re not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.
But it seems like in general white conservatives are at the extreme bottom in most scenarios… they’re just also blinded by the “it’s just not my turn to be rich yet” fallacy.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
Both religion and capitalism ensure white conservatives always have someone to look down on and they in return lends them their loud voice & violence.
ETA : Religion + capitalism’s symbiotic behaviour is not restricted to white conservatives. They have the same relationship with every ethnic & religious majoritarian conservative. India has been experiencing it since 2014 where Hindu supremacists support big corporates even when the corporates have created enormous inflation. In return these corporates control mainstream media and fund Hindu supremacist leaders who paint targets on the back of minority religions (currently, Muslims & Christians).
Because “conservative” isn’t an ideology, it’s a mindset. It’s based on the idea that the in-group is good, not because of what they believe but because of who they are. So because they are good, whatever they want is good. It does not matter if their wants are contradictory or hypocritical or irrational in any way. They define the parameters for what is worth preserving, and then anyone who wants to stop them is part of the out-group and therefore bad. The out-group is not bad because they hold bad positions. The out-group could change their positions, and they would still be bad becauae it is part of their identity.
Conservatives also do not require any justification for their wants, but having a religious justification is like catnip. Because of the conservative mindset, they have no problem picking and choosing the religious beliefs that support what they want while ignoring or attacking the ones that don’t.
This is honestly an extremely weak take. Not going to start a debate with you, I’m not a conservative, but oversimplification and vilification does more harm than good.
